Does your business currently run or plan to run events that need handling registrations, such as seminars, training courses, not-for-profit fund-raisers, social events, or even a big event such as a rave party, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Managing event registrations is a complicated and time-consuming process. You will most likely have to co-ordinate scheduling, date availability, registration numbers, data collection and admin, collecting payments and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders and alerts, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and providing tickets to event registrants.
There are many benefits to setting up an automated online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower expenses, help you easily copy settings for previously-run events, give event managers more control, improve customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event registration system can be costly.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-based web site, you can download and install a very inexpensive and highly professional online event registration solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress enables you to easily set up an event and begin processing online bookings literally in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and process online event registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can employ a number of event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up ticket-selling, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your attendees, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing follow-ups.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Please Note: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their software: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is fundamentally different than the older EE 3, as the platform is being redeveloped using a different structure to allow for future expansion. The Event Espresso 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 read more about the benefits and advantages of using this plugin.
Go here to learn more about the plugin:
Benefits
Here are just some of the many 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 into an automated and feature-rich event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple price levels 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 improve your business productivity by literally doing away with the chore of processing registrations manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for event participants to register by themselves.
Letting your customers to do all of the data entry frees you up from doing admin work and lets you focus more of your time on planning a more enjoyable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will see shortly, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and booking process that you want your participants to experience.
Additional plugin benefits include:
- Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd-party service. This is made possible through a model where you pay for the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then purchase add ons only when you need additional features.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online event signups outside traditional business hours. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social and marketing features and add ons (see below) let people interested in attending your event invite their friends who may be interested.
- Green Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, the event signup process can be transacted wholly online, reducing typical paper waste from tasks associated with administration.
- All Information Belongs To You. You own all the data you collect from your event attendees.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to users via standard features (these come with the plugin) and optional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many great built-in to website owners. Here are just some:
- Fast and easy to install and set up. Ready to use in minutes.
- Customized Event Registration Forms. With Event Espresso you can gather specific information using custom event registration forms on your site to plan a great experience for your users.
- Customized Confirmation Emails. Easily set up automated registration and payment confirmation email messages to communicate with your attendees.
- Ticket Selector. Present a number of ticket options to registrants and let them choose the ticket(s) that will best fit their needs.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration enables you to configure the look and control settings of Google Maps on the event listing and event details sections.
- Spam Protection. Reduce the likelihood of spammers and robots creating false registrations on your web site with reCAPTCHA settings to provide human validation.
- Discount And Promotional Codes. Set up promotional and discount codes to encourage visitors to make a decision immediately, or make your events more appealing for others. This is also practical for helping to increase sales of events close to deadlines.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of attendees and check-in those who have attended.
- Waiting Lists. Interested persons can subscribe to a waiting list if your event is full. Additionally, you can make it a requirement wait-list registrants pay for their spots if you plan to add more capacity for your event.
- XML RSS Feeds. Keep your customers up-to-date about your events, drive quality traffic and expand your content distribution with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Works With The Most Up-To-Date WP Version. The Event Espresso 4 user interface follows the WordPress guidelines to help you create visually enhanced event pages that are easier to use and mobile-friendly.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your profile to be deployed throughout the software and your front-end templates. Your organization data include: organization name, address, city, state, country, zip code, primary contact email address, phone, tax number, company logo, Facebook profile URL, Twitter URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ URL, Instagram URL.
- Exportable Data. You can export all of your information collected from event attendees into Excel or CSV format for compiling advanced reports, devising marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, and so on.
- Register Multiple Participants. EE 4 allows one person or an organization to pay for multiple tickets and different types of tickets simultaneously. Event managers control how many attendees can enroll in one registration by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Event Espresso Community. Event Espresso gives you access to an expert community of experienced event managers and plugin users. You can interact with other Event Espresso users through their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential event clients who have not made payment for their admission with a standard but personalized PDF invoice with one click. Your invoices will reference pre-registered participants who have not paid their registration in full by name, give them the balance they owe, and include links to the event, a payment link and a link where they can download a PDF invoice.
- Attendee Reports. Event reports provides you with data of the registrations and transactions, enabling you to analyze the performance of your events with the aggregate number of people who have registered and how much money you have collected.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows developers to have more control and options over the content of your event page and how your information displays to prospects.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 allows you to output a log file with debugging data which can be useful for developers when troubleshooting.
- Autonomy, Flexibility 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 company operates on a modular and highly efficient model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium version of Event Espresso also includes 40+ additional features, including:
- Live-filtering when searching for events in the Event Espresso admin.
- Default surcharge (the same as applying a service tax to tickets).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Addons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow users to significantly enhance the capabilities of events.
Some of these add-ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Addon: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display scheduled events by location. 4 maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Management Add on: The Recurring Events manager add on allows you to put your events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months in advance. You can schedule as many future events as you need. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close bookings for all of these recurring events.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add on: The Category Accordion template displays event categories in a simple list. Clicking the category name shows the events related to that category and closes previously open categories.
- Social Coupons Integration Addon: If your website is featured on Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can also specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- Custom Template Addon: The Custom Template addon can display your events in a variety of visually exciting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add on Versions: This addon lets you include other users in your organization to help manage your events 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 give them different permissions with different capabilities, so your staff can help you manage your events or the 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 sections 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.
- 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 capacity 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 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 registrants and to validate tickets.
- 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 edit the design 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 design custom templates using one of the templates provided as a base template.
- MailChimp Integration Add-on: The MailChimp add on lets you auto-register participants to a particular mailing list or group within MailChimp.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software, including new addons.
For more details about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
Testimonials
Here are just some of the many testimonials that users have posted about Event Espresso:
”Tri-South, Inc is using Event Espresso to manage the course catalog, event ticketing, and class registration. [As their developer] I have customized a few items to make the site and plugin a seamless integration. The client is very pleased!” Jenifer Design
”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
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, teacher, show promoter, or event consultant, there are just countless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered owner, visit the forums for new ideas and practical ways to improve your event management process and improve the experience of your registrants.
Event Espresso Support
Event Espresso is compatible with all WP plugins and WordPress themes that follow standard WP coding guidelines. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive technical support, as so many of its satisfied plugin users confirm:
”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
The software provides incredible support that includes access to support forums, in-depth 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 WordPress developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely software you can count on to run your events.
Event Espresso Cost
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software functionality, however, you may want to consider using one of the premium plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This license allows you to set up Event Espresso on 1 site only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This license option enables you to run Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This license option lets you configure Event Espresso on 5 domains. 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 depends 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 Registration & Ticketing Management
Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this article was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Information
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.
Use the software’s documentation pages for answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to a specific situation, or to notify developers about bugs and leave feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product site.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the leading WP event booking and ticketing management software, used by thousands of companies.
If you own a WordPress-powered web site and you plan to run any event that involves scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), registering participants, and/or selling seating, then you will probably not find a better plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticket Registration Plugin For WordPress
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