Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that need to accept registrations, such as seminars, community courses, not-for-profit fund-raisers, networking functions, or even a large-scale event such as an exhibition, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Managing event registrations is a time-consuming process. You need to manage scheduling, availability, participant numbers, data entry, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders and alerts, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and providing tickets to event registrants.
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 expenses, help you easily duplicate recurring events, give you more control, improve customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be costly.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-powered site, you can easily install an inexpensive and highly professional online event registration solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Management System
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily schedule your event and start processing bookings in minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and accept online bookings)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Customize your event registration forms
You can use several event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up selling tickets, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your event attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media sites like Facebook.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Important: Currently, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is significantly different than the older EE 3, as the platform is being rebuilt using a different structure to enable future expansion. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually phase out Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
More info:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just some of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current website into a fully-featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using an online 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 sign-ups manually.
Essentially, you are enabling event participants to perform the enrollment process themselves.
Letting your customers to do the data themselves frees you up from doing admin work and lets you direct more of your resources on planning a more unique event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will see in a moment, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management process that you want your users to experience.
Some additional benefits of the plugin include the following:
- Significantly Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin provides you with a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own software or using a third party service provider. The cost is kept to a minimum through a model where users purchase the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and purchase addons when you need new functionality.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept new signups 24 hrs a day. In addition, Event Espresso social and marketing features and add ons (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event share your information with friends who may be interested.
- Green And Paperless Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign up process is conducted wholly in digital form, significantly reducing typical paper waste from tasks associated with enrollment.
- Own Your Information. You own all the information you acquire from your event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to end-users through built-in features (these are included with the plugin) and optional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers a number of built-in to site owners. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and easy to install and implement. Be up and running in very little time.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso lets you configure as many different types of tickets as you need and set prices, ticket quantity limits, etc.
- Customized Notification Emails. Configure automatic booking and payment notification email messages to communicate with event participants.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso provides integration with payment gateways, enabling you to collect booking payments prior to running the events.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration allows event managers to configure the display settings of Google Maps on your event listing and event details sections.
- Default Prices. Create events quickly with pre-configured system-default ticket prices.
- Promotional Codes. Offer promotional and discount codes to incentivize people to register immediately, or simply make your offers more affordable for price-sensitive prospects. This is also practical if you want to increase sales of events close to timelines.
- Event Check-In List. Generate an exportable list of attendees and confirm those who have attended.
- No-Ticket Events. Promote events without requiring attendees to select tickets. Event Espresso can be used for all kinds of events, not only those that need tickets.
- Private Contact Notes. Record observations about event registrants on their profile and how you’ve interacted with your contacts. Private notes lets you keep a record of when users contacted you, your internal comments, and how you have interacted with them.
- Keyword-Rich Page URLs. Keyword-rich Web links leverage your WordPress Permalinks configuration settings. “Pretty” permalinks with relevant keywords add to the context of your pages and is favored by search engines, helping you get more potential customers to your site.
- Country Settings. Event managers can configure the country and currency settings that will be used throughout Event Espresso, including currency, currency signs, decimal characters and places, country codes, regions, and so on.
- Upload Events. Event Espresso 4 provides a CSV-based importing feature that enables you to easily import a lot of event data at once. You can export, edit and import data for events, datetimes, ticketing information, pricing, registration questions, venue info, terms, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Visual Editor. Event Espresso uses the built-in WordPress Visual editor, allowing you to quickly and easily insert images and create your event descriptions without knowing HTML or CSS, just like any typical WordPress post.
- Automatic Software Installation Updates. Event Espresso provides easy 1-click plugin updating to make sure that you have the latest features and to keep your installation compatible with new versions of WordPress.
- Staff Member Management. Save time and stay organized by reusing staff profiles for multiple events or displaying profile information such as staff member’s contact information, resume and photo using a shortcode in your event description.
