Do you currently run or plan to run events that need to accept registrations, such as workshops, group courses, non-profit fundraisers, social functions, or even a big event such as an arts & crafts, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Managing event sign-ups can be a complex process. You need to manage scheduling, available dates and seating allocations, attendee numbers, data collection, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders and alerts, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and providing tickets to event attendees.
There are many benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower costs, help you easily duplicate similar events, give event managers more control, improve client experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be costly.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-powered website or blog, you can install an inexpensive and highly professional online event registration solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Registration System
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily schedule your event and begin accepting bookings in just a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and receive online bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can use a range of event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up selling tickets, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media sites like Facebook.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Please Note: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is considerably different than the older EE 3, as the platform has been redeveloped using a different structure to enable future expansion. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually move completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and advantages of using 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 site:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website or blog into a fully-featured and automated event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by literally eliminating the need to process registrations manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for event attendees to enroll by themselves.
Allowing your attendees to do all of the data entry frees up your time and lets you concentrate more energy on delivering a more unique event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover shortly, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your attendees to experience.
Some additional benefits and advantages include the following:
- Significantly Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin is a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own software or using a third party service. This is made possible through a model where you start with the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then purchase add ons when you need new features.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept new signups any time of day or night. In addition, Event Espresso social add-ons (see below) let people interested in attending your event invite others who may be interested.
- Green And Paperless Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event registration process can be kept wholly online, reducing typical paper consumption from tasks related to enrollment.
- All Information Belongs To You. You control all the data obtained from your event participants.
Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to its customers through standard features (these are included with the software) and optional features that you can buy for an additional cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many unique built-in to WP users. Here are just some:
- Fast and easy to install and implement. 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), that these can be managed from a single event.
- Custom Notification Email Message. Configure automated registration and payment confirmation emails to communicate with your clients.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso integrates with payment gateways, enabling you to collect payments before running events.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration allows you to configure the display of Google Maps on your event listing and event details sections.
- Default Prices. Create events quickly with pre-configured system-default ticket pricing.
- Discount Codes. Provide promotional and discount codes to incentivize people to make a decision now, or make your offerings more appealing for others. Also useful for helping to sell out events close to deadlines.
- Manual Registration Option. you have the option of booking event participants at the door, or sending in paper registration forms for manual registration later.
- Event Manager Pre-approval. Be selective about who can register for your events.
- Private Notes On Contacts. Keep comments about event registrants on their profile. Private notes allows you to keep a record of when users contacted you, your internal notes, and how you’ve helped them.
- Draft Events. Draft events allow you to build an 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 to publish your event at a later date and time.
- Multi-Language Application. Event Espresso is currently available in over 15 languages, and more translations are being added all the time.
- Import Event Information. EE 4 provides a CSV-based importing feature that enables you to quickly upload bulk event data at once. You can export, edit and upload data for events, datetimes, ticketing details, pricing, custom registration questions, venues, terminology, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Venue Management. The venue manager in Event Espresso 4 lets information about a venue to appear throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front end of your website to inform attendees of the location of your event. The venue record displays many standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also displays information such as venue seating capacity, venue website, phone number, venue address, Google map, etc. You can also list venue profiles on different sections of your theme as well as on a venue archive page on your website where you can set up and reuse venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have listed for a particular venue.
- Attendee Records. You can manage your attendee’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their information organized.
- Staff Manager. Save time and stay organized by reusing team member profiles for multiple events or displaying profile information such as team member’s contact information, resume and photo using a shortcode in any event description.
- Accurate Event Attendee Manager. You control your participants’ date; who has registered, which event they have registered for and what amount they’ve 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 a list of event attendees to an Excel spreadsheet for additional reports, send customizable payment reminders and receipts and send messages to your registrants on a person-by-person basis or collectively.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows developers to have more control and options over your content and how the information displays to your prospects.
- Maintenance Mode. Pause registrations for normal site traffic whenever you need to make updates on your site. 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 goals, the company operates on a modular and highly effective model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium version of Event Espresso also comes with over 40 additional features, including:
- Live-filtering when you search for events inside the Event Espresso admin.
- Default surcharge (similar to adding a service tax to tickets).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Add ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow you to significantly expand the capabilities 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 all upcoming events by location. There are 4 maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Manager Addon: The Recurring Events manager addon enables you to put your events on autopilot by scheduling recurring 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 your recurring events.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add-on: The Category Accordion template displays event categories as a simple list. Clicking on a category name displays the events related to that category and closes previously open categories.
- Social Coupons Integration Add on: If your website uses Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can also specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- Custom Files Add on: The Custom Files addon allows you to bypass certain aspects of the Event Espresso plugin.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Addon Editions: This add-on lets you include staff in the event management process and give new users the ability to create events or regional managers permission to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WordPress users roles and give them different permissions with different capabilities, allowing staff to help you manage your events or events that others create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain parts of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain areas of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to allow users to control factors geographically for events and users, use the Roles and Permissions Pro addon.
- EE4 Event Ticketing And Bar Scanning Addon: The Ticketing add-on gives you the ability to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add-on adds the ability to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing add on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode types are included for managing 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 Calendar Add-on: This add-on uses the WordPress calendar to display events and event categories using a nice graphical calendar.
- Infusionsoft Integration Add on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft integration all-in-one sales and business marketing software addon, you can completely automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture registrant data, track bookings, and accept payments from your website.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin, including new add-ons.
To learn more about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
Customer Feedback
Here are some of the many testimonials that customers have written 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
”This really is a hell of a plugin. For me, it’s probably the final nail in the coffin for Joomla, as WP can now pretty much do EVERYTHING Joomla does, but better. Love the simplicity of this plugin!” Sam, Web Contempo
”You guys have done an AWESOME job with this system…promise me to keep up the excellent work you guys are doing, for as long as you can… Respect!” Robert Jarnroth, Jarnroth Digital Productions
Useful Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, presenter, show planner, or event management consultant, there are just countless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, search the user forum for useful ideas and practical ways to streamline your event management and registration workflow or improve the experience of your registrants.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with other WP plugins and WP themes that follow standard WordPress development rules. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great end-user support, as so many of its users attest:
”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
Event Espresso provides comprehensive support that includes access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, custom development 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 WordPress web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can count on to run your events.
Plugin Cost
Event Espresso is available in a number of editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin features, however, you should consider downloading one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal Edition – This enables you to set up Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This lets you set up Event Espresso on one domain only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Edition – This edition allows you to install Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Pricing for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. When we last checked, the plugin is selling for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing: Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticketing Registration Plugin For WordPress
Please 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 developer when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Plugin Information
Event Espresso regularly adds 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.
Search the plugin’s online documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to your specific use-case, or to notify developers about problems and leave feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product website.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event booking and ticketing management software, used by thousands of users.
If you own a WordPress site and you intend to run events that require scheduling dates, times and venues, registering participants, and/or selling tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Management
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