Do you currently run or plan to run events that need co-ordinating bookings, such as seminars, community classes, not-for-profit fund raisers, networking events, or even a big event such as an exhibition, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Managing event sign-ups is a complex process. You will probably have to co-ordinate event schedules, availability, attendee numbers, data processing and storage, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations, reminders and notifications, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and issuing tickets to participants.
There are many benefits to setting up an online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily reproduce repeat events, give event managers more control, improve user experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that this can be expensive.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-based web site, you can download and install an inexpensive and professional online event registration system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Management
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP enables you to easily create your event and begin accepting online registrations in just a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and accept online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
Customize your event registration forms
You can use multiple event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your attendees, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing updates.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Note: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is significantly different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the software has been redeveloped using a different structure to accommodate future growth and expansion. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually retire EE 3, 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:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages 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 online presence into a feature-rich and professional event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by literally doing away with the chore of processing registrations and signups manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating participants to enroll by themselves.
Letting your attendees to do all of the data themselves frees up your time and lets you direct more energy on organizing a better event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn in a moment, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management process that you want your attendees to experience.
Some additional plugin benefits include the following:
- Lower Costs: Event Espresso provides you with an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own software or using a 3rd party service provider. The cost is kept to a minimum through a model where Event Espresso users buy the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then purchase optional addons only when you need extra features.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept online bookings outside normal business hours. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social and marketing add ons (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event invite their friends who may be interested.
- Paperless Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event registration process can remain entirely online, eliminating typical paper waste from tasks related to admin and record-storage.
- All Data Belongs To You. You control all the information you acquire from event participants.
Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to users through built-in features (these come with the software) and optional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many unique built-in to WP users. Here are just a few of these:
- Fast and easy to install and set up. Ready to start accepting registrations in no time.
- Custom Event Registration Forms. Event Espresso lets you collect specific information using custom event registration forms on your web pages to plan a tailored experience for your event participants.
- Customized Confirmation Emails. Set up automatic registration and payment confirmation emails to communicate with your registrants.
- Ticket Selector. Present several ticket options to registrants and let them purchase the ticket(s) that best suits their needs.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your WordPress theme and reuse contact data throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow you to create new prices that adjust the default ticket pricing of the system-default ticket.
- 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 registering event attendees at the door, or sending in paper-based registration forms for manual registration later.
- Admin Pre-approval. Control who can participate in your events.
- Private Contact Commenting. Record observations about a contact on their profile and how you’ve helped them. Private notes enables you to keep records of when users contacted you, your internal notes, and how you have interacted with them.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events allow you to develop your event over time without publishing it to your website. You can continue editing your events until you are ready to publish it live on your website, or schedule your event pages to publish at a later time and date.
- Complete 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 management, customizable event designs, payment processing and handling, list waiting, limits on attendees, print-ready ticketing and more.
- Upload Events. Event Espresso 4 provides an advanced importing feature that allows you to import a lot of event data at once. You can export, edit and import data for events, datetimes, ticketing information, pricing, custom registration questions, venue info, terms, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Register Multiple Attendees. Event Espresso 4 allows an individual or an organization to enroll multiple attendees at once. Event managers can control how many attendees are able to enrol in one booking session by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso provides users with access to a community of experienced event managers, developers, designers, digital marketers and businesses who also use the plugin. You can network with other Event Espresso users via 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 registrants who have not made payment for their booking with a standard but personalized PDF invoice with one click. Your invoices will address pre-registered attendees who have not paid their registration yet by name, give them the amount owing, and include links to the event, a payment url and a url to download a PDF invoice.
- Event Reports. Event reports gives you data of all the registrations and transactions, enabling you to track the performance of your events with the aggregate number of people who have registered and amount of revenue has been collected.
Additional features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming. Event Espresso is simple enough for basic WP users, and also robust and customizable for higher end users and web developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, Event Espresso 4 makes possible more complex extensions and customizations to the plugin.
- Metabox Management & Organization. Event Espresso leverages the WP user interface, which gives you the ability to reconfigure the user interface to suit your workflow. Each control box can be collapsed, re-arranged or entirely removed from your workflow configuration.
- Autonomy, Flexibility And Value For Money: According to the philosophy stated on their site, Event Espresso’s aim 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 model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also comes with 40+ added features, including:
- Duplicating events – reduces the work of re-entering event details when creating new events.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse the same group of questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Addons
As well as an incredible range of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow users to significantly enhance the capabilities of managing an event.
Some of these addons include:
- EE4 Events Grid Template Addon: Displays events in a pure CSS grid-like structure using the featured image. Hovering over the image will display further information. If an event does not have a featured image, a default image will be used.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes events with many datetimes into a drop-down list.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add-on: The Category Accordion template displays categories in a simple list. Clicking a category name displays all events associated with that category and closes previously open categories.
- EE4 Events Social Sharing Add-on: This addon adds social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that lets your registrants to post a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after booking.
- Custom Template Addon: The Custom Template add-on lets you display your events in a number of exciting and interesting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Addon Versions: This add-on lets you involve staff 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 WordPress users roles and give them different permissions with different capabilities, allowing others to help you manage your events or the events that others create. You can customize roles so that users do 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 have geographic responsibilities for events and users, use the Roles and Permissions Pro addon.
- Event Ticketing Add-on: The Ticketing add-on gives you the ability to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon adds the ability to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing addon 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 mobile app can be used for checking in or checking out registrants and to validate tickets.
- Events Calendar Add-on: This add-on uses the WordPress calendar to display events and categories of events 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 software add on, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture event attendee data, track registrations, and accept payments from your Event Espresso powered website.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software, including new add-ons.
To learn more about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
Customers – Feedback
Here are a few of the testimonials that 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
”I searched long and hard to find something that would serve my needs. This is, by far, the most complete and comprehensive solution I have found.” Bill Hepper, We Teach Live
”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
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, presenter, conference promoter, or event consultant, there are simply endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered user, visit the forums for tips and practical suggestions to streamline your event management workflow or improve the experience of your attendees.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with other WordPress plugins and themes that follow standard WP development rules. If you find that you need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent end-user support, as many of its users attest:
”These guys are right on any problem or issue or even general questions. You can’t really put a value high enough on the kind of support these guys offer.” Mark Wigston, Muskoka Graphics
Event Espresso provides amazing support that includes access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, priority 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 an established team of experienced WordPress web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can count on to organize and manage your events.
Product Price
Event Espresso is available in a number of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin features, however, you need to consider downloading one of the premium plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This allows you to configure Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This license allows you to set up Event Espresso on one domain only. It includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This option lets you configure Event Espresso on 5 domains. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The cost to purchase the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. When we last checked, the plugin sells for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticket Registration Plugin For WordPress
Note: The above reflects the pricing when this article was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin author when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Information
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.
Use the plugin’s documentation tools for answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to your specific use-case, or to report bugs and give feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event registration and ticketing manager software, used by thousands of companies.
If you own a WordPress-powered website and you plan to run an event that involves managing dates, times and venues, enrolling participants, or booking seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Ticketing Registration System
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