- Accurate Participant Management. You control your attendees’ details; who has registered, which event they have registered for and how much they 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 an event attendee list to an Excel spreadsheet for additional reports, send custom payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your event registrants on a person-by-person basis or all at once.
Extra 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 site visitors.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. EE 4 allows you to output a log file with debugging data that can be helpful for developers when troubleshooting.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value: According to the mission statement on their 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 objectives, the company operates on a modular and highly efficient model 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:
- Email shortcodes for including customer data in emails and updates.
- Default surcharge (the same as applying a service tax to each ticket).
- Option to skip the confirmation page in the registration process.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow you to significantly enhance the functionality of managing an event.
Some of these add-ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display upcoming events by location. 4 maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Template Add-on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes the events with many datetimes into a dropdown list.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add on: The Category Accordion template shows categories in a simple list. Clicking a category name displays the events associated with that category and closes any 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 registrants to post a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after booking.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration addon allows you to take advantage of the WordPress user system. With the WP User Integration add-on you can give your users a special incentive by offering member prices and overriding event prices when your members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered users of the website can have access to these special events. Members can also input personal information into their profile page allowing them to quickly register for events by auto-filling in their personal information on the event booking form. Users can also view previous events and make payment for events.
- Seating Chart Add-on: The seating chart add on is suitable 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 addon lets you promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart add on lets you manage the experience for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to every seat.
- EE4 Event Ticketing & Bar Scanning Add-on: The Ticketing add-on adds the ability to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add on gives you the ability to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing addon includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode types are included for handling check-in scans at venues. Customers 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 attendees and to validate tickets.
- Events Calendar Add on: This WordPress events calendar displays events and event categories via a nice graphical calendar.
- Infusionsoft Integration Addon: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and business marketing plugin add-on, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture customer data, track enrollments, and accept payments from your web site.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin, including new addons.
For more information about the latest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
Customer Feedback
Below are just some of the many testimonials that satisfied 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 recently downloaded it to add to a nonprofit site for a Boy Scout troop and the features work wonderfully with what we wanted to accomplish for the site. It allows us to set up calendar, events, and even take payments for trips. At first, I thought that it would be overkill for such a small site, but now I see the possibilities and will definitely be offering Event Espresso to my clients that need an event organization system for their web sites.” Lucy Conn, Troop 462
”Hello. I wanted to say that I’ve purchased Event Espresso twice now for two different organizations and have had great success with the purchases. Outside of photography, I also build small websites with WordPress as the CMS. I built two websites for two different martial arts organizations who host yearly seminars and tournaments. The plug in has provided a way for attendees to sign up online from both Canada and the United States with ease, and also allowed the organizations to easily manage payments, attendee lists, and many other aspects of the events. Thanks to Seth for creating such a great plug in, and for your constant support!” James Zedd, James Zedd Photography
Useful Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, teacher, concert promoter, or event professional, there are simply endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered user, search the user forum for inspiration and practical suggestions to improve your event management and registration workflow or improve the experience of your registrants.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with most WordPress plugins and WordPress themes that follow standard WordPress development guidelines. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent user support, as many of its satisfied plugin customers attest:
”By far, the customer service experience with Event Espresso has been the best of any WordPress Theme or Paid Plugin that I’ve used in the past two years!” Megan Murray, Boys & Girls Club of Lake Tahoe
Event Espresso provides comprehensive support including access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, premium 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 a solution you can depend on to manage your events.
Product Cost
Event Espresso is available in different editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you may want to consider purchasing one of the premium plugin versions below:
- Personal License Edition – This lets you run Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License – This option enables you to set up Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This license lets you configure Event Espresso on 5 sites. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The price 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 prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticketing Registration Software For WordPress
Please Note: The pricing above was current at the time this review was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin seller when you visit the site.
Additional Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the software’s online documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to a specific situation, or to notify developers about issues and share feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event registration and ticketing manager software, used and trusted by thousands of people.
If you own a WordPress website and you currently run an event that involves managing dates and venues, enrolling participants, and selling tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable WP plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management
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