Does your business currently run or plan to run events that need handling bookings, such as workshops, community courses, non-profit fund-raisers, networking functions, or even a large-scale event such as an art exhibition, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Managing event sign-ups is a time-consuming process. You have to co-ordinate scheduling, availability, attendee numbers, data collection, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders and notifications, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to event registrants.
There are a number 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 recurring events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event registration system can be expensive.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-based web site, you can set up a very inexpensive and professional web-based event booking system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – Event Manager And Registration System For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily create your event and start accepting online bookings in minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and process online event registrations)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can employ several event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up ticket sales, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your participants, or integrating your event bookings with social media sites like Facebook.
View detailed information about event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso is transitioning between 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 redeveloped using a different structure to allow for future growth. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually retire EE 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and features of using the plugin.
To learn more about the plugin go here:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just some of the many benefits and advantages 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 current website into a feature-rich and professional event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to attendee limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically doing away with the need to process registrations and sign-ups manually.
Basically, you are facilitating attendees to enroll by themselves.
Allowing your enrollees to do all of the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you invest more of your energy on delivering a better event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon see, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management process that you want your clients to experience.
Some additional benefits of the plugin include the following:
- Less Costs: Event Espresso is a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to developing your own system or using a third-party provider. This is made possible through a model where you pay for the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then purchase optional addons when you need additional features.
- More Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept online event sign-ups any time of day or night. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with other people they know who may be interested.
- Paperless Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event registration process is transacted wholly in digital form, eliminating typical paper waste from tasks related to admin and record-keeping.
- All Data Belongs To You. You own all the information you collect from your event attendees.
Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to users through built-in features (these are included with the software) and optional features that you can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many unique features to site owners. Here are just a few:
- Fast and easy to install and set up. Be up and running in no time.
- Custom Event Registration. With Event Espresso you can gather unique information using custom event registration forms on your web pages to create a tailored experience for your clients.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Participants can easily find your upcoming events and add these to their schedule using the calendar.
- Tax Administration. Event Espresso 4 gives you a number of ways to handle taxes for your event and provide reports of tax fee components to registrants who purchase tickets. You can configure taxes globally and on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your WP theme and reuse registrant information throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types let you create new prices that adjust the default ticket pricing of the system-default ticket.
- Mobile Registration & Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system lets you validate tickets, speed up in-venue registrations, create multiple check-in “stations” and track attendees.
- Manual Registration Option. you have the option of booking event participants when they show up, or sending in paper forms for manual registration later.
- Administrative Pre-approval. Control who can attend your events.
- Private Contact Commenting. Record notes about event attendees on their profile and how you’ve assisted them. Private commenting enables you to keep records of when event attendees contacted you, your internal notes, and how you have interacted with them.
- Keyword-Rich URLs. Keyword rich event page Web links take advantage of your WP site’s Permalinks configuration settings. SEO-friendly web links that include relevant keywords enhance the context of your events and improves your search rankings, helping you drive a more targeted audience to your site.
- 15+ Languages. Event Espresso is being translated into more than 15 languages, and more languages are being added all the time.
- Upload Events. Event Espresso 4 provides a CSV-based importing feature that enables you to easily upload bulk event data all at one time. You can export, edit and import information about events, datetimes, ticketing information, prices, custom registration questions, venue info, terminology, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- WordPress Visual Editor. Event Espresso uses the standard WP Visual editor, so you can quickly and easily insert photos and write and edit your event descriptions without knowledge of HTML or CSS, just like any standard WordPress post.
- Attendee Profiles. You can manage each registrant’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their data organized and easily accessible.
- Staff Member Manager. Save time and stay organized by reusing staff member profiles for multiple events or displaying their profile using a shortcode in any event description.
- Attendee Reports. Event reporting provides you with information of all the registrations and transactions, allowing you to analyze the performance of your events with the aggregate number of people who have registered and amount of revenue has been collected.
Extra features include:
- Hooks, Actions And Filters. These features allow web developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso plugin that are compatible with WordPress.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. EE 4 lets you generate a log file with debugging data that can be helpful for developers who are troubleshooting.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & Value For Money: According to the philosophy stated on their web site, Event Espresso’s goal 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+ added features, including:
- Live-filtering when searching for events within the Event Espresso admin.
- Default surcharge (the same as applying a service tax to each ticket).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Add-Ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow plugin users to further enhance the capabilities of managing your event.
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 available, a default image will be used instead.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Custom Template Addon: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes 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.
- Social Coupons Integration Add-on: If your site is featured on Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can even specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration add-on allows you to take 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 prices when your 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 enter personal data 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 view event history and pay for future events.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Addon Editions: This add on lets you include others in your organization to help manage your events and give new users the capacity 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 capabilities, so others 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 parts of your WP dashboard and/or certain parts 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.
- Multi-Event Registration Addon: The Multiple Event registration addon gives potential customers the ability to book 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 cart. With the Multiple Event Registration add-on, attendees can register for several events at once and even add additional attendees to any of the same events in the same checkout process.
- Events Table View Template Add-on: The Events Table Template addon gives you an easy-to-use system that lets you edit 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 lets web developers design their own custom templates using one of the templates provided as a source template.
- EE4 Infusionsoft Integration Add-on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and marketing software add-on, you can completely automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture customer data, track bookings, and accept payments from your website.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software, including new add ons.
For complete details about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
Users – Testimonials
Below are just some of the many great testimonials that satisfied plugin users have posted about Event Espresso:
”It’s been very comprehensive and covers exactly the aspects of event registration that we needed for our site plus some features that we didn’t even need but could still use in the future. Very Excellent Plugin!” Tristan Hall, Area 12:2 Youth Group
”Your plugin rocks! Seriously, saved me hours on the phone setting up attendance manually. Kudos. :)” William, Petruzzo Photography
”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
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, teacher, workshop promoter, or event consultant, there are simply unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered owner, visit the support forum for inspiration and practical ways to improve your event management and registration workflow or improve the experience of your attendees.
Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with other WP plugins and WordPress themes that follow standard WP coding guidelines. If you find that you need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent technical support, as many of its clients confirm:
”It’s magical. Support is amazing, plugin is simple to use, a 3 year old could use the iPhone app…it all is very impressive and professional.” David, House of Prayer
Event Espresso provides comprehensive support that includes access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase 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 developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can rely on to organize and manage your events.
Software Price
Event Espresso is available in a number of editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you should consider downloading one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This enables you to install Event Espresso on 1 site only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This license option allows you to run Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This lets you set up Event Espresso on 5 domains. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The cost of purchasing the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Presently, the plugin is selling for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Management And Registration System For WordPress
Note: The above reflects the pricing when this review was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin seller when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Info
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the software’s documentation tools for answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to your particular situation, or to report bugs and share feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event booking and ticketing manager software, used and trusted by thousands of companies.
If you own a WordPress-powered website and you intend to run an event that involves scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), enrolling attendees, and booking tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – Event Manager And Registration Software For WordPress
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