Does your company currently run or plan to run events that require handling bookings, such as workshops, community classes, charity fund-raisers, corporate events, or even a big event like an arts & crafts, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Managing event registrations can be a complex process. You will probably have to co-ordinate scheduling, available dates and seating, participant numbers, data collection and storage, collecting payments and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and providing tickets to participants.
There are lots of advantages to setting up an automated web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily duplicate repeat events, give event managers more control, create a more enjoyable customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that this can be very expensive.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-powered site, you can easily set up a very inexpensive and professional web-based event registration system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticket Registration System For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily schedule an event and begin accepting bookings in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and take online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed plugin that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize event registration forms
You can employ a number of event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up selling tickets, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with an autoresponder system for ongoing notifications.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Important: Currently, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their software: EE 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is impressively different than the older EE 3, as the platform is being rebuilt using a different structure to accommodate future growth. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually phase out EE 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and features of using this plugin.
To learn more about the plugin go here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just some of the many benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Automated Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing web site into a fully-featured event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using a web-based 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 enabling event participants to complete the enrollment process on their own.
Letting your customers to do the data themselves frees you up from doing admin work and lets you concentrate more of your attention on organizing a more unique event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon learn, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management process that you want your attendees to experience.
Additional plugin benefits include:
- Reduced Costs: Event Espresso is an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd-party service. This is made possible by using a model where you start with the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and buy add ons only if you need extra features.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept online sign-ups 24 hrs a day. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing features and addons (see below) let people interested in attending your event invite other people they know who may be interested.
- Green & Paperless Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, the event booking process can remain entirely online, significantly reducing traditional paper waste from tasks associated with administration.
- Own Your Data. You control all the data obtained from your event participants.
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 provides many built-in to site owners. Here are just a few of these:
- Fast and easy to install and use. Be up and running in no time.
- Customized Event Registration Form. Event Espresso lets you gather specific data using a custom event registration form on your website to prepare a great experience for your clients.
- Custom Notification Emails. Configure automatic booking and payment notification email messages to communicate with your clients.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso integrates with payment gateways, enabling you to collect money before running your events.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your theme and reuse contact data throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Prices. Create events quickly and easily with pre-configured system-default ticket prices.
- In-App Documentation Systems. Event Espresso 4 provides 3 useful in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. Event Espresso 4 lets you understand who your clients are and how they’ve done business with you.
- No-Ticket Events. You can set up events without making it necessary for attendees to book tickets. Use Event Espresso for all kinds of events, not just when tickets are required.
- Private Contact Notes. Record observations about event participants on their profile. Private commenting lets you keep a record of when event participants contacted you, your internal notes, and how you have assisted them.
- Keyword Rich URLs. Keyword-rich event page URLs leverage your WordPress site’s Permalinks configuration settings. Search engine friendly permalinks with relevant keywords add to the context of your content and improves your search rankings, helping you drive a more targeted audience to your site.
- Your Organization Settings. Configure your profile to display throughout the software and your front-end templates. The organization fields include: company name, street address, city, state, country, zip/postal code, primary contact email address, telephone, tax number, your logo, Facebook profile URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn URL, Pinterest profile URL, Google+ URL, Instagram URL.
- Bulk Edit Events. EE 4 provides an advanced importing capability that allows you to easily upload bulk event data at once. You can export, edit and upload details about events, datetimes, ticketing details, pricing, registration questions, venue info, terms, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Multiple Event Participant. Event Espresso 4 allows a single person or people to enroll multiple participants simultaneously. You can control how many people are allowed to register in a single booking session by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso gives you access to a community of experienced event managers, software programmers, web designers, marketers and businesses who also use the plugin. You can engage with other Event Espresso users using their community chat room, support forums, job board, and social media pages on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Staff Management. Save time and stay organized by reusing staff profiles for multiple events or displaying their profile using a shortcode in your event description.
- Attendee Reporting. Quick-view event reports gives you information of your registrations and transactions, enabling you to analyze the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and amount of revenue has been collected.
Extra features include:
- Hooks, Actions & Filters. These allow you to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso software that are completely compatible with WordPress.
- Metabox Management & Organization. Event Espresso lets you leverage the WP user interface, which gives you the ability to reorganize the user interface to suit your workflow processes. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or deleted from the workflow configuration.
- Autonomy, Flexibility And 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 modular that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium version of Event Espresso also includes 40+ added features, including:
- Live-filtering when you search for events in the Event Espresso admin.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse a common set of questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Add ons
In addition to a comprehensive range of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow customers to further enhance the capabilities of managing an event.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add-on: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display your scheduled events by location. There are 4 maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Template Add-on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes events with many datetimes into a dropdown list.
- 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 display the event thumbnail image instead of the date.
- 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 addon lets you take advantage of the WP user system. With the WP User Integration addon you can give your users a special incentive by offering member prices and overriding event prices when members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered site users can have access to these special events. Members can also store personal information into their profile page allowing them fast registration for events by auto-filling in their personal information on the event booking form. Users can also view past events and pay for future events.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add on Editions: This addon lets you involve other users in your organization to help manage your events 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 allow them different permissions with different capabilities, so your staff can help you manage your events or the events that other people create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain sections of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain parts of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to create geographic regions for other people to manage events, use the Roles and Permissions Pro add-on.
- Event Ticketing & Bar Scanning Add on: The Ticketing add-on adds the capacity to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add on gives you the ability to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing add on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code 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 barcode scanner can be used for checking in or checking out attendees and to validate tickets.
- Events Table Template Add-on: The Events Table Template add on provides event managers with an easy-to-use system that lets you 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 design custom templates using one of the templates provided as a source template.
- EE4 Infusionsoft Integration Addon: 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 customer data, track registrations, and accept payments from your website.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add ons.
For full details about the newest Event Espreso features and add ons, visit the plugin website here:
Customers – Testimonials
Below are a few of the testimonials that satisfied plugin users have written about Event Espresso:
”EventEspresso saves us money, saves our secretary 16-24 hours and looks so professionally done that people ask us how we do it; which we happily tell them, “Event Espresso, and be sure to get the ticketing add-on.”” David, House of Prayer
”Probably the best event management plugin available.” Materia Inspiration Centre
“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
Useful Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, teacher, festival planner, or event consultant, there are just endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, go through the user forum for inspiration and practical ways to streamline your event management process and enhance the experience of your event attendees.
Event Espresso Support
Event Espresso works with with all WordPress plugins and WordPress themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great technical support, as so many of its end-users confirm:
“I’m really impressed with not only the application itself but the support. I have rarely seen such a responsive support staff than at EE. They rock…I highly recommend this plugin!” sock2me
The Event Espresso plugin provides comprehensive support including access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, premium 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.
Additionally, 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 depend on to run and manage your events.
Event Espresso Cost
Event Espresso is available in a range of editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you need to consider downloading one of the paid plugin editions below:
- Personal License Edition – This enables you to install Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This allows you to run Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This allows you to run Event Espresso on five domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons 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 specials being offered. Currently, the plugin retails for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Management & Registration System For WordPress
Note: The pricing above was current when this review was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin author when you visit the website.
Additional Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the software’s documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to a specific situation, or to notify developers about problems 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 preferred WP event registration and ticketing management software, used by thousands of businesses.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you plan to run events that require managing dates and venues (offline and online), registering participants, and/or reserving tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
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