Do you currently run or plan to run events that require co-ordinating bookings or registrations, such as workshops, community courses, charity fundraisers, corporate conferences, or even a big event like a trade exhibit, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Managing event registrations can be a complex and time-consuming process. You will probably have to co-ordinate scheduling, available dates and spaces, registration numbers, data administration, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders and notifications, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to participants.
There are a number of advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce costs, help you easily reproduce previous events, give event managers more control, create a better customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event booking system can be quite expensive.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-powered site, you can set up an inexpensive and highly professional web-based event registration solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Management
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily schedule your event and begin receiving online registrations literally in a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and take online event registrations)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed software that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can use a range of event registration strategies, from simple online bookings 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 updates.
View detailed information about event attendees
Note: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their software: EE 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is fundamentally different than the older EE 3, as it has been redeveloped using a different structure to allow for future growth and expansion. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually migrate completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and advantages of this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing web site into a fully-featured and automated event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to attendee limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by virtually doing away with the chore of processing registrations manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for event attendees to perform the enrolment process on their own.
Allowing your participants to do the data themselves frees you up from doing admin work and lets you spend more time on delivering a memorable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn in a moment, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and registration process that you want your clients to experience.
Additional plugin benefits include:
- Significantly Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd party provider. The cost is kept low by using a model where users buy the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then buy add-ons when you need additional functionality.
- More Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept online registrations outside normal business hours. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features and add ons (see below) let people interested in registering for your event invite others who may also be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event signup process can be kept wholly online, eliminating traditional paper consumption from tasks associated with administration.
- Own Your Data. You control all the data you collect from event attendees.
Features
The Event Espresso plugin provides functionality to end-users via built-in features (these come with the plugin) and optional features that users can buy for an added cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many great built-in to WordPress users. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and easy to install and configure. Ready to use in minutes.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In EE 4, events can have multiple dates and times (called datetimes), which these can be managed from a single event.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Registrants can easily find your upcoming events and add these to their schedule with the WordPress calendar.
- Tax Administration Options. Event Espresso 4 provides a number of ways to manage taxes for an event and provide reports of tax fees to customers who purchase tickets. You can configure taxes globally and on a per-ticket basis.
- Intelligent Single Page Checkout Process. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically copy the primary registrant’s information for any additional attendees.
- Spam Protection. Prevent the risk of spammers and bot software programs creating bogus registrations with reCAPTCHA option to provide human validation.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 includes three detailed in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Manual Registration Option. you have the option of booking event participants when they show up, or sending in paper-based forms for manual submission later.
- Admin Pre-approval. Be selective about who can and cannot register for your events.
- Public Commenting. Add social interactivity to your event by encouraging potential prospects to ask questions about your event and previous customers to post reviews that can help others choose whether or not to sign up. Moderation settings for commenting are set up using the WP commenting section.
- Keyword-Rich URLs. Keyword rich URLs leverage your Permalinks configuration settings. Search engine friendly web links that use relevant keywords enhance the context of your events and improves your search rankings, helping you drive more visitors to your website.
- Full Control Of Your Event Management. Event Espresso puts event managers in complete control of all aspects of an event’s registration and ticketing, and lets you automate the process with event management tools that include staff and venue manager, customizable event designs, payment processing, wait lists, attendee limits, print-ready ticketing and more.
- Import Event Information. EE 4 provides an advanced importing capability that lets you easily upload bulk event data all at one time. You can export, edit and import data for events, datetimes, tickets, pricing, custom registration questions, venue info, terms, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Register Multiple Participants. Event Espresso 4 allows one person or a group to purchase multiple tickets and different types of tickets at once. You control how many people can register in a single session by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Event Espresso Community. Event Espresso gives you access to a community of experienced event managers, developers, web designers, online marketers and business owners who also use the plugin. You can network with other members of the Event Espresso community via their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential registrants who have not paid yet for their booking with a standard but personalized invoice with just one click. Your invoices will reference registered participants who have not paid their registration yet by name, display the balance they owe, and include links to the event, a payment link and a link to download the invoice.
- Accurate Attendee Manager. You control your participants’ information; who has registered, which event they have booked and how much they have paid. With the attendee manager, you can get an overview of registered participants and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export a list of attendees to an Excel spreadsheet for additional reports, send customizable payment reminders and receipts and send messages to your attendees on a person-by-person basis or collectively.
Additional features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming. Event Espresso is simple enough for most users, and also extremely robust and customizable for enterprise-level users and web-based software developers. The bottom line is that by using Object-oriented programming (OOP), EE 4 allows for more complex enhancements and customizations to the application.
- Metabox Management & Organization. Event Espresso leverages the WP user interface, which gives you the ability to reorder the user interface to suit your workflow process. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or completely deleted from the workflow configuration.
- Autonomy, Flexibility And Value: According to the mission statement 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 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 version of Event Espresso also provides you with over 40 additional features, including:
- Live-filtering when searching for events in the Event Espresso admin.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse the same group of questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow users to significantly expand the functionality of managing an event.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add-on: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display all scheduled events by location. Four maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Management Addon: The Recurring Events manager add on enables you to put events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months … even years ahead. You can create as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in advance as you need. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close registrations for all recurring events.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add on: The Category Accordion template displays categories in a simple list. Clicking a category name displays all events related to that category and closes previously open categories.
- EE4 Events Social Sharing Add on: 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 registration.
- Custom Template Addon: The Custom Template add on can display your events in a range of visually exciting ways.
- Seating Chart Addon: The seating chart add on 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 lets you offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart addon lets you control the experience for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to each seat.
- Multiple Event Registration Addon: The Multiple Event registration addon gives potential attendees the ability to book multiple events at once. In each event listing attendees will be given the option to either register for a single event or add multiple events to their shopping 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.
- EE4 Events Calendar Add on: This WordPress events calendar displays events and event categories using an attractive graphical calendar.
- MailChimp Integration Add on: The MailChimp add-on lets you automatically register participants to a chosen mailing list or group within your MailChimp account.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin, including new add-ons.
For more information about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, visit the plugin website:
Customer Feedback
Below are some of the many testimonials that customers have posted about Event Espresso:
”My hope with this whole integration is to be able to show other school districts an affordable and easy solution to these registrations. I cannot believe how much money they are charged for less by other companies. This has the potential to save schools tens of thousands, which is huge right now.” Kelly, College Station Independent School District
”Event Espresso event management plugin for WordPress is really an awesome plugin.” Cheryl Smithem, Charleston PR & Design
”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
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, trainer, seminar promoter, or event consultant, there are just unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a licensed user, go through the user forum for tips and practical suggestions to improve your event management and registration workflow or enhance the experience of your event participants.
Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with all WordPress plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress coding rules. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive customer support, as so many of its satisfied plugin customers attest:
”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 great support including access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, custom development 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.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely software you can rely on to run your events.
Event Espresso Price
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software options, however, you may want to consider purchasing one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This enables you to configure Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This option allows you to install Event Espresso on one domain only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This allows you to set up Event Espresso on five sites. It includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Pricing details of the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, the software is being retailed for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Manager
Note: The above reflects the pricing when this article was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin author when you visit the website.
Additional Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the plugin’s online documentation pages for answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to your specific situation, or to report issues and leave feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product information pages.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the leading WP event registration and ticketing manager plugin, used by thousands of people.
If you own a WordPress-powered site and you plan to run any event that involves managing dates, times and venues (offline and online), enrolling attendees, and/or reserving tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Management Software
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