Do you currently run or plan to run events that require bookings, such as seminars, community courses, non-profit fundraisers, networking events, or even a big event like a dance party, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups can be a complex process. You will probably need to manage calendar schedules, dates, attendee numbers, data processing and storage, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and providing tickets to attendees.
There are a number of 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, create a better customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that this can be very expensive.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-based digital presence, you can download and install an inexpensive and professional online event registration solution.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticketing Registration System For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily create an event and start receiving online bookings in minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and receive online registrations)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Customize registration forms
You can use various event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up ticket sales, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your participants, or integrating your event registration forms with social media sites like Facebook.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is significantly different than the older EE 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 pricing. The developers aim to eventually retire EE 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and features of using this plugin.
Go here to learn more:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just a few of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website or blog into an automated and fully featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to attendee limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by virtually eliminating the need to process registrations and bookings manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating participants to perform the registration on their own.
Allowing your customers to do the data themselves frees up your time and lets you direct more of your energy on creating a better event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn shortly, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management process that you want your attendees to experience.
Some additional benefits of the plugin include:
- Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin provides you with an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own system or using a third party service. This is made possible by using a model where users purchase the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then buy add-ons only if you need new features.
- More Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept new event registrations outside traditional 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 share your information with other people they know who may be interested.
- Green & Paperless Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, your event registration process remains entirely in digital form, significantly reducing traditional paper waste from tasks associated with enrollment.
- Own Your Information. You control all the information acquired from your event attendees.
Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to users via built-in features (these come with the software) and optional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many unique features to WordPress users. Here are just some:
- Fast and easy to install and set up. Ready to start using in no time.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In EE 4, events can have many dates and times (called datetimes), and these can be managed from one single event.
- Event Calendar. Attendees can easily see your upcoming events and add these to their schedule using a calendar.
- Tax Admin & Reporting. Event Espresso 4 provides several ways to manage taxes for an event and report tax fees to registrants who purchase tickets. Event managers can administer taxes globally or on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
- Intelligent Single Page Checkout. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically duplicate the primary registrant’s information for any added registrants.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow event managers to create new prices that adjust the default ticket price of the system-default ticket.
- Mobile Registration & Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system enables you to validate tickets, speed up door registrations, create various check-in “stations” and track all attendees.
- Manual Registration Option. you have the option of registering event attendees when they show up, or send in paper-based forms for manual submission later.
- No-Ticket Events. You can create events without the requirement for registrants to select tickets. Event Espresso can be used for any form of event, not only those that need tickets.
- Private Contact Commenting. Keep comments about users on their profile and how you have assisted them. Private notes helps you keep a record of when users contacted you, your internal observations, and how you’ve helped your customers.
- Optimized For The Latest WordPress Version. The EE 4 user interface follows the WordPress guidelines to help you create beautifully-designed event pages that are easier to use and mobile-friendly.
- Country Settings. Event managers can configure the country and currency settings that will be used to run your events, such as currency name, currency signs, decimal characters and places, country codes, regions, etc.
- Exportable Information. You can export all the data collected from your event attendees into Excel or CSV format for creating reports, implementing new marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, etc..
- Venue Management. The venue management feature in EE 4 lets information about venues to display throughout the Event Espresso admin and the public areas of your site to inform attendees of the location of your event. The venue profile displays many standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also displays venue details like venue seating capacity, venue website, venue phone number, physical and virtual location, maps, etc. You can also list all of your event venues throughout various areas on your theme and on a venue archive page on your website where you can set up and publish venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have booked for a given venue.
- Automatic Updating. Event Espresso offers simple one-click software installation upgrades to ensure that you have the latest features and to keep your installation compatible with the latest version of WordPress.
- Social Sharing. Event participants and your website visitors can spread the word about your event using social share buttons.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post types. You can also customize your page templates to display events in your own unique way.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows web-based software developers to have more control and options over your event pages and how your information displays to your visitors.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 lets you generate a log file with debugging data which can be helpful for web developers who are troubleshooting.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And 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 software has been built using a model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium version of Event Espresso also includes 40+ additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – eliminates the work of re-entering event data when adding new events.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse a group of questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
In addition to a very large number of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow you to further enhance the capabilities 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 instead.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Template Add-on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes events with multiple datetimes into a dropdown list.
- Events Category Accordion Template Addon: The Category Accordion template shows categories as a simple list. Clicking on 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 attendees to post a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after registration.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration addon lets you take advantage of the WP user system. With the WP User Integration addon you can give your users a special incentive by offering member pricing and overriding event prices when your members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered users of the site can have access to these special events. Members can also store personal data into their profile page allowing them to quickly register for events by auto-filling in their personal information on the event registration form. Users can also view event history and pay for events.
- Seating Chart Add on: The seating chart add-on is great for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is perfect for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart add on lets you offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart addon lets you manage the environment for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to every seat.
- Multi-Event Registration Add-on: The Multi-Event registration add-on 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 shopping 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.
- EE4 Events Table Template Addon: The Events Table Template add on provides event managers with a simple and easy-to-use system that allows you to 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 web developers build their own custom templates using one of the included templates as a source template.
- MailChimp Integration Add-on: The MailChimp add on lets you automatically register participants to a specified mailing autoresponder list or group within MailChimp.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin, including new addons.
For full details about the latest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
Plugin Users – Feedback
Below are some of the many testimonials that customers have written 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
”You can tell that the Event Espresso team is really passionate about their work, and that they care and spend a lot of time helping people work with their plugin and use it with their events – it’s something every WordPress service should aim for.” Ryan Imel, WPCandy
”Just bought an Event Espresso license for an upcoming conference website we are working on. The custom registration forms functionality rocks!” Eric Sopp, Inside Design
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, presenter, seminar planner, or event professional, there are simply countless 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 and registration process or enhance the experience of your event participants.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso works with with all WP plugins and WP themes that follow standard WP coding guidelines. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent end-user support, as so many of its end-users attest:
”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 great support that includes 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.
In addition, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely software you can rely on to run your events.
Event Espresso Price
Event Espresso is available in a number of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software features, however, you should consider downloading one of the premium plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This enables you to install Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This allows you to configure Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This license allows you to configure Event Espresso on five sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Pricing details of the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Presently, the software retails for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management
Please Note: The pricing above was current at the time this review was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Information
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the software’s documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to your particular situation, or to report problems and give feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event booking and ticketing management plugin, used by thousands of event promoters.
If you are a WordPress user and you currently run any event that requires scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), booking attendees, and/or booking tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Registration Plugin
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