Does your company currently run or plan to run events that need co-ordinating registrations, such as workshops, training classes, charity fundraisers, social conferences, or even a big event like a food fair, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Managing event sign-ups can be a complicated and time-consuming process. You have to co-ordinate calendar schedules, dates, participant numbers, data entry, payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to attendees.
There are lots of advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower expenses, help you easily copy settings for repeat events, give you more control, improve user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event booking system can be costly.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-powered site, you can easily set up a very inexpensive and professional web-based event registration solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticketing Registration System For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress lets you easily schedule an event and start accepting bookings in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and receive online bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
Customize your event registration forms
You can use several event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up ticket-selling, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your participants, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing updates.
View detailed information about event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is completely different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the platform has been revamped using a different structure to enable future growth and expansion. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually move completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and features of using the plugin.
Learn more here:
Benefits
Here are just some of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Automated Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current digital presence into a fully-featured event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by practically eliminating the need to process registrations manually.
Basically, you are facilitating participants to perform the registration themselves.
Allowing your clients to do the data entry frees you up from doing admin work and lets you concentrate more attention on planning a memorable event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover shortly, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and booking process that you want your attendees to experience.
Additional benefits include the following:
- Significantly Lower Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third party service. The cost is kept to a minimum through a model where users start with the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and buy add-ons when you need new functionality.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept new event sign-ups outside normal business hours. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features (see below) let people interested in registering for your event share your information with other people they know who may be interested.
- Green And Paperless Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign up process remains entirely online, significantly reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks related to administration.
- Own Your Information. You control all the information you obtain from event participants.
Features
The Event Espresso software provides functionality to users through built-in features (these come with the software) and additional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of great features to WordPress users. Here are just some:
- Quick and easy to install and use. Ready to start accepting registrations in no time.
- Customized Event Registration Forms. Event Espresso lets you collect unique data using a custom event registration form on your website to plan a great experience for your clients.
- Customizable Event And Registration Page Designs. Customize your events and enrollments page using Event Espresso’s limitless template options and components, as well as HTML and CSS.
- Tax Admin And Reporting Options. Event Espresso 4 provides several ways to handle taxes for an event and provide reports of tax fees to customers who purchase tickets. You can administer taxes globally and on a per-ticket basis.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration enables you to customize the look and control settings of Google Maps on the event listing and event details sections.
- Spam Protection. Eliminate the chance of spammers and robots making bogus registrations on your site with reCAPTCHA option that provide human validation.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system enables you to validate tickets, speed up door registrations, set up various check-in “stations” and track attendees.
- Manual Registration Option. you have the option of booking event attendees when they show up, or sending in paper-based registration forms for manual inputting later.
- Administrative Pre-approval. Be selective about who can and cannot participate in your events.
- Public Commenting. Add social a new level of social sharing to your event pages by encouraging potential prospects to ask questions about your event and past attendees to post reviews that can help others decide whether or not to sign up. Moderation settings for comments are configured via the WP commenting admin area.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events let you develop an event page over multiple work sessions without publishing it to your site. You can work on your events until you are ready to publish it to your site, or schedule to publish your event at a later date and time.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your profile to display throughout Event Espresso and your WordPress themes. Your organization fields include: company name, street address, city, state, country, zip/postal code, email, phone, tax number, business logo, Facebook URL, Twitter URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ URL, Instagram URL.
- Upload Events. Event Espresso 4 provides a CSV-based importing feature that allows you to upload bulk event data all at one time. You can export, edit and import information about events, datetimes, ticketing details, prices, registration questions, venue info, terminology, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- WYSIWYG Editor. Event Espresso uses the default WP Visual editor, so you can quickly and easily insert graphic images and format your event descriptions without having to know HTML or CSS, just like any WP post.
- Attendee Records. You can manage each customer’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their information organized and easily accessible.
- Staff Manager. Save time and keep your business organized by reusing staff member profiles for multiple events or displaying their profile using a shortcode in an event description.
