Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that require managing registrations, such as workshops, training classes, charity fundraisers, marketing events, or even a big event such as a school concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Managing event sign-ups is a time-consuming process. You may be required to co-ordinate event schedules, availability, registration numbers, data processing and storage, collecting payments and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders and notifications, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to event participants.
There are lots of advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower expenses, help you easily copy settings for recurring events, give event managers more control, create a better user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event registration system can be quite expensive.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-powered site, you can download and install a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event booking system.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticket Registration Software For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin allows you to easily set up multiple events and start processing online registrations in just minutes.
(Set up multiple events and process online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed plugin that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize event registration forms
You can employ several event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media and email marketing solutions.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is significantly different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the plugin has been revamped using a different structure to allow for future growth and expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually phase out EE 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and features of using this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Automated Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current digital presence into a fully-featured event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to attendee limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Increased 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 chore of processing registrations and signups manually.
Essentially, you are making it easier for participants to enrol themselves.
Letting your customers to do all of the data entry frees up your time and lets you concentrate more of your energy on organizing a more unique event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will see shortly, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management and booking process that you want your customers to experience.
Additional benefits and advantages include the following:
- Lower Costs: Event Espresso provides you with a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own software or using a third party provider. The cost is kept to a minimum by using a model where users pay for the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then buy add-ons when you need extra functionality.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new event bookings 24/7. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social and marketing features and add ons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event invite other people they know who may be interested in attending.
- Green Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign-up process can remain wholly online, reducing traditional paper waste from tasks related to enrollment.
- Own Your Information. You control all the information you obtain from your event participants.
Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to its customers through standard features (these are included with the software) and additional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many great built-in to website owners. Here are just a few:
- Quick and easy to install and configure. Be up and running in minutes.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In EE 4, events can have multiple dates and times (called datetimes), which these can be managed from a single event.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Attendees can easily find your upcoming events and add these to their schedule using the calendar.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso seamlessly integrates with payment gateways, enabling you to collect payments before running events.
- Smart Single Page Checkout Process. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically duplicate the primary registrant’s details for any additional attendees.
- Default Prices. Create events quickly by pre-configuring default ticket prices.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system allows you to validate tickets, speed up door registrations, set up multiple check-in “stations” and track event participants.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. EE 4 lets you know who your clients are and how they’ve done business with you.
- Waiting Lists. Latecomers can subscribe to a waiting list if your event is full. You can also specify that wait-list attendees pay for their spots if you plan to add more 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 in your own time frame without displaying it live on your website. You can keep working on your event until you are ready to take it live, or schedule to publish your event pages at a later date and time.
- Multi-Language Plugin. Event Espresso has been translated into 15+ languages, and more translations are being added all the time.
- Import Event Information. Event Espresso 4 provides a CSV-based importing capability that enables you to import bulk event data all at one time. You can export, edit and import information about events, datetimes, ticketing information, prices, custom registration questions, venue info, terms, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Multiple Event Attendee. Event Espresso 4 allows a single person or a group to purchase multiple tickets and different ticket types simultaneously. Event managers specify how many people are able to enrol in one registration by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Event Espresso Community. Event Espresso provides users with access to a community of experienced event managers, developers, designers, marketers and businesses who also use the software. You can network with other Event Espresso users via their community chat room, support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Staff Management. Save time and keep your data organized by reusing staff profiles for multiple events or displaying their profile using a shortcode in any event description.
- Accurate Attendee Management. You have control of your attendees’ details; who has enrolled, which event they have registered for and how much they paid. With the attendee manager, you can get a quick overview of registered attendees and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export an event attendee list to an Excel spreadsheet for additional reports, send customized payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your participants on a person-by-person basis or all at once.
Extra features include:
- Hooks, Actions & Filters. These allow you to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso application that are compatible with WordPress.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registrations for regular site visitors whenever website maintenance is required. You can still work on your event pages during maintenance mode.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & 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 modular and highly efficient 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 additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes that includes attendee data in emails and newsletters.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing a common set of questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page in registration.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As well as an amazing array of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow customers to further expand the functionality of managing an event.
Some of these add ons 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 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 the events with multiple datetimes into a drop-down list.
- Events Category Accordion Template Addon: The Category Accordion template shows categories as a simple list. Clicking the category name shows all events associated with that category and closes any previously open categories.
- Social Media Buttons Add-on: The social media add-on displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media addon comes free with any of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- Custom Template Addon: The Custom Template addon lets you display your events in a variety of visually exciting ways.
- Seating Chart Add-on: The seating chart add-on is 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 allows you to offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues directly from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart add-on lets you control the experience for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to each seat.
- Event Ticketing And Bar Scanning Add on: The Ticketing add-on gives you the ability 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 managing check-in scans at the door. Registrants 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.
- Events Calendar Add on: This WordPress events calendar displays events and categories of events in an attractive graphical calendar.
- Infusionsoft Integration Add on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft 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 registrations, and accept payments from your Event Espresso powered website.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin, including new addons.
For full details about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
Testimonials
Below are some of the many great testimonials that plugin users have posted about Event Espresso:
”Broadcasting my support for Event Espresso will be a pleasure. I recently helped the Webmaster at a sister church configure your event manager for their site, so I can say with confidence and from experience, that Event Espresso is the best Event Manager plugin ever!” Philip Simpson, The Charlotte Church
”Your plugin rocks! Seriously, saved me hours on the phone setting up attendance manually. Kudos. :)” William, Petruzzo Photography
”I can’t even imagine what I would want the plugin to do that it doesn’t already do. I’m really happy with the features.” Jim Harmer, Improve Photography
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, teacher, workshop promoter, or event management professional, there are just countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed user, go through the support forum for tips and practical ways to improve your event management and registration workflow or enhance the experience of your event registrants.
Support
Event Espresso works with with most WP plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress coding rules. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great end-user support, as many of its satisfied users confirm:
”No complaints here. Satisfied customer. You can teach us all few things about customer service. Thanks!” Charles
Event Espresso provides incredible support with access to support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase 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.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts an established team of experienced web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can rely on to organize and manage your events.
Plugin Pricing
Event Espresso is available in a number of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software options, however, you will want to consider downloading one of the ”Pro” plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This option allows you to configure Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This license lets you run 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 edition lets you configure Event Espresso on 5 sites. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The cost to purchase the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the plugin retails for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Note: The pricing above was current at the time this review was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin author when you visit the site.
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.
Look up the plugin’s online documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to a specific use-case, or to report issues and give feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product site.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event registration and ticketing manager software, used and trusted by thousands of WP users.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you intend to run events that require scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), registering attendees, and/or selling tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticket Registration System
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