Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that require handling bookings or registrations, such as seminars, group classes, not-for-profit fundraisers, social conferences, or even a large-scale event like a show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event bookings is a time-consuming process. You may have to manage event schedules, available dates and spaces, participant numbers, data administration, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders and alerts, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to event attendees.
There are many advantages to setting up an online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily duplicate previously-run events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be costly.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-powered website or blog, you can download and install a very inexpensive and professional online event registration solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticket Registration Software For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily create an event and begin processing online bookings in minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and take online registrations)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich application that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Customize your event registration forms
You can use multiple event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up ticket-selling, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event participants, or integrating your event registration forms with social media and email marketing tools.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is impressively different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the plugin is being revamped using a different structure to accommodate future growth. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually phase out Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and features of this plugin.
Go here to learn more about the plugin:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current web site into an automated and feature-rich event management site … 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 practically eliminating the need to process registrations and signups manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for attendees to enroll on their own.
Allowing your attendees to do the data themselves frees up your time and lets you direct more of your energy on organizing a better event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will see in a moment, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and booking process that you want your customers to experience.
Some additional plugin benefits include:
- Significantly Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin is a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd party service provider. The cost is kept low through a model where Event Espresso users start with the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and buy addons when you need new functionality.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online bookings 24/7. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with friends who may be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event registration process remains wholly online, significantly reducing traditional paper waste from tasks associated with administration.
- All Data Belongs To You. You own all the data you acquire from your event participants.
Features
The Event Espresso software provides functionality to end-users via standard features (these are included with the software) and optional features that customers can buy for an added cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many built-in to web site owners. Here are just a few:
- Fast and easy to install and configure. Ready to use in minutes.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In EE 4, events can have multiple dates and times (datetimes), and these can be managed from one single event.
- Customized Confirmation Emails. Set up automated registration and payment confirmation emails to communicate with your customers.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso seamlessly integrates with leading payment gateways, allowing you to collect payments before running the events.
- Intelligent Single Page Checkout. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is smart, fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically duplicate the primary registrant’s details for any added registrants.
- Default Prices. Set up events quickly and easily with pre-configured default ticket pricing.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system enables you to validate tickets, speed up door registrations, create multiple check-in “stations” and track attendees.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of booking event attendees at the door, or sending in paper registration forms for manual inputting later.
- Event Manager Pre-approval. Control who can and cannot register for your events.
- Public Commenting. Add “social proof” by allowing potential customers to interact with you online via commenting and previous attendees to post reviews that can help others consider whether or not to sign up. Moderation settings for commenting are configured via the WordPress commenting admin area.
- Keyword Rich URLs. Keyword rich event page Web links leverage your Permalinks configuration settings. Search engine friendly urls with relevant keywords enhance the context of your content and is favored by search engines, helping you drive more potential customers to your site.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your profile to display throughout the software and your WP themes. Organization data include: organization name, street address, city, state, country, zip/postal code, primary contact email address, telephone, VAT/tax number, logo, Facebook URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ URL, Instagram URL.
- Exportable Data. You can output all the information gathered from event attendees into Excel or CSV format for creating reports, planning new marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, etc..
- Multiple Attendee Bookings. EE 4 allows an individual or people to register multiple attendees at once. You specify how many attendees are able to register in a single registration by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Registrant Records. Manage your registrant’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their information organized.
- Social Sharing. Event registrants and your website visitors can tell others about your events using social media share buttons.
- Accurate Event Participant Manager. You have control of your participants’ date; who has registered, which event they have booked and how much they’ve paid. With the attendee manager, you can get an overview of registered attendees and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export a list of event attendees to an Excel spreadsheet for additional reports, send custom payment reminders and receipts and send messages to your registrants on a person-by-person basis or collectively.
Extra features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for basic WP users, and also extremely robust and customizable for higher end users and web-based software developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, EE 4 enables more complex developments and customizations to the plugin.
- Control Box Management And Reorganization. Event Espresso leverages the WP user interface, which brings the ability to organize the user interface to suit your workflow processes. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or entirely deleted from your page.
- Autonomy, Flexibility And Value: According to the mission statement on their site, Event Espresso’s aim 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 company operates on a modular that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium version of Event Espresso also includes over 40 additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes for including registrant data in confirmation emails and email updates.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing the same group of questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page during registration.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As well as an incredible number of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow users to significantly enhance the functionality of your event management system.
Some of these addons 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, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Custom Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes many datetime events into a dropdown list.
- Events Date Range Template Addon: The Date Range custom event list template lets your users to search for events that occur in a certain date range.
- Social Coupons Integration Add-on: If your site 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 Add-on: The Custom Template add-on is capable of displaying your events in a variety of exciting and interesting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add-on Editions: This addon lets you include others in the event management process and give new users permission to create events or regional managers the capacity to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WP users roles and give them different permissions with different privileges, so your staff can help you manage your events or events that other people create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain sections of your WP dashboard and/or certain areas of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to allow users to control factors geographically for events and users, use the Roles and Permissions Pro add on.
- Event Ticketing Add-on: The Ticketing add-on gives you the ability to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon adds the capacity 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 the venue door. Customers 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 registrants and to validate tickets.
- Events Table View Template Add-on: The Events Table Template addon gives event managers an easy-to-use system that allows you to change the look and feel of your event lists. It comes with a simple table template with category filters, table search, table paging and more. It also allows developers to design their own custom templates using one of the included templates as a source template.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp add-on allows you to automatically register participants to a particular mailing list or group within your MailChimp account.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software, including new add-ons.
For complete details about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
Testimonials
Here are some of the many great testimonials that customers have written 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
”I recently downloaded it to add to a nonprofit site for a Boy Scout troop and the features work wonderfully with what we wanted to accomplish for the site. It allows us to set up calendar, events, and even take payments for trips. At first, I thought that it would be overkill for such a small site, but now I see the possibilities and will definitely be offering Event Espresso to my clients that need an event organization system for their web sites.” Lucy Conn, Troop 462
”Just bought an Event Espresso license for an upcoming conference website we are working on. The custom registration forms functionality rocks!” Eric Sopp, Inside Design
Useful Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, presenter, conference planner, or event professional, there are just countless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, visit the user forum for useful ideas and practical ways to streamline your event management workflow and enhance the experience of your event participants.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with most WP plugins and WordPress themes that follow WP coding standards. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent user support, as so many of its plugin end-users confirm:
”These guys are right on any problem or issue or even general questions. You can’t really put a value high enough on the kind of support these guys offer.” Mark Wigston, Muskoka Graphics
The plugin provides exceptional support with access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, premium 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 developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can count on to manage your events.
Product Price
Event Espresso is available in different plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin features, however, you need to consider using one of the ”Pro” plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This allows you to set up Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This allows you to set up Event Espresso on one domain only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This enables you to install Event Espresso on 5 domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The cost to purchase the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, the plugin is being retailed for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager
Please Note: The pricing above was current at the time this article was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin developer when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Plugin Information
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.
Use the plugin’s documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to your particular situation, or to notify developers about issues and give feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WP event registration and ticketing manager plugin, used and trusted by thousands of businesses.
If you own a WordPress site and you plan to run events that require scheduling dates and venues, booking attendees, and/or selling seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
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