Do you currently run or plan to run events that require managing registrations, such as workshops, community courses, not-for-profit fund-raisers, social conferences, or even a large-scale event like a music concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups is a complicated and time-consuming process. You have to manage scheduling, available dates and seating, attendee numbers, data administration, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to event attendees.
There are many benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce costs, help you easily duplicate repeat events, give you more control, improve customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event registration system can be quite expensive.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-based website or blog, you can easily install a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event registration system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Management System
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP enables you to easily schedule multiple events and begin receiving registrations in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and process online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can employ multiple event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up ticket-selling, 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 follow-ups.
View detailed information about event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is completely different than the older EE 3, as the software has been revamped using a different structure to allow for future growth and expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually retire Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
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 site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to attendee 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 increase your business productivity by virtually eliminating the need to process registrations manually.
Basically, you are enabling participants to enrol on their own.
Letting your enrollees to do all of the data entry frees up your time and lets you concentrate more time on creating a more unique event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will see shortly, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and registration process that you want your clients to experience.
Some additional benefits and advantages include:
- Lower Costs: Event Espresso provides you with a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own system or using a third party provider. This is made possible by using a model where users purchase the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and purchase optional addons when you need additional functionality.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept online sign-ups 24/7. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing add ons (see below) let people interested in registering for your event invite friends who may also be interested in attending.
- Green And Paperless Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign up process can remain entirely in digital form, significantly reducing typical paper consumption from tasks associated with admin and record-storage.
- Own Your Information. You control all the information you obtain from event attendees.
Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to users through standard features (these are included with the plugin) and additional features that customers can buy for an additional cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of great built-in to site owners. Here are just a few of these:
- Fast and simple to install and implement. Ready to start accepting registrations in no time.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In EE 4, events can have many dates and times (called datetimes), which these can be managed from a single event.
- Customizable Event Page Designs. You can customize your events and bookings page using Event Espresso’s limitless template options and elements, and HTML or CSS.
- Ticket Selector. Present a number of ticket options to prospects so they can choose the ticket(s) that best fits their needs.
- Intelligent Single Page Checkout Process. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is smart, fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically duplicate the primary registrant’s information for any additional attendees.
- Spam Protection. Reduce the risk of spammers and robots making false registrations by using reCAPTCHA option to confirm human activity.
- In-App Documentation Systems. Event Espresso 4 comes with 3 detailed in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of registrants and check in everyone who has attended.
- Administrative Pre-approval. Control who can and cannot attend your events.
- Private Contact Notes. Keep notes about event participants on their profile. Private commenting lets you keep records of when users contacted you, your internal notes, and how you have helped them.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events let you develop an event in your own time-frame without displaying it live on your website. You can continue working on your event until you are ready to publish it live on your website, or schedule to publish your event at a later time and date.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your profile to be deployed throughout the software and your front-end templates. Your organization fields include: company name, address, city, state, country, zip code, email address, telephone, tax number, company logo, Facebook URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest profile URL, Google+ profile URL, Instagram profile URL.
- Upload Events. EE 4 provides an advanced importing feature that allows you to upload bulk event data at once. You can export, edit and upload information about events, datetimes, tickets, prices, custom registration questions, venue info, terms, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- WYSIWYG Editor. Event Espresso uses the default WordPress WYSIWYG editor, allowing you to quickly and easily insert photos and format your content without knowledge of HTML or CSS, just like any typical WordPress post or page.
- Event Espresso Community. Event Espresso gives you access to a community of experienced event managers, programmers, designers, marketers and business owners who also use the plugin. You can network with other members of the Event Espresso community using their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media pages on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential event clients who have not fully paid for their registration with a standard but personalized PDF invoice with one click of a button. Your invoices will address pre-registered attendees who have not paid their registration yet by name, give them the balance owing, and include a link to the event, a payment link and a url to download a PDF invoice.
- Attendee Reporting. Event reporting provides you with data of all the registrations and transactions, allowing you to measure the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and how much money you’ve collected.
Extra features include:
- Hooks, Actions And Filters. These features allow developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso software that are 100% compatible with the WordPress software platform.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. EE 4 lets you create a log file with debugging data which can be useful for developers who are troubleshooting.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & Value For Money: Event Espresso states on their website that their mission 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 in the process.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also provides you with 40+ added features, including:
- Duplicating events – reduces the need to re-enter event details when adding new events.
- Default surcharge (similar to adding a service fee to each ticket).
- Option to skip the confirmation page in registration.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
In addition to a very large number of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow software users to further enhance the functionality of events.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display the scheduled events by location. Four maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Manager Add-on: The Recurring Events management add-on lets you put your events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years in advance. You can schedule as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in the future as you want. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close bookings for all recurring events.
- 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 Add-on: If your website 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 Add-on: The Custom Template addon is capable of displaying your events in a number of exciting and interesting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add on Editions: This add-on lets you involve others 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, allowing others to help you manage your events or events that others create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain parts 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.
- Multi-Event Registration Add on: The Multi-Event registration addon gives your potential customers 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 cart. With the Multi-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 Calendar Add on: This add on uses the WordPress calendar to display events and categories of events in a nice graphical calendar.
- EE4 Infusionsoft Integration Addon: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft integration all-in-one sales and marketing software addon, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture customer data, track bookings, and accept payments from your web site.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add ons.
For more details about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website:
Plugin Users – Testimonials
Below are some of the many great testimonials that satisfied customers have written about Event Espresso:
”Broadcasting my support for Event Espresso will be a pleasure. I recently helped the Webmaster at a sister church configure your event manager for their site, so I can say with confidence and from experience, that Event Espresso is the best Event Manager plugin ever!” Philip Simpson, The Charlotte Church
”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
”At first we looked at CVENT for one of our clients and they wanted $16,000 per year for 3000 event attendees + fees totaling $22k. That is before Staff and Webinar fees. Worst of all we had to prepay the $16k amount even if we never used all 3000 attendees. That was when we looked at Event Espresso and we realized we could build our own event system for less than 16K. For the most part we have been very satisfied with our decision. The real ROI will come next year when they don’t have to pay another 16k-22K! 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 (Long Version), KT Benefits & InkItDigital.com
Useful Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, trainer, conference planner, or event management consultant, there are just unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a registered user, go through the support forum for tips and practical suggestions to streamline your event management process or enhance the experience of your participants.
Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with other WP plugins and WP themes that follow standard WP development guidelines. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great technical support, as so many of its clients attest:
”Your plugin saved our client nearly $9000 in development costs because it handled the majority of the functionality we were looking for at a much lower cost. EventEspresso’s staff have been very responsive to our needs when we have them (which has been rare, because the plugin is so well coded). Great job on a great plugin!” Brandon P., Experience Farm
The Event Espresso plugin provides comprehensive support with access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, priority 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 a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can rely on to run and manage your events.
Software Cost
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 should consider downloading one of the paid plugin editions below:
- Personal Edition – This allows you to configure 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 Licensing – This license lets you run Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License – This allows you to run Event Espresso on five sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $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. Presently, the plugin is selling for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Management And Registration Software For WordPress
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing when this review was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin developer when you visit the site.
Additional Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the software’s online documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to your specific situation, or to report bugs and share feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product web site.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event registration and ticketing manager plugin, used and trusted by thousands of WordPress site owners.
If you are a WordPress user and you currently run events that involve scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), registering attendees, or reserving tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better WP plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticketing Registration Software For WordPress
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