Do you currently run or plan to run events that require handling bookings or registrations, such as workshops, training classes, non-profit fund raisers, corporate conferences, or even a big event such as a music concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Managing event registrations is a time-consuming process. You will most likely have to manage scheduling, dates, registration numbers, data processing, collecting payments and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering 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 reduce expenses, help you easily duplicate previously-run events, give event managers more control, improve customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be quite costly.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-based digital presence, you can set up a very inexpensive and professional online event booking solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticket Registration System For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily schedule an event and start receiving registrations in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and take online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Customize event registration forms
You can use a number of event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up selling tickets, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with an autoresponder system for ongoing updates.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Please Note: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is impressively different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the platform has been rebuilt using a different structure to allow for future growth. 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 the benefits and features of using this plugin.
More info:
Benefits
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
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current website or blog into an automated and fully featured event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and 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 manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for attendees to complete the enrollment process on their own.
Letting your participants to do the data entry frees up your time and lets you concentrate more resources on delivering a better event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover in a moment, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management process that you want your customers to experience.
Some additional plugin benefits include the following:
- Reduced Costs: The Event Espresso plugin provides you with a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd party provider. The cost is kept to a minimum by using a model where you start with the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then purchase add-ons only when you need extra features.
- Higher Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new event registrations outside traditional business hours. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing add-ons (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with friends who may also be interested.
- Paperless Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign up process can be transacted entirely in digital form, reducing traditional paper waste from tasks associated with administration.
- Own Your Data. You control all the information you obtain from your event participants.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to its users through standard features (these come with the software) and optional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many features to website owners. Here are just a few of these:
- Fast and easy to install and configure. Ready to start using in minutes.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In Event Espresso 4, events can have many dates and times (datetimes), that these can be managed from one single event.
- Event Calendar. Registrants can easily find your events and add these to their schedule with a WordPress calendar.
- Tax Admin And Reporting. Event Espresso 4 provides a number of ways to handle taxes for your event and provide reports of tax fees to customers who purchase tickets. Event managers can administer taxes globally and on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
- Smart Single Page Checkout Process. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically copy the primary registrant’s details for any additional attendees.
- Spam Protection. Prevent the risk of spammers and robots creating fake registrations with reCAPTCHA option that provide human authentication.
- Mobile Registration & Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system allows you to validate tickets, speed up in-venue registrations, set up multiple check-in “stations” and track attendees.
- Event Check-In List. Generate an exportable list of registrants and check in everyone who attends.
- Admin Pre-approval. Be selective about who can attend your events.
- Private Contact Comments. Record observations about a contact on their profile. Private notes allows you to keep records of when event registrants contacted you, your internal observations, and how you have assisted your contacts.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events enable you to build an event over multiple work sessions without displaying it live on your site. You can work on your event until you are ready to take things live, or schedule your event to publish at a future time and date.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your organization’s profile to display throughout Event Espresso and your front-end templates. Organization information include: business name, street address, city, state, country, zip code, email, telephone, tax number, logo, Facebook profile URL, Twitter URL, LinkedIn URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ profile URL, Instagram URL.
- Default Tickets. If you find yourself creating identical tickets for many of your events, you can set one of those tickets as your default ticket for the next event simply by ticking a checkbox.
- Event Venue Management. The venue management feature in Event Espresso 4 lets details about venues to be published throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front-end of your website to inform attendees of the location of your event. The venue profile has many of the standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also lets you reuse venue details such as venue seating capacity, venue website, telephone number, physical and/or virtual location, directions map, etc. You can also list all of your event venues on different areas in your theme as well as on a venue listing page on your website where you can set up and publish venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have listed for a given venue.
- Attendee Records. Manage your registrant’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their data organized.
- Social Sharing. Event registrants and your website visitors can help publicize your events using social media share buttons.
- Accurate Participant Management. You have control of your attendees’ date; who has registered, which event they have registered for and what amount they’ve 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 a list of attendees to an Excel spreadsheet for additional reports, send custom payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your attendees on a person-by-person basis or as a group.
Extra features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming. Event Espresso is simple enough for general WP users, and also extremely robust and customizable for enterprise-level users and developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, EE 4 makes possible more complex enhancements and customizations to the plugin.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. EE 4 allows you to output a log file with debugging data which can be useful for developers who are diagnosing application problems.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And Value: According to the philosophy stated on their web site, Event Espresso’s aim is to “empower business and organization leaders with the event registration, ticketing and management tools that maximize the success of events.” To achieve their goals, the company operates on a modular and highly effective model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also includes over 40 added features, including:
- Email shortcodes for including participant data in confirmation emails and newsletters.
- Default surcharge (similar to adding a service fee to each ticket).
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow customers to significantly expand the capabilities of the event management system.
Some of these addons include:
- EE4 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 Manager Add-on: The Recurring Events management addon enables you to put your events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years in advance. You can add as many events in the future as you need. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close bookings for all of these recurring events.
- Events Calendar Table Template Add on: The Calendar Table template is a list template with a bold date and customizable “register now” button. The template can be customized to show an event thumbnail instead of a date.
- EE4 Events Social Sharing Add on: This add-on adds 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 registration.
- Custom Template Add-on: The Custom Template add on can display your events in a variety of visually exciting ways.
- Seating Chart Addon: The seating chart add-on is suitable for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart add on allows you to promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart add on lets you control the environment for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach single pricing to each seat.
- Multiple Event Registration Add-on: The Multiple Event registration add-on gives potential attendees the ability to book multiple events at once. In each event listing attendees will be given the option to either register for a single event or add multiple events to their 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 Calendar Addon: This add on uses the WordPress calendar to display events and event categories using an attractive graphical calendar.
- Infusionsoft Integration Add on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account 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 customer 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 plugin, including new add ons.
To learn more about the latest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
Customer Feedback
Here are a few of the testimonials that customers have posted 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
”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
”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
Plugin Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, teacher, festival planner, or event management consultant, there are just unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered owner, search the forums for inspiration and practical suggestions to improve your event management and registration process and enhance the experience of your event participants.
Support
Event Espresso works with with other WordPress plugins and WP themes that follow WP coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent technical support, as so many of its satisfied plugin end-users confirm:
”These guys are right on any problem or issue or even general questions. You can’t really put a value high enough on the kind of support these guys offer.” Mark Wigston, Muskoka Graphics
Event Espresso provides robust support including access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, email support and even a monthly VIP member pass giving 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 proven track record of support, so this is definitely software you can rely on to run your events.
Software Price
Event Espresso is available in a number of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin options, however, you need to consider using one of the premium plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This lets you set up Event Espresso on 1 site only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This enables you to install Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This lets you set up Event Espresso on five sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Price details for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Presently, the software is selling for the amounts 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 price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the site.
Additional Info
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the plugin’s documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to your specific situation, or to report errors and share feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product web site.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event registration and ticketing management plugin, used by thousands.
If you own a WordPress-powered site and you currently run events that involve scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), booking participants, and/or selling tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Management Software
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