Do you currently run or plan to run events that need to accept registrations, such as seminars, community classes, non-profit fundraisers, networking conferences, or even a large-scale event like a dance party, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Managing event bookings is a complex process. You will most likely be required to co-ordinate scheduling, available dates and spaces, participant numbers, data entry, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders and alerts, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and providing tickets to participants.
There are lots of advantages to setting up an automated online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce costs, help you easily copy settings for recurring events, give event managers more control, create a more enjoyable user experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that this can be expensive.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-powered website or blog, you can set up a very inexpensive and professional online event booking solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – Event Management & Registration System For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily set up your event and start accepting online registrations in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and process online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed software that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can employ a number of event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups 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 and autoresponders.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is fundamentally different than the older EE 3, as the software is being revamped using a different structure to enable future expansion. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually migrate completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current digital presence into a feature-rich and professional event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple price options 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 improve your business productivity by virtually doing away with the chore of processing registrations manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for attendees to enroll themselves.
Letting your enrollees to do the data entry frees up your time and lets you spend more time on delivering a more enjoyable event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon discover, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management and booking process that you want your clients to experience.
Additional benefits include:
- Reduced Costs: Event Espresso is an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd-party service. The cost is kept to a minimum through a model where users purchase the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then purchase add ons when you need added functionality.
- Higher Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new signups 24/7. In addition, Event Espresso social features and add-ons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event share your information with friends who may be interested.
- Green & Paperless Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, your event booking process is conducted entirely in digital form, reducing typical paper consumption from tasks associated with enrollment.
- All Data Belongs To You. You control all the information acquired from your event attendees.
Features
The Event Espresso software provides functionality to users via built-in features (these come with the software) and optional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many features to website owners. Here are just a few of these:
- Fast and easy to install and set up. Ready to start accepting registrations in minutes.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In EE 4, events can have many dates and times (datetimes), which these can be managed from one single event.
- Customizable Event Page Designs. Match your website’s look and feel for your events and registrations page using Event Espresso’s template options and parts, plus HTML or CSS.
- Tax Admin & Reporting. Event Espresso 4 gives you a number of ways to administer taxes for your event and provide reports of tax fees to customers when purchasing tickets. You can configure taxes globally or on a per-ticket basis.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration allows you to customize the settings of Google Maps on the event listing and event details pages.
- Default Prices. Create events quickly and easily with pre-configured default ticket pricing.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 comes with 3 useful in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of booking event attendees at the door, or send in paper registration forms for manual registration later.
- Waiting Lists. Prospective attendees can join a waiting list if your event has reached the limit of participants. You can also make it a requirement wait-list attendees pre-pay if you plan to expand numbers for your event.
- Private Contact Notes. Record observations about users on their profile and how you have helped your contacts. Private commenting lets you keep records of when event participants contacted you, your internal notes, and how you’ve helped your contacts.
- Keyword Rich URLs. Keyword rich URLs leverage your WordPress Permalinks configuration settings. “Pretty” permalinks that include relevant keywords add to the context of your content and improves your search rankings, helping you bring a more targeted audience to your website.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your profile to display throughout Event Espresso and your front-end templates. The organization data include: organization name, street address, city, state, country, zip/postal code, email address, telephone, VAT/tax number, logo, Facebook profile URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest profile URL, Google+ profile URL, Instagram profile URL.
- Exportable Information. You can export all the information collected from event customers into Excel or CSV format for creating advanced reports, devising marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, etc..
- Venue Manager. The venue manager feature in EE 4 lets information about a venue to be made available throughout the Event Espresso admin and the public areas of your site to inform site visitors of your event’s location. The venue profile displays many standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also lets you add details like venue seating capacity, venue site URL, venue phone number, physical and virtual location, Google map, etc. You can also list all of your event venues throughout different locations of your theme as well as on a venue listing page on your site where you can set up and display venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have booked for a given venue.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso gives you access to an expert community of event managers and other plugin users. You can engage with other Event Espresso users using their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Social Sharing. Event attendees and your site visitors can help publicize your event using social media sharing buttons.
- Transaction Reporting. Event reporting provides you with information of your registrations and transactions, enabling you to analyze the performance of your events with the aggregate number of people who have registered and how much money has been collected.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows web developers to have more control and options over your event pages and how your information displays to your prospective event registrants.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. EE 4 allows you to output a log file with debugging data that can be useful for developers when diagnosing application errors.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value: According to the philosophy stated 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 goals, 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 provides you with 40+ additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – reduces the need to re-enter event details when creating new events.
- Default surcharge (similar to adding a service fee to tickets).
- Option to skip the confirmation page during the registration process.
Addons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow end-users to significantly enhance the functionality of events.
Some of these add ons include:
- 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.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Custom Template Add-on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes the events with multiple datetimes into a dropdown list.
- Events Calendar Table Template Add-on: The Calendar Table template is a list template with a bold date and customizable “register now” button. The template can be customized to show an event thumbnail instead of the date.
- Social Coupons Integration Addon: If your site uses Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can even specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- Custom Template Addon: The Custom Template addon can display your events in a number of exciting and interesting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add-on Versions: This addon lets you involve staff in your organization to help manage your events and give new users permission to create events or regional managers the ability to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WP users roles and allow them different permissions with different privileges, allowing staff to help you manage your events or the 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 parts of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to allow users to have geographic responsibilities for events and users, use the Roles and Permissions Pro addon.
- EE4 Event Ticketing And Bar Scanning Addon: The Ticketing add on adds the capacity to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon gives you the capacity to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing add-on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for managing check-in scans at the venue door. Attendees 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 attendees and to validate tickets.
- EE4 Events Calendar Add-on: This add-on uses the WP calendar to display events and event categories via an attractive graphical calendar.
- EE4 Infusionsoft Integration Addon: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and marketing plugin add on, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture event attendee data, track enrollments, and accept payments from your website.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software, including new add ons.
For complete details about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website here:
Customer Feedback
Here are some of the many great testimonials that users have written about Event Espresso:
”Event Espresso is one of the nicest Event Managers (WP Plugin) I have come across.” Joe Distefano, Citizen Joe
”Over the next 5-6 years we should be able to claim that we saved the company over $100,000 – Thanks Event Espresso!” David Waterman, KT Benefits & InkItDigital.com
”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
Useful Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, presenter, conference planner, or event management consultant, there are simply endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, spend a little time going through the user forum for new ideas and practical ways to improve your event management and registration process or improve the experience of your attendees.
Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with all WordPress plugins and themes that follow WP coding standards. If you do need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive technical support, as many of its satisfied clients attest:
”No complaints here. Satisfied customer. You can teach us all few things about customer service. Thanks!” Charles
The plugin provides exceptional support including access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledge base 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.
In addition, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can count on to run your events.
Software Pricing
Event Espresso is available in a number of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin options, however, you should consider purchasing one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This option lets you run Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This lets you set up Event Espresso on 1 site only. It includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License – This lets you run Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons 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 special offers. Currently, the plugin is being retailed for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Management And Registration Plugin For WordPress
Note: The pricing above was current when this review was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin author when you visit the website.
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 plugin’s online documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to your specific situation, or to report problems and leave feedback.
For detailed 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 plugin, used and trusted by thousands of users.
If you own a WordPress web site and you plan to run an event that involves scheduling dates, times and venues, booking attendees, and selling tickets, then you will probably not find a better solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso
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