Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that need to accept bookings or registrations, such as workshops, training classes, charity fund raisers, corporate conferences, or even a big event such as a festival, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Managing event registrations is a time-consuming process. You will probably have to manage calendar schedules, available dates and spaces, attendee numbers, data processing, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to event registrants.
There are many benefits to setting up an automated web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce costs, help you easily copy settings for previously-run events, give event managers more control, create a better client experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event booking system can be costly.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-powered site, you can set up a very inexpensive and professional online event registration solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – Event Manager And Registration Software For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily set up your event and start processing online registrations in just a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and receive online bookings)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can use a number of event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your participants, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing follow-ups.
View detailed information about event attendees
Note: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is significantly different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the software has been rebuilt using a different structure to allow for future expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually migrate completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and advantages of this plugin.
For more details go here:
Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current digital presence into an automated and fully featured event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by literally eliminating the need to process registrations manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating attendees to enroll by themselves.
Letting your customers to do all of the data themselves frees you up from doing admin work and lets you invest more resources on planning a more enjoyable event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon see, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and registration process that you want your attendees to experience.
Some additional plugin benefits include:
- Less Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own system or using a third-party service provider. The cost is kept low by using a model where you start with the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and purchase add-ons only if you need added functionality.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online event signups any time of day or night. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features and addons (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with others who may also be interested.
- Green Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, the event registration process remains wholly in digital form, eliminating traditional paper waste from tasks related to administration.
- All Data Belongs To You. You control all the data you acquire from event participants.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to its customers through standard features (these are included with the plugin) and optional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many unique built-in to web site owners. Here are just some:
- Fast and easy to install and set up. Be up and running in no time.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso allows you to configure as many kinds of tickets as you want and specify unique pricing options, ticket quantity limits, etc.
- Customizable Event And Registration Page Designs. Match your website’s design for your events and registrations page using Event Espresso’s template options and components, plus HTML or CSS.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso provides integration with payment gateways, allowing you to collect payments before running events.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your theme and reuse attendee information throughout other areas of your site.
- Spam Protection. Reduce the chance of spamming and bot software programs creating false registrations on your web site by using reCAPTCHA tools that provide human validation.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 provides 3 comprehensive in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. Event Espresso 4 lets you gain a better understanding of who your customers are and how you’ve done business with them. The Contact Profile section records the name, biography, contact details, event registration history, comments, and more about each attendee.
- Waiting Lists. Prospective participants can subscribe to a waiting list if your event has reached capacity. Additionally, you can specify that waiting list attendees pay for their spots if you plan to add more capacity for the event.
- XML RSS Feeds. Keep your customers updated about your events, bring in more visitors and reach a wider number of potential customers with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Search Engine Friendly Page URLs. Keyword rich event page Web links leverage your WP Permalinks configuration settings. “Pretty” web links with topic-relevant keywords enhance the context of your pages and is favored by search engines, helping you get a more targeted audience to your site.
- Country-specific Settings. You can configure the country and currency settings to be used for your events, such as currency name, currency signs, decimal signs, characters and places, country codes, states or provinces, and so on.
- Exportable Information. You can export all of your information gathered from event customers into Excel or CSV format for compiling advanced reports, devising marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, and so on.
- Visual Editor. Event Espresso uses the native WordPress WYSIWYG editor, allowing you to quickly and easily insert graphic images and create your content without having to learn HTML or CSS, just like any standard WP post.
- One-Click Plugin Installation Updates. Event Espresso offers easy one-click software installation upgrades to make sure that you have the latest features and to keep your software installation up-to-date with the latest version of WordPress.
- Staff Manager. Save time and stay organized by reusing staff profiles for multiple events or displaying their profile using a shortcode in your event description.
- Accurate Event Attendee Manager. You have control of your customers’ details; who has enrolled, which event they have booked and how much they have 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 an event attendee list to an Excel spreadsheet for additional reports, send customized payment reminders and receipts and send messages to your customers on a person-by-person basis or as a group.
Additional features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming. Event Espresso is simple enough for general WordPress users, and also extremely robust and customizable for enterprise-level users and developers. The bottom line is that by using Object-oriented programming (OOP), Event Espresso 4 makes possible more complex extensions and customizations to the plugin.
- Maintenance Mode. Pause registrations for normal website traffic whenever website maintenance is needed. You can continue to work on your content during maintenance mode.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And Value For Money: According to the mission statement on their site, 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 mission, the company operates on a model 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 added features, including:
- Duplicating events – eliminates the need to re-enter event details when adding new events.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse commonly asked questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
In addition to an incredible number of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow software users to further expand the functionality of managing your event.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Addon: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display your scheduled events by location. Four maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Manager Addon: The Recurring Events management addon allows you to put events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months in advance. You can schedule as many future events as you need. Event Espresso will automatically open and close bookings for all recurring events.
- Events Category Accordion Template Addon: The Category Accordion template shows categories in a simple list. Clicking the category name displays the events associated with that category and closes previously open categories.
- Social Media Buttons Add on: The social media add-on displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media add-on is included free with any of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration add-on allows you to take full advantage of the WP user system. With the WP User Integration add-on you can give your users a special incentive by offering member pricing and overriding event pricing when members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered users of the site can have access to your special events. Members can also store personal details into their profile page allowing them fast registration for events by auto-filling in their personal information on the event registration form. Your users can also look up previous events and make payment for new events.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add on Editions: This addon lets you involve staff in the event management process and give new users the ability 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 privileges, so others can help you manage your events or the events that others create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain sections of your WP dashboard and/or certain sections 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 add-on.
- Event Ticketing & Bar Scanning Add on: The Ticketing add-on adds the ability to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add on adds the ability to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing addon includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode types are included for managing 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 registrants and to validate tickets.
- Events Calendar Addon: This WordPress events calendar displays events and categories of events in an attractive graphical calendar.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp add on lets you automatically register attendees to a particular mailing autoresponder list or group within MailChimp.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add-ons.
For full details about the latest Event Espreso features and add-ons, visit the plugin website:
User Feedback
Below are just some of the many testimonials that 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
”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 played around with the free version for a couple hours then purchased the Pro for a client. Love it and so do they! Sweetest Event plugin I have tried.” Bill Chambers, Bill Chambers Design
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, teacher, concert planner, or event consultant, there are just endless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a registered user, search the support forum for new ideas and practical ways to improve your event management and registration workflow or improve the experience of your event customers.
Support
Event Espresso works with with other WordPress plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress coding guidelines. If you do need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great customer support, as many of its customers confirm:
”No complaints here. Satisfied customer. You can teach us all few things about customer service. Thanks!” Charles
Event Espresso provides amazing support with access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, premium support and even a monthly VIP member pass that gives 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 solid track record of support, so this is definitely software you can rely on to run and manage your events.
Software Pricing
Event Espresso is available in a number of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you will want to consider downloading one of the ”Pro” plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This license enables you to configure Event Espresso on one site only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This enables you to configure Event Espresso on one site only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This license option lets you set up Event Espresso on five domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The cost of purchasing the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the plugin is being retailed for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Please Note: The pricing above was current when this article was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin seller when you visit the site.
Additional Plugin Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the plugin’s online documentation pages for answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to your particular situation, or to notify developers about problems and give feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product site.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event registration and ticketing manager plugin, used and trusted by thousands of people.
If you are a WordPress user and you plan to run events that involve scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), enrolling attendees, and/or booking tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticket Registration System For WordPress
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