Do you currently run or plan to run events that require handling registrations, such as seminars, community classes, non-profit fund-raisers, corporate conferences, or even a big event such as a music show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Managing event sign-ups can be a complex and time-consuming process. You will most likely need to co-ordinate scheduling, availability, registration numbers, data processing and storage, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders and notifications, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to participants.
There are a number of advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce costs, help you easily copy settings for repeat events, give event managers more control, create a better client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event registration system can be expensive.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-based website or blog, you can set up an inexpensive and professional web-based event registration solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Manager Plugin
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily create multiple events and begin receiving online bookings in just a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and process online event bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed plugin that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can employ a range of event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your participants, or integrating your event registration forms with social media sites like Facebook.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is impressively different than the older Event Espresso 3, as it is being rebuilt using a different structure to enable future growth. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually retire Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and advantages of using this plugin.
More info:
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:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current online presence into a fully-featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to attendee limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by literally eliminating the need to process registrations manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for attendees to register on their own.
Letting your attendees to do the data entry frees up your time and lets you concentrate more of your energy on planning a more unique event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover shortly, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management and booking process that you want your customers to experience.
Some additional benefits and advantages include the following:
- Significantly Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own system or using a 3rd party service. The cost is kept low through a model where users start with the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and purchase add-ons only when you need added functionality.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept online bookings outside traditional business hours. 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 also be interested in attending.
- Green And Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, the event booking process is transacted wholly online, eliminating traditional paper consumption from tasks related to enrollment.
- Own Your Information. You own all the information acquired from event participants.
Features
The Event Espresso software provides functionality to users through built-in features (these are included with the plugin) and optional features that you can buy for an additional cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many built-in to web site owners. Here are just some of these:
- Fast and easy to install and configure. Be up and running in very little time.
- Customized Event Registration Forms. With Event Espresso you can gather unique data using a custom event registration form on your web pages to plan a unique experience for your event participants.
- Custom Confirmation Emails. Easily configure custom automated registration and payment notification emails to communicate with your registrants.
- Ticket Selector. Present multiple ticket options to prospects and let them purchase the ticket(s) that best fits their needs.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration allows you to customize the settings of Google Maps on your event listing and event details pages.
- Default Prices. Set up events fast with pre-configured default prices.
- Promotional Codes. Offer promotional and multiple discount codes to incentivize visitors to make a decision now, or simply make your offers more affordable for others. Also useful if you want to increase sales of events close to timelines.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of booking event participants at the door, or send in paper-based forms for manual submission later.
- Waiting Lists. Prospective attendees can join a waiting list if your event has reached maximum capacity. Additionally, you can specify that wait-listed attendees pre-pay if you plan to expand capacity for the event.
- XML RSS Event Feeds. Automatically update customers, drive quality traffic and widen your content distribution with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events let you build an event page at your own leisure without displaying it live on your website. You can work on your events until you are ready to go live, or schedule your event pages to publish at a later date and time.
- Your Organization Settings. Configure your profile to display throughout the software and your WordPress themes. Your organization information include: business name, street address, city, state, country, zip code, email, phone number, VAT/tax number, your logo, Facebook URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ URL, Instagram URL.
- Default Tickets. If you create identical tickets for your events, you can set one of those tickets as your default ticket for any new events simply by checking a box.
- Register Multiple Attendees. EE 4 allows one person or people to register multiple attendees at the same time. You specify how many people are able to enrol in a single registration by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Automatic Software Installation Upgrading. Event Espresso provides simple one-click software installation upgrades to make sure that you have the latest features and to keep your installation working with the latest version of WordPress.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential event customers who have not fully paid for their admission with a standard but personalized invoice with just one click. Your invoices will address registered customers who have not paid their registration yet by name, give them the amount owing, and include a link to the event, a payment link and a link where they can download the invoice.
- Attendee Reports. Quick-view event reports provides you with data of all of your registrations and transactions, allowing you to track the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and how much money you have collected.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows you to have more control and options over the content of your events and how your information displays to your prospective event participants.
- Control Box Management & Reorganization. Event Espresso leverages the WP user interface, which brings the ability to organize the user interface to suit your workflow. Each control box can be collapsed, re-arranged or completely deleted from the workflow configuration.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & Value: According to the philosophy stated on their website, Event Espresso’s objective 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 modular that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also includes over 40 added features, including:
- Live-filtering when you search for events in the Event Espresso admin.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing a series of questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As well as an incredible array of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow users to significantly expand the capabilities of events.
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. There are 4 maps 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 Date Range Template Add-on: The Date Range custom event list template enables your users to search for events that occur within a certain date range.
- Social Media Buttons Add-on: The social media addon displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media addon is included free with all of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration add-on allows you to take full 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 pricing when members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered users of the website can have access to your special events. Members can also input personal data into their profile page allowing them fast registration for events by auto-filling in their personal information on the event registration form. Your users can also view event history and pay for future events.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Addon Editions: This add-on lets you include other users in the event management process and give new users permission 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 capabilities, allowing staff 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 areas of your WP dashboard and/or certain sections 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 add-on.
- EE4 Event Ticketing Add on: The Ticketing add on adds the capacity to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add on adds the capacity 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 the door. 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 registrants and to validate tickets.
- EE4 Events Calendar Add-on: This WordPress events calendar displays events and categories of events using an attractive graphical calendar.
- Infusionsoft Integration Addon: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and business marketing software 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 Event Espresso powered website.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software, including new add ons.
To learn more about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
User Feedback
Below are some of the many testimonials that satisfied users have written about Event Espresso:
”Thanks to you and the rest of the team for Event Espresso – Every time I get a signup for an event, I think about how much time EE saves me – and signups happen while I’m out on the water teaching kayaking, not answering the phone. :-)” Tue Brems Olesen, OnAdventure
”When you can get a company to expend more money switching systems just to use your plugin…you’ve really accomplished something.” David, House of Prayer
”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
Plugin Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, trainer, concert promoter, or event management professional, there are simply unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a registered owner, go through the user forum for inspiration and practical suggestions to improve your event management and registration process and improve the experience of your event registrants.
Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with most WP plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress coding rules. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent support, as so many of its plugin users confirm:
”Thank you Seth for being so responsive and going above and beyond the call of duty with your app! I highly recommend Event Espresso for its functionality and for the stellar support. Seth has a deep knowledge and understanding of WordPress and has built a tool that is seamless to use for both organizer and attendee alike! After looking at a bunch of alternatives, Event Espresso far surpasses the other apps that are available.” Wendy Troupe, ICS North Pole Express
Event Espresso provides comprehensive support that includes access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, custom development 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 web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can rely on to organize and manage your events.
Plugin Pricing
Event Espresso is available in various editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you need to consider downloading one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This lets you install Event Espresso on one domain only. It includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This license enables you to configure Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Edition – This option lets you install Event Espresso on 5 sites. It includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Pricing for 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 pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
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 author when you visit the website.
Additional Info
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.
Use the plugin’s documentation pages for answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to your particular situation, or to report bugs and share feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event registration and ticketing management software, used by thousands of users.
If you own a WordPress-powered website and you plan to run any event that requires scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), enrolling participants, and selling seating, then you will probably not find a better software for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – Event Manager & Registration Software For WordPress
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