Do you currently run or plan to run events that need to accept registrations, such as seminars, community courses, not-for-profit fund raisers, corporate conferences, or even a large-scale event such as a music show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event registrations can be a time-consuming process. You may need to manage scheduling, availability, participant numbers, data processing and storage, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to event registrants.
There are many advantages to setting up an automated web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower expenses, help you easily duplicate repeat events, give event managers more control, improve user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event booking system can be quite costly.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-based website or blog, you can set up an inexpensive and highly professional web-based event registration system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Management System
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP allows you to easily create your event and start receiving registrations in just a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and receive online registrations)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
Customize registration forms
You can use several event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up ticket sales, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your event participants, or integrating your event registration forms with an autoresponder system for ongoing notifications.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is fundamentally different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the platform has been revamped using a different structure to enable future expansion. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually retire Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
Go here to learn more about the plugin:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just some of the many benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website or blog into a feature-rich and professional event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by practically doing away with the need to process registrations and signups manually.
Basically, you are facilitating event attendees to perform the registration by themselves.
Letting your enrollees to do all of the data entry frees you up from doing admin work and lets you concentrate more energy on organizing a more enjoyable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon learn, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management and booking process that you want your clients to experience.
Some additional benefits and advantages include:
- Significantly Lower Costs: Event Espresso provides you with a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to building your own software or using a 3rd party service. This is made possible through a model where Event Espresso users start with the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then buy add-ons only if you need added functionality.
- More Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept online event signups 24 hrs a day. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing features and addons (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event invite others who may be interested.
- Green Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign up process remains wholly online, significantly reducing typical paper waste from tasks associated with administration.
- Own Your Data. You own all the information you obtain from event attendees.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to its users through standard features (these come with the software) and additional features that customers can buy for an additional cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many features to website owners. Here are just some of these:
- Quick and simple to install and use. Be up and running in minutes.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In Event Espresso 4, events can have multiple dates and times (datetimes), which these can be managed from one single event.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Customers can easily see your upcoming events and add these to their schedule with a WordPress calendar.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso seamlessly integrates with payment gateways, enabling you to collect registration payments before running the events.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration allows event managers to configure the display settings of Google Maps on your event listing and event details sections.
- Spam Protection. Prevent the risk of spammers and bot software programs making fake registrations on your site with reCAPTCHA settings to provide human validation.
- Mobile Registration And Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system enables you to validate tickets, speed up in-venue registrations, set up various check-in “stations” and track event attendees.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. Event Espresso 4 lets you gain a better understanding of who your clients are and how you’ve previously done business with them. The Contact Profile section records the name, biography, contact information, event registration history, comments, and more about each client.
- No-Ticket Events. List events without making it necessary for attendees to book tickets. Use Event Espresso for any kind of event, not only those that need tickets.
- Public Commenting. Add social engagement to your event by encouraging potential prospects to ask questions about your event and past attendees to post comments that can help others consider whether or not to enroll. Moderation settings for public comments are set using the WP built-in commenting admin area.
- Keyword Rich Event Page URLs. Keyword-rich event page Web links leverage your WordPress Permalinks configuration settings. “Pretty” urls with topic-relevant keywords add to the context of your content and is favored by search engines, helping you get a more targeted audience to your events.
- Easy Event Management. Event Espresso puts you in full control of all aspects of an event’s registration and ticketing processes, and lets you automate the process with event management tools that include staff and venue manager, custom event designs, payment processing, list waiting, attendee limits, print-ready tickets and more.
- Default Tickets. If you create similar tickets for many of your events, you can easily set one of those tickets as your default ticket for the next event simply by checking a box.
- Register Multiple Attendees. Event Espresso 4 allows an individual or an organization to pay for multiple tickets and different ticket types at the same time. Event managers decide how many people can enroll in one booking session by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Automatic Software Installation Upgrading. Event Espresso offers easy 1-click software upgrades to ensure that you have the latest features and to keep your installation compatible with the latest version of WordPress.
- Staff Management. Save time and stay organized by reusing team member profiles for multiple events or displaying profile information such as team member’s contact information, resume and photo using a shortcode in your event description.