- Categorize Events. If you have several different event types such as free and paid, conference speakers and mastermind sessions, different kinds of exercise classes, etc. you can categorize them to help event attendees to find what they’re looking for. You can list all the events in a category on an event category page, make events searchable by category, and color-code your events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make these easier to find, in addition to suggesting new events in the categories that interest your visitors.
Extra features include:
- Hooks, Actions & Filters. These allow web developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso software that are 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 developers when potential application problems.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & 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 mission, the software has been built using 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 comes with over 40 added features, including:
- Live-filtering when searching for events inside the Event Espresso admin.
- Default surcharge (similar to adding a service fee to all tickets).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow end-users to further expand the functionality of events.
Some of these add-ons include:
- EE4 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, a default image will be used.
- Recurring Events Manager Add on: The Recurring Events management add on lets you put events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years in advance. You can add as many events in advance as you want. Event Espresso will automatically open and close registrations for all recurring events.
- Events Date Range Template Add-on: The Date Range custom event list template lets 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 add on can display your event lists in a number of visually exciting ways.
- Seating Chart Add-on: The seating chart add-on is suitable for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is perfect 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 right from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart addon lets you control the environment for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to every seat.
- Multi-Event Registration Add on: The Multiple Event registration add-on gives your potential attendees the ability to register for multiple events at once. In each event listing registrants will be given the option to either register for a single event or add multiple events to their shopping cart. With the Multi-Event Registration addon, attendees can register for several events at once and even add additional attendees to any of the same events in the same checkout process.
- EE4 Events Calendar Addon: This WordPress events calendar displays events and categories of events via an attractive graphical calendar.
- EE4 Infusionsoft Integration Add-on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and business marketing plugin add on, you can completely automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture event attendee data, track registrations, and accept payments from your web site.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add-ons.
To learn more about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website:
Users – Testimonials
Here are just some of the many great testimonials that satisfied users have posted about Event Espresso:
”Thanks to you and the rest of the team for Event Espresso – Every time I get a signup for an event, I think about how much time EE saves me – and signups happen while I’m out on the water teaching kayaking, not answering the phone. :-)” Tue Brems Olesen, OnAdventure
”Probably the best event management plugin available.” Materia Inspiration Centre
”Thank you, we just did 2 sell out seminars of 50 attendees in 48 hours using Event Espresso and it was awesome. My wife was able to pick up on the processing backend with ease. You have done a great job on getting this system together – very simple, clear and well laid out With powerful functionality. I am so glad I dumped the old booking application we had and gave Event Espresso a go. Just wanted to say thanks, and thanks for the very patient, friendly and speedy assistance in helping me to get it all set up at the start. Many thanks to you and your team. A grateful customer.” Nicholas de Castella, Emotional Intelligence Trainings
Useful Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, teacher, event planner, or event management consultant, there are simply unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a registered user, go through the user forum for inspiration and practical ways to improve your event management workflow and improve the experience of your registrants.
Support
Event Espresso works with with other WP plugins and WordPress themes that follow standard WordPress development rules. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent support, as so many of its clients 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
Event Espresso provides comprehensive support that includes access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, one-on-one 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 an established team of experienced web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can count on to organize and manage your events.
Software Pricing
Event Espresso is available in various editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software functionality, however, you should consider purchasing one of the ”Pro” plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This allows you to install Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License – This lets you run Event Espresso on 1 site only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This license option enables you to set up Event Espresso on 5 sites. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The cost of purchasing the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. When we last checked, the software sells for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current price: Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticket Registration System For WordPress
Note: The pricing above was current at the time this review was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin author when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Info
Event Espresso regularly adds 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 tools for answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to your particular situation, or to report problems and share feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the leading WP event registration and ticketing manager software, used by thousands of event managers.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you currently run an event that requires scheduling dates, times and venues (offline and online), booking attendees, and/or booking tickets, then you will probably not find a better WP plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso
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