Does your company currently run or plan to run events that need handling bookings, such as seminars, training courses, not-for-profit fund-raisers, social conferences, or even a big event like a dance party, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Co-ordinating event registrations is a time-consuming process. You need to manage scheduling, available dates and spaces, registration numbers, data processing and storage, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders and notifications, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to event attendees.
There are lots of advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower costs, help you easily replicate previous events, give you more control, improve client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be very expensive.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-based digital presence, you can set up a very inexpensive and highly professional online event registration system.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – Event Manager And Registration System For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily schedule your event and begin processing online bookings literally in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and process online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed software that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can use various event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up ticket sales, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your participants, or integrating your event registration forms with social media sites like Facebook.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: Currently, 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 Event Espresso 3, as it has been rebuilt using a different structure to accommodate future growth and 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.
Go here to learn more about the plugin:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just some of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current online presence into a fully-featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to attendee limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by practically doing away with the chore of processing registrations manually.
Essentially, you are making it easier for event participants to register on their own.
Letting your customers to do all of the data entry frees you up from doing administration and lets you spend more time on planning a more unique event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn shortly, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management process that you want your attendees to experience.
Additional benefits of the plugin include:
- Less Costs