- Categorize Events. If you have several different event types like free and paid, conference speakers and mastermind sessions, different types of courses, etc. you can categorize them to help event registrants to locate what they’re looking for. You can display all events in a category on an event category page, make all events searchable by category, and color-code your events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make these easier to find, as well as suggesting other events in the categories that interest your existing customers.
Extra features include:
- Hooks, Actions And Filters. These features allow you to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso software that are 100% compatible with the WordPress software platform.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. EE 4 allows you to generate a log file with debugging data which can be helpful for web developers when troubleshooting.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & Value: According to the philosophy stated on their website, Event Espresso’s objective is to “empower business and organization leaders with the event registration, ticketing and management tools that maximize the success of events.” To achieve their objectives, the software has been built using a model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also includes 40+ additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes for including registrant data in emails and email updates.
- Default surcharge (the same as applying a service tax to all tickets).
- Option to skip the confirmation page in the registration process.
Add-Ons
In addition to an incredible range of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow end-users to further enhance the capabilities of the event management system.
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 the event does not have a featured image, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Template Add-on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize events with many datetimes into a dropdown list.
- Events Date Range Template Add-on: The Date Range custom event list template enables your users to search for events that occur in a certain date range.
- Events Social Sharing Addon: Add social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that allows your attendees to post a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after booking.
- Custom Template Add-on: The Custom Template addon is capable of displaying your event lists in a number of visually exciting ways.
- Seating Chart Addon: The seating chart addon is for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is ideal for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart add-on allows you to offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues directly from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart addon lets you manage the experience for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to each seat.
- Event Ticketing & Bar Scanning Add-on: The Ticketing add on gives you the ability to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon adds the ability to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing addon includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for handling check-in scans at venues. Customers can either print out their tickets or display them on their mobile devices. The mobile app can be used for checking in or checking out attendees and to validate tickets.
- EE4 Events Calendar Addon: This addon uses the WordPress calendar to display events and event categories using a nice graphical calendar.
- MailChimp Integration Add on: The MailChimp add-on allows you to automatically register participants to a particular mailing autoresponder list or group within MailChimp.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin, including new addons.
For full details about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website:
Customer Feedback
Here are just some of the many testimonials that satisfied plugin users have posted about Event Espresso:
”Event Espresso rocks! I use it for my dance class registrations. Unlike most dance studios where people have to call or send an email in advance, Event Espresso puts a registration form right there in front of the user and allows me to collect valuable information from the user during the registration process with custom questions such as “Do you have previous dance experience?” or “How did you hear about us?”. It also gives my site a professional look and feel.” Ral, Ral’eau Salsa Dance Company
”Your plugin rocks! Seriously, saved me hours on the phone setting up attendance manually. Kudos. :)” William, Petruzzo Photography
”Event Espresso plugin still rocks. Saw you guys were up for the WP Honors too. Glad I paid for it! If you need event management on your WordPress site I recommend Event Espresso.” Patrick Allmond, Focus Consulting
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, trainer, show promoter, or event consultant, there are simply countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a registered owner, search the forums for useful ideas and practical ways to improve your event management and registration process and improve the experience of your customers.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso is compatible with all WordPress plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress coding rules. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great support, as many of its clients confirm:
”No complaints here. Satisfied customer. You can teach us all few things about customer service. Thanks!” Charles
Event Espresso provides comprehensive support including access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, email 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.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts an established team of experienced WordPress web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can rely on to run your events.
Product Cost
Event Espresso is available in different editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software features, however, you should consider downloading one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This license option lets you install Event Espresso on one site only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This allows you to configure Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This license option enables you to run Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Pricing details of the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Presently, the plugin sells for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Management And Registration Software For WordPress
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing when this article was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin author when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the software’s documentation tools for answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to your particular use-case, or to report problems and leave feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event booking and ticketing manager plugin, used and trusted by thousands of WP site owners.
If you own a WordPress-powered site and you intend to run events that require scheduling dates, times and venues, booking attendees, and/or booking tickets, then you will probably not find a better WP plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – Event Manager And Registration Software For WordPress
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