Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that need managing bookings or registrations, such as workshops, training classes, non-profit fundraisers, marketing functions, or even a big event like an art exhibition, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups is a complicated and time-consuming process. You will most likely need to manage scheduling, available dates and spaces, participant numbers, data collection, collecting payments and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders and notifications, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to participants.
There are lots of benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily copy settings for previously-run events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable user experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that this can be very expensive.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-powered website or blog, you can easily set up an inexpensive and professional online event booking system.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticketing Registration Software For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin lets you easily set up multiple events and begin processing online registrations in just minutes.
(Set up multiple events and take online bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize registration forms
You can use a number 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 and email marketing software.
View detailed information about event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their software: EE 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is fundamentally different than the older EE 3, as it is being redeveloped using a different structure to allow for future growth. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually move completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
Learn more about the plugin here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just some of the many benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current digital presence into an automated and feature-rich event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using a web-based 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 bookings manually.
Essentially, you are making it easier for event attendees to enroll themselves.
Letting your attendees to do all of the data entry frees up your time and lets you concentrate more of your energy on creating a more unique event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon learn, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management and registration process that you want your clients to experience.
Additional plugin benefits include:
- Significantly Lower Costs: Event Espresso is a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third-party service provider. The cost is kept low by using a model where users pay for the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and buy add-ons only if you need additional features.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new event signups 24/7. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social features and addons (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with their friends who may also be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign-up process can remain wholly in digital form, eliminating typical paper waste from tasks associated with admin and record-storage.
- All Information Belongs To You. You own all the information you acquire from your event participants.
Event Espresso Features
The Event Espresso software provides functionality to its users through built-in features (these are included with the software) and additional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many unique features to site owners. Here are just a few:
- Quick and easy to install and use. Be up and running in very little time.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso lets you set up multiple ticket types and set unique pricing options, maximum number of tickets, and more.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Customers can easily find your upcoming events and add these to their schedule using a calendar.
- Ticket Selector. Present a number of ticket options to prospects and let them choose the ticket(s) that best fits their needs.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration allows you to customize the display settings of Google Maps on the event listing and event details sections.
- Spam Protection. Eliminate the risk of spamming and bots creating false registrations on your site by using reCAPTCHA settings to validate human activity.
- Mobile Registration And Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system lets you validate tickets, speed up door registrations, create multiple check-in “stations” and track participants.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. EE 4 provides you with the tools to gain a better understanding of who your clients are and how you have done business with them. Your Contact Profile section stores updated records like the name, biography, contact details, event registration information, private comments, etc. about each attendee.
- Event Manager Pre-approval. Be selective about who can and can’t register for your events.
- Public Commenting. Add social a new level of engagement to your event page by allowing potential customers to ask questions about your event and past customers to post feedback that can help others consider whether or not to enroll. Moderation settings for comments are configured via the WordPress built-in commenting settings.
- Keyword Rich Page URLs. Keyword-rich Web links take advantage of your WordPress Permalinks configuration settings. SEO-friendly urls with topic-relevant keywords enhance the context of your events and is favored by search engines, helping you drive more potential customers to your events.
- 15+ Languages. Event Espresso is is available in over 15 languages, with more translations coming soon.
- Exportable Information. You can export all the data collected from event attendees into Excel or CSV format for producing reports, implementing marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, etc..
- Event Venue Profiles. The venue manager in EE 4 allows information about a venue to display throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front end of your website to inform attendees of the location of your event. The venue record has many standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also displays details like venue seating capacity, venue web address, venue phone number, physical, maps, etc. You can also display venue profiles in various locations in your theme as well as on a venue listing page on your website where you can set up and reuse venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a particular venue.
- Event Espresso Community. Event Espresso lets you interact with a community of experienced event managers, developers, designers, marketers and business owners who also use the software. You can network with other members of the Event Espresso community through their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media pages on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential attendees who have not paid yet for their admission with a standard but personalized invoice with just one click. Your invoices will reference registered customers who have not paid their registration in full by name, display the balance they owe, and include a link to the event, a payment link and a link to download a PDF invoice.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post type features such as custom fields, post meta data, taxonomies, etc. You can even customize the templates to display event information in your own unique way.
Additional features include:
- Hooks, Actions & Filters. These allow web developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso application that are compatible with WordPress.
- Control Box Management & Reorganization. Event Espresso lets you leverage the WordPress user interface, which gives you the ability to reorganize the user interface to match your workflow. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or removed from your workflow configuration.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value: 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 that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also provides you with over 40 added features, including:
- Duplicating events – simplifies the work of re-entering event data when creating new events.
- Default surcharge (similar to adding a service fee to tickets).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
In addition to an amazing array of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow end-users to significantly expand the capabilities of the event management system.
Some of these add-ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display all scheduled events by location. There are 4 maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Manager Add-on: The Recurring Events management add-on lets you put events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years in advance. You can add as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in the future as you want. Event Espresso will automatically open and close bookings for all recurring events.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add on: The Category Accordion template shows event categories as a simple list. Clicking the category name displays all events related to that category and closes previously open categories.
- Events Social Sharing Add-on: This add on adds social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that allows your registrants to post a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after registration.
- Custom Files Addon: The Custom Files add on allows you to override certain aspects of the Event Espresso plugin.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Addon Editions: This add-on lets you involve other users in your organization to help manage your events and give new users permission to create events or regional managers permission to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WP users roles and give them different permissions with different privileges, allowing others to help you manage your events or the events that others create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain parts of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain sections 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.
- Multi-Event Registration Addon: The Multi-Event registration add-on gives potential customers the ability to register for multiple events at once. In each event listing registrants will be given the option to either register for a single event or add multiple events to their shopping cart. With the Multiple Event Registration add on, attendees can register for several events at once and even add additional attendees to any of the same events in the same checkout process.
- EE4 Events Table View Template Addon: The Events Table Template add-on gives event managers a simple and easy-to-use system that allows you to change 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 web developers build their own custom templates using one of the included templates as a source template.
- Infusionsoft Integration Add-on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and marketing software add-on, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture event attendee data, track bookings, and accept payments from your Event Espresso powered website.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin, including new addons.
For more information about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
Customer Feedback
Below are some of the many great testimonials that satisfied customers have posted about Event Espresso:
”I want to commend you on a fabulous product which is just the right price for a small non-profit. People are happy with the registration process, as are we! …Thank you SO much for a great product.” Sandra Forero Bush, World Trade Center Tacoma
”I searched long and hard to find something that would serve my needs. This is, by far, the most complete and comprehensive solution I have found.” Bill Hepper, We Teach Live
”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 motivational speaker, presenter, show promoter, or event professional, there are simply countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, search the user forum for inspiration and practical ways to streamline your event management workflow and improve the experience of your attendees.
Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with all WordPress plugins and WordPress themes that follow WP coding standards. If you find that you need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive technical support, as so many of its clients confirm:
”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 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 a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can depend on to organize and manage your events.
Event Espresso Price
Event Espresso is available in a number of editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you will want to consider downloading one of the premium plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This option allows you to configure Event Espresso on one site only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This enables you to set up Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This enables you to run Event Espresso on 5 sites. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Price details for the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. When we last checked, the plugin retails for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Manager And Registration Plugin 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 author when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – 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.
Look up the software’s documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to your particular use-case, or to notify developers about bugs and share feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product information pages.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event booking and ticketing management plugin, used by thousands.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you intend to run any event that involves scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), booking participants, or booking tickets, then you will probably not find a better software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Registration System
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