Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that need managing bookings or registrations, such as workshops, training courses, non-profit fundraisers, corporate conferences, or even a big event such as a school concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?

Co-ordinating event sign-ups can be a complex process. You will probably need to co-ordinate scheduling, available dates and seating, participant numbers, data entry, collecting payments and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and issuing tickets to participants.

There are lots of benefits to setting up an online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce costs, help you easily duplicate previously-run events, give event managers more control, create a more enjoyable client experience and increase your sales.

The problem is that this can be very expensive.

The good news is that if you own a WordPress-powered website, you can easily set up an inexpensive and professional web-based event registration solution.

Announcing …

Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management

Plugin Description

The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily set up your event and begin receiving registrations literally in a few minutes.

(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and receive online registrations)

Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich software that gives you full control over the event registration management process.

Create custom event registration forms

You can use several event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up ticket sales, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media and email marketing software.

Access detailed information about your event attendees

Important: Currently, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their software: EE 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is significantly different than the older EE 3, as the plugin has been revamped using a different structure to enable future expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually retire Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and features of using this plugin.

For more details, visit the plugin site here:

• Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Management Plugin

Benefits

Here are just a few of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:

Automated Event Registration Management

Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website into a fully-featured and automated event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.

Better Business Productivity

By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by virtually doing away with the chore of processing registrations and bookings manually.

Basically, you are facilitating event participants to perform the registration by themselves.

Allowing your attendees to do the data entry frees you up from doing admin work and lets you invest more attention on planning a more enjoyable event.

More Control Over The User Experience

As you will see in a moment, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your participants to experience.

Additional benefits of the plugin include:

• Reduced Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd party provider. The cost is kept low by using a model where you buy the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and buy add-ons only when you need new features.
• Increased Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept online event sign-ups any time of day or night. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social and marketing add-ons (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event share your information with others who may be interested in attending.
• Green Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, the event signup process remains entirely in digital form, eliminating traditional paper consumption from tasks related to administration.
• Own Your Information. You own all the data gathered from your event attendees.

Features

Event Espresso provides functionality to end-users via built-in features (these are included with the software) and additional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.

Event Espresso provides a number of great built-in to WordPress users. Here are just a few of these:

• Quick and simple to install and implement. Be up and running in minutes.
• Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso allows you to configure as many different types of tickets as you need and specify separate prices, ticket quantity limits, and more.
• Customizable Event Page Designs. You can customize your events and bookings page using Event Espresso’s unlimited template options and parts, as well as HTML and/or CSS.
• Ticket Selector. Present several ticket options to prospective registrants so they can purchase the ticket(s) that will best fit their needs.
• Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your WordPress theme and reuse events information throughout other areas of your site.
• Spam Protection. Reduce the chance of spamming and bots creating fake registrations with reCAPTCHA option to confirm human activity.
• Mobile Registration And Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system lets you authenticate tickets, speed up in-venue registrations, set up multiple check-in “stations” and track attendees.
• Event Check-In List. Generate an exportable list of event registrants and confirm everyone who attends.
• Administrative Pre-approval. Control who can and can’t participate in your events.
• RSS Feeds. Automatically update your customers, bring in more visitors and widen your content distribution with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
• Keyword-Rich Page URLs. Keyword-rich event page Web links leverage your WordPress site’s Permalinks configuration settings. SEO-friendly urls with relevant keywords enhance the context of your events and is favored by search engines, helping you get more potential customers to your events.
• 15+ Languages. Event Espresso is currently available in more than 15 languages, with more languages coming soon.
• Exportable Data. You can export all the data collected from event customers into Excel or CSV format for producing advanced reports, implementing new marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, and so on.
• Event Venue Manager. The venue manager in Event Espresso 4 lets information about a venue to be made available throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front end of your site to inform attendees of the location of your event. The venue record has many standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also lets you add venue details like venue capacity, venue site URL, phone number, physical, map, etc. You can also display venue profiles on different sections of your theme as well as on a venue listing page on your site where you can set up and reuse venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have booked for a particular venue.
• Registrant Records. Manage your registrant’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their records organized.
• Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential event attendees who have not fully paid for their admission with a standard but personalized invoice with just one click of a button. Your invoices will address pre-registered attendees who have not paid their registration yet by name, display the amount they owe, and include links to the event, a payment link and a url where they can download the invoice.
• Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post type features such as custom fields, post meta data, taxonomies, etc. You can even customize the page templates to display event information in your own unique way.

Additional features include:

• Object-Oriented Programming. Event Espresso is simple enough for basic users, and also robust and customizable for enterprise-level users and web developers. The bottom line is that by using Object-oriented programming (OOP), Event Espresso 4 allows for more complex developments and customizations to the application.
• Metabox Management & Reorganization. Event Espresso leverages the WordPress user interface, which brings the ability to reorganize the user interface to suit your workflow processes. Each control box can be collapsed, re-arranged or removed from the page.
• Flexibility, Autonomy And Value For Money: Event Espresso states on their website that their mission is to “empower business and organization leaders with the event registration, ticketing and management tools that maximize the success of events.” To achieve their goals, the company operates on a modular that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.

The premium edition of Event Espresso also includes 40+ additional features, including:

• Duplicating events – eliminates the work of re-entering event details when adding new events.
• Question groups that simplify the process of reusing a group of questions for similar events.
• Option to skip the confirmation page during registration.

Event Espresso Add-Ons

As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow you to significantly expand the capabilities of events.

Some of these add ons include:

• Events Grid Template Add-on: Displays events in a pure CSS grid-like structure using the featured image. Hovering over the image will display further information. If an event does not have a featured image, a default image will be used.
• Recurring Events Management Addon: The Recurring Events manager add-on allows you to put your events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months in advance. You can create as many events in advance as you need. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close bookings for all recurring events.
• Events Calendar Table Template Addon: The Calendar Table template is a list template with a bold date and customizable “register now” button. The template can be customized to show an event thumbnail instead of a date.
• Social Coupons Integration Addon: If your website uses Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can also specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
• Custom Template Addon: The Custom Template add-on lets you display your event lists in a variety of exciting and interesting ways.
• Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add on Versions: This add-on lets you involve other users in the event management process and give new users permission to create events or regional managers the ability to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WordPress users roles and allow them different permissions with different capabilities, so others can help you manage your events or events that others create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain areas of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain areas of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to create geographic regions for other people to manage events, use the Roles and Permissions Pro addon.
• Event Ticketing And Bar Scanning Add-on: The Ticketing add on adds the ability to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add on adds the capacity to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing add-on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode types are included for managing check-in scans at the venue door. Attendees can either print out their tickets or display them on their mobile devices. The barcode scanner can be used for checking in or checking out attendees and to validate tickets.
• Events Calendar Add on: This add on uses the WP calendar to display events and categories of events using a nice graphical calendar.
• Infusionsoft Integration Addon: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft integration all-in-one sales and marketing plugin add on, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture registrant data, track registrations, and accept payments from your Event Espresso powered website.

Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software, including new addons.

To learn more about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:

• Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Manager Software

User Feedback

Below are some of the many testimonials that satisfied users have written about Event Espresso:

”My hope with this whole integration is to be able to show other school districts an affordable and easy solution to these registrations. I cannot believe how much money they are charged for less by other companies. This has the potential to save schools tens of thousands, which is huge right now.” Kelly, College Station Independent School District

”I have been using Event Espresso to run my festival and have been very happy with how it has worked out. They have provided tremendous support and their iPhone app is amazing and easy to use. I suggest using it for your event.” Alex Grant, Byron Spirit Festival

”I’m using it on multiple sites and enjoying it. It’s simple and as others have stated… fast service and real help.” Arlen Nagata

Plugin Tips

Whether you are an education services provider, teacher, festival promoter, or event management professional, there are simply countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.

After downloading the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, search the user forum for tips and practical ways to streamline your event management process and improve the experience of your customers.

Support

Event Espresso works with with all WordPress plugins and WordPress themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great support, as so many of its users attest:

“I’m really impressed with not only the application itself but the support. I have rarely seen such a responsive support staff than at EE. They rock…I highly recommend this plugin!” sock2me

The plugin provides great support including access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, custom development support and even a monthly VIP member pass giving you access to community of developers, designers, event managers, publishers and webmasters that use Event Espresso tools, plus faster support response times.

In addition, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can count on to organize and manage your events.

Plugin Pricing

Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin options, however, you will want to consider using one of the premium plugin editions below:

• Personal License – This option lets you run Event Espresso on 1 site only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
• Everything License – This lets you run Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
• Developer License – This lets you run Event Espresso on five sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.

Current pricing for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Presently, the plugin is being retailed for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso

Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this review was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin developer when you visit the site.

Event Espresso – Additional Information

The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.

Look up the plugin’s documentation pages for answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to a particular situation, or to notify developers about issues and share feedback.

For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.

Our Recommendation

Event Espresso is the leading WP event registration and ticketing management software, used by thousands of event managers.

If you are a WordPress site owner and you intend to run an event that requires managing dates, times and venues, enrolling participants, or selling tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable solution for your needs than Event Espresso.

To learn more, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso

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