Do you currently run or plan to run events that require handling registrations, such as workshops, group classes, charity fund raisers, corporate events, or even a big event like a community fair, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups is a complex process. You will most likely be required to co-ordinate scheduling, available dates and spaces, participant numbers, data processing and storage, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to event attendees.
There are many advantages to setting up an online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce costs, help you easily duplicate previously-run events, give you more control, create a better user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be very costly.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-powered web site, you can set up a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event registration system.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Management Software
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily set up multiple events and start processing online registrations in just a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and accept online event registrations)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed application that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can use a number of event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up selling tickets, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event participants, or integrating your event registration forms with social media and autoresponders.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is completely different than the older EE 3, as the plugin has been rebuilt 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 company plans to eventually retire Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
To learn more about the plugin go here:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just some of the many benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Automated Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing web site into an automated and feature-rich event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by virtually eliminating the need to process registrations and sign-ups manually.
Basically, you are enabling event attendees to complete the registration process by themselves.
Letting your participants to do the data entry frees up your time and lets you focus more attention on delivering a more enjoyable event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon discover, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management and registration process that you want your users to experience.
Additional benefits and advantages include:
- Reduced Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own solution or using a 3rd party service provider. The cost is kept low through a model where you pay for the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and buy add-ons when you need added features.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new event bookings 24 hours a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social features (see below) let people interested in attending your event invite friends who may be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, your event booking process remains wholly online, eliminating typical paper waste from tasks associated with enrollment.
- Own Your Information. You own all the data acquired from your event participants.
Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to users via standard features (these come with the plugin) and optional features that you can buy for an additional cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many great built-in to web site owners. Here are just some:
- Fast and easy to install and set up. Be up and running in minutes.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In EE 4, events can have many dates and times (datetimes), and these can be managed from one single event.
- Custom Notification Email Message. Configure automatic registration and payment notification emails to communicate with event participants.
- Ticket Selector. Present a number of ticket options to registrants and let them choose the ticket(s) that best suits their needs.
- Intelligent Single Page Checkout Process. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is smart, fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically duplicate the primary registrant’s details for any added attendees.
- Default Price Types. Price types let event managers create new prices that adjust the base ticket price for the system-default ticket.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system lets you validate tickets, speed up door registrations, create various check-in “stations” and track attendees.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of attendees and confirm those who attend.
- Admin Pre-approval. Be selective about who can and can’t participate in your events.
- Private Comments On Contacts. Record observations about users on their profile and how you have helped them. Private notes lets you keep a record of when users contacted you, your internal notes, and how you have helped them.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events allow you to build your event over time without displaying it live on your website. You can work on your events until you are ready to go live, or schedule your event to publish at a future date and time.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your organization’s profile to display throughout the software and your WordPress themes. Your organization data include: company name, street address, city, state, country, zip code, primary contact email address, phone, VAT/tax number, logo, Facebook profile URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn URL, Pinterest profile URL, Google+ profile URL, Instagram profile URL.
- Bulk Edit Event Information. Event Espresso 4 provides an advanced importing capability that allows you to easily upload bulk event data all at one time. You can export, edit and import information about events, datetimes, ticketing information, pricing, registration questions, venue info, terminology, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Register Multiple Participants. EE 4 allows an individual or a group to buy multiple tickets and different ticket types at the same time. You can control how many attendees are allowed to enroll in a single registration session by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Attendee Records. Manage your registrant’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their records organized and easily accessible.
- Social Sharing. Event participants and site visitors can spread the word about your events using social media share buttons.
- Categorize Events. If you have multiple types of events such as free and paid, conference speakers and breakout sessions, different kinds of programs and program modules, etc. you can categorize these to make it easier for your registrants to find what they’re looking for. You can list all events in a category on a custom event category page, make the events searchable by category, and colour-code your events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make these easier to find, in addition to suggesting other events in the categories that appeal to your visitors.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows web-based software developers to have more control and options over the content of your event page and how your information displays to visitors.
- Maintenance Mode. Pause registrations for normal website visitors whenever site maintenance is required. You can continue to work on the back-end of your site 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 company operates on a 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 over 40 added features, including:
- Duplicating events – streamlines the work of re-entering event information when adding new events.
- Default surcharge (the same as adding a service tax to all tickets).
- Default payment status.
Add ons
In addition to a comprehensive number of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow you to further expand the functionality of managing your event.
Some of these add-ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add-on: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display your upcoming events by location. There are 4 maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Management Add on: The Recurring Events management add-on enables you to put your events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months … even years in advance. You can schedule as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in advance as you need. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close bookings for all recurring events.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add on: The Category Accordion template shows categories as a simple list. Clicking the category name displays all events associated with that category and closes any previously open categories.
- Social Coupons Integration Add-on: If your site 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.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration add-on lets you take full advantage of the WP user system. With the WP User Integration addon you can give your users a special incentive by offering member pricing and overriding event pricing when members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered site users can have access to your special events. Members can also input personal details into their profile page allowing them fast registration for events by auto-filling in the personal information on the event registration form. Users can also look up event history and pay for events.
- 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 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 directly from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart addon lets you control the experience for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to each seat.
- Multiple Event Registration Add-on: The Multiple Event registration addon gives potential customers 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 addon, attendees can register for several events at once and even add additional attendees to any of the same events in the same checkout process.
- Events Table View Template Addon: The Events Table Template add on gives event managers an easy-to-use system that lets you modify the look and feel of your event lists. It comes with a simple table template with category filters, table search, table paging and more. It also enables developers to build custom templates using one of the templates included as a source template.
- EE4 Infusionsoft Integration Addon: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft integration all-in-one sales and marketing software add-on, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture customer data, track enrollments, and accept payments from your web site.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software, including new addons.
For full details about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
Customer Feedback
Here are a few of the many testimonials that satisfied plugin users have written about Event Espresso:
”My hope with this whole integration is to be able to show other school districts an affordable and easy solution to these registrations. I cannot believe how much money they are charged for less by other companies. This has the potential to save schools tens of thousands, which is huge right now.” Kelly, College Station Independent School District
”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
“Love the plugin, we only use it once a year for a race we have in February. This saved us tons of time in data entry. In addition, we had more runners register than any other year. We attribute that to the ease of registering online. Thanks for your work.” Ed, Friends of Oscar Scherer Park
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, presenter, conference planner, or event professional, there are just unlimited possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, go through the forums for tips and practical suggestions to streamline your event management and registration process and improve the experience of your attendees.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso works with with all WP plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress development guidelines. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive user support, as many of its satisfied plugin customers attest:
”No complaints here. Satisfied customer. You can teach us all few things about customer service. Thanks!” Charles
Event Espresso provides exceptional support with access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base 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 an established team of experienced web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can rely on to run and manage your events.
Plugin Price
Event Espresso is available in different plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software functionality, however, you should consider purchasing one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This option enables you to run Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This allows you to run Event Espresso on 1 site only. It includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This license option enables you to configure Event Espresso on 5 domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The cost of purchasing the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the software is selling for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing: Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticket Registration System For WordPress
Note: The pricing above was current at the time this review was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin seller when you visit the site.
Additional Information
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the software’s online documentation tools for answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to a specific situation, or to notify developers about bugs and share feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event registration and ticketing management plugin, used and trusted by thousands.
If you are a WordPress user and you intend to run events that require scheduling dates, times and venues (offline and online), enrolling attendees, and selling tickets, then you will probably not find a better WP plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Manager Software
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