Do you currently run or plan to run events that require managing bookings, such as seminars, training courses, charity fund raisers, marketing events, or even a large-scale event like a rave party, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Managing event registrations can be a complex process. You will probably need to manage scheduling, date availability, registration numbers, data collection and storage, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders and alerts, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to event registrants.
There are a number of benefits to setting up an online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower expenses, help you easily copy settings for previous events, give event managers more control, create a more enjoyable user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that this can be quite expensive.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-powered site, you can download and install a very inexpensive and professional web-based event booking solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Registration Plugin
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily create your event and begin accepting online bookings in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and process online event registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich software that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can employ a range of event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up selling tickets, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media sites like Facebook.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is fundamentally different than the older EE 3, as the platform is being redeveloped using a different structure to allow for future growth and expansion. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually move completely to Event Espresso 4, 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 site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website or blog into a feature-rich and professional event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to attendee limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by literally doing away with the need to process registrations manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for attendees to register on their own.
Allowing your participants to do the data entry frees you up from doing admin work and lets you direct more of your attention on organizing a better event.
More 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 users to experience.
Additional benefits include the following:
- Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin is a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own software or using a 3rd-party service. The cost is kept low through a model where Event Espresso users buy the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and buy add-ons when you need additional features.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new event sign-ups 24/7. In addition, Event Espresso social features and add-ons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event share your information with others who may also be interested in attending.
- Green Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event registration process can be kept wholly online, reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks related to administration.
- Own Your Information. You own all the data you acquire from your event participants.
Plugin Features
The Event Espresso software provides functionality to users through built-in features (these are included with the plugin) and additional features that you can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many features to WP users. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and simple to install and configure. Be up and running in minutes.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In Event Espresso 4, events can have multiple dates and times (called datetimes), and these can be managed from a single event.
- Customized Notification Email Message. Easily set up automatic booking and payment notification email messages to communicate with event participants.
- Tax Administration. Event Espresso 4 gives you several options to manage taxes for an event and report tax fees to registrants when purchasing tickets. Event managers can administer taxes globally or on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your WP theme and reuse venue details throughout other areas of your site.
- Spam Protection. Prevent the chance of spammers and bot software programs making fake registrations by using reCAPTCHA tools to authenticate human activity.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system enables you to validate tickets, speed up in-venue registrations, create various check-in “stations” and track all attendees.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of booking event attendees when they show up, or send in paper-based registration forms for manual inputting later.
- Administrative Pre-approval. Be selective about who can and can’t register for your events.
- Event RSS Feeds. Keep your site visitors up-to-date about your events, bring in more visitors and expand your content distribution with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Optimized For The Latest WordPress Version. The EE 4 user interface follows all WordPress guidelines to help you create visually attractive event pages that are responsive and mobile-friendly.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your organization’s profile to be used throughout Event Espresso and your front-end templates. The organization information include: business name, address, city, state, country, zip/postal code, primary contact email address, telephone, VAT/tax number, logo, Facebook URL, Twitter URL, LinkedIn URL, Pinterest profile URL, Google+ URL, Instagram URL.
- Exportable Information. You can export all of your data gathered from event attendees into Excel or CSV format for producing reports, planning new marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, etc..
- Venue Profiles. The venue manager in EE 4 lets details about a venue to be made available throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front end of your website to inform potential attendees of the location of your event. The venue record has many of the standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also lets you republish information like venue seating capacity, venue site URL, phone number, physical, maps, etc. You can also list all of your venues throughout specific locations of your WP theme and 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.
- Registrant Records. Manage each attendee’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their information organized.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential event clients who have not made payment for their booking with a standard but personalized invoice with just one click. Your invoices will reference pre-registered participants who have not paid their registration yet by name, display the amount owing, and include links to the event, a payment url and a link where they can download the invoice.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post types. You can also customize your templates to display event information in your own unique way.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows developers to have more control and options over your event page content and how your information displays to readers.
- Control Box Management And Organization. Event Espresso leverages the WP user interface, which gives you the ability to organize the user interface to match your workflow. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or removed from your workflow configuration.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & Value For Money: According to the philosophy stated on their site, Event Espresso’s goal 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 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 additional features, including:
- Live-filtering when searching for events in the Event Espresso admin.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing the same group of questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Addons
In addition to a very large array of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow you to further enhance the capabilities of managing your event.
Some of these addons 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 an event does not have a featured image available, a default image will be used.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Template Addon: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes multiple datetime events into a drop-down list.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add on: The Category Accordion template displays categories in a simple list. Clicking the category name displays all 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 even specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- Custom Template Add-on: The Custom Template addon lets you display your event lists in a number of visually exciting ways.
- Seating Chart Add-on: The seating chart addon is suitable 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 addon lets you promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues right from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart add on lets you manage the environment for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach single pricing to each seat.
- EE4 Event Ticketing Add-on: The Ticketing addon adds the capacity to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add on adds the ability to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing add on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode types are included for handling check-in scans at the venue door. Attendees 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 attendees and to validate tickets.
- EE4 Events Table Template Add-on: The Events Table Template add on gives event managers an easy-to-use system that allows you to modify 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 developers build custom templates using one of the included templates as a base template.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp add on lets you automatically register participants to a selected 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.
To learn more about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
Plugin Users – Testimonials
Below are just some of the many great testimonials that customers have written 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 have been using Event Espresso to run my festival and have been very happy with how it has worked out. They have provided tremendous support and their iPhone app is amazing and easy to use. I suggest using it for your event.” Alex Grant, Byron Spirit Festival
”Event Espresso is very nice and functional plugin. Set it up is not very easy for a beginner like me, but you have one of the best support team in your side. They answer all questions in a timely manor. I didn’t know anything about setting up the plugins, Thanks to Event Espresso Support team that now I can find my way around this plugin. Event Espresso helps our company to manage the workshops, keep track of our students, manage the emails, and much more. We upgrade from personal License to Business license in just two weeks of using Personal license. I strongly recommend the Business license.” Ted Karlsalr, Omnilargess
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, teacher, concert promoter, or event consultant, there are just countless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a registered owner, visit the forums for tips and practical suggestions to improve your event management and registration process and enhance the experience of your participants.
Product Support
Event Espresso is compatible with all WordPress plugins and WP themes that follow standard WP coding rules. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent end-user support, as so many of its customers 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
The software provides comprehensive support including access to support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, priority 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 an established team of experienced WordPress developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely software you can depend on to run your events.
Event Espresso Cost
Event Espresso is available in a range of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software options, however, you will want to consider downloading one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal License Edition – This allows you to install Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This option allows you to configure Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This enables you to install Event Espresso on 5 sites. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Current pricing for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Presently, the software sells for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Note: The above reflects the pricing when this review was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin developer when you visit the site.
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.
Search the software’s documentation pages for answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to your particular use-case, or to report bugs and leave feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event registration and ticketing management plugin, used by thousands of companies.
If you are a WordPress user and you plan to run an event that involves scheduling dates, times and venues (offline and online), enrolling attendees, or reserving seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Manager Software
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