Do you currently run or plan to run events that need managing bookings or registrations, such as workshops, community classes, not-for-profit fundraisers, marketing functions, or even a large-scale event like a show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event registrations can be a complex and time-consuming process. You may need to co-ordinate event schedules, availability, participant numbers, data administration, collecting payments and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders and alerts, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to attendees.
There are lots of benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower costs, help you easily duplicate previous events, give event managers more control, improve user experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be quite costly.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-powered website or blog, you can easily install a very inexpensive and professional web-based event registration solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily create multiple events and begin receiving registrations in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and take online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize registration forms
You can use multiple event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up selling tickets, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media sites like Facebook.
View detailed information about event attendees
Note: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their software: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is impressively different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the software has been revamped using a different structure to allow for future expansion. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually migrate completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and features of this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just some 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 existing online presence into a fully-featured and automated event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by practically doing away with the need to process registrations and bookings manually.
Basically, you are facilitating attendees to register on their own.
Letting your customers to do all of the data entry frees up your time and lets you direct more of your resources on planning a more unique event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn shortly, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management and registration process that you want your clients to experience.
Some additional benefits include the following:
- Reduced Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third-party service provider. The cost is kept low through a model where Event Espresso users buy the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and purchase addons when you need additional functionality.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept new event signups 24/7. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social and marketing features (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event invite their friends who may be interested in attending.
- Green And Paperless Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event booking process can remain wholly online, reducing traditional paper waste from tasks associated with admin and record-keeping.
- Own Your Data. You control all the data gathered from event attendees.
Features
The Event Espresso software delivers functionality to its customers through standard features (these come with the software) and optional features that you can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many features to website owners. Here are just some of these:
- Quick and simple to install and set up. Be up and running in minutes.
- Customized Event Registration Form. With Event Espresso you can collect specific information using custom event registration forms on your web pages to prepare a customized experience for your customers.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Participants can easily find your upcoming events and add these to their schedule using the WordPress calendar.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso seamlessly integrates with several payment gateways, allowing you to collect money before running your events.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your WP theme and reuse contact information throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Prices. Set up events fast by pre-configuring system-default ticket prices.
- Mobile Registration And Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system enables you to authenticate tickets, speed up in-venue registrations, create multiple check-in “stations” and track all participants.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. Event Espresso 4 lets you understand who your customers are and how they’ve done business with you.
- Ticketless Events. Promote events without the requirement for participants to book tickets. Use Event Espresso for all forms of events, not just when tickets are needed.
- Public Commenting. Add “social proof” by encouraging potential prospects to ask questions about your event and past customers to post comments that can help others consider whether or not to sign up. Moderation settings for public commenting are set up using the WordPress commenting settings.
- Keyword-Rich URLs. Keyword-rich event page Web links leverage your WP site’s Permalinks configuration settings. Search engine friendly web links that use topic-relevant keywords add to the context of your content and improves your search rankings, helping you drive more potential customers to your website.
- Multi-Language Plugin. Event Espresso is currently available in more than 15 languages, and more languages are being added all the time.
- Bulk Import Events. EE 4 provides an advanced importing feature that enables you to upload a lot of event data at once. You can export, edit and upload data for events, datetimes, tickets, prices, custom registration questions, venues, terms, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Register Multiple Participants. Event Espresso 4 allows a single person or an organization to book multiple participants at the same time. Event managers decide how many people are able to enrol in a single registration session by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Automatic Plugin Upgrading. Event Espresso provides simple one-click upgrading to ensure that you have the newest features and to keep your installation working with new versions of WordPress.
- Staff Member Manager. Save time and stay organized by reusing team member profiles for multiple events or displaying profile information such as team member’s contact information, resume and photo using a shortcode in your event description.
- Attendee Reporting. Quick-view event reports gives you data of the registrations and transactions, allowing you to analyze the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and how much money has been collected.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows developers to have more control and options over the content of your events and how the information displays to prospects.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registrations for normal website traffic whenever website maintenance is required. You can still work on the back-end of your site during maintenance mode.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And Value: 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 objectives, 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 edition of Event Espresso also provides you with over 40 additional features, including:
- Live-filtering when you search for events in the Event Espresso admin.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing the same questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As well as a very large range of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow end-users to significantly enhance the functionality of events.
Some of these addons include:
- 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 available, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Custom Template Add-on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize the 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 the category name shows all events related to that category and closes previously open categories.
- Social Media Buttons Addon: The social media addon displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media addon comes free with any of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- Custom Template Addon: The Custom Template add on can display your event lists in a variety of visually exciting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Addon Editions: This add-on lets you involve other users in the event management process and give new users permission to create events or regional managers permission 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 capabilities, allowing others to 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 sections of your WordPress 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 addon.
- Multi-Event Registration Addon: The Multiple Event registration addon gives your potential customers the ability to register for 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 addon, 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 Template Add on: The Events Table Template add on provides event managers with a simple and easy-to-use system that lets you change 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 developers design their own custom templates using one of the included templates as a source template.
- Infusionsoft Integration Add on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft integration all-in-one sales and business marketing plugin add on, you can completely automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture event attendee data, track bookings, and accept payments from your web site.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin, including new addons.
To learn more about the latest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
Testimonials
Below are a few of the testimonials that satisfied users have posted about Event Espresso:
”My clients have used Event Espresso for Transportation (Cadet Bus for leave), Parties (tailgates and brewery tours), and Horse-back riding lessons and camps. What a terrific plug-in and fantastic support from Seth!” Nina, Blue Iris Web Design
”Your plugin rocks! Seriously, saved me hours on the phone setting up attendance manually. Kudos. :)” William, Petruzzo Photography
”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 gym owner, teacher, conference planner, or event consultant, there are just endless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a registered owner, spend a little time visiting the forums for tips and practical ways to improve your event management process or enhance the experience of your participants.
Support
Event Espresso works with with other WP plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress coding guidelines. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great end-user support, as so many of its satisfied end-users 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 including access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, one-on-one 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 web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can rely on to run your events.
Plugin Price
Event Espresso is available in different editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin features, however, you may want to consider downloading one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This allows you to set up Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This edition enables you to install Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Edition – This lets you run Event Espresso on five sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The cost of purchasing the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, the plugin sells for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticketing Registration System For WordPress
Note: The pricing above was current when this review 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 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 setup and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to a specific use-case, or to notify developers about problems and leave feedback.
For all installation and support 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 management plugin, used by thousands of businesses.
If you own a WordPress site and you intend to run events that involve managing dates, times and venues (offline and online), booking attendees, and selling tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Ticket Registration Plugin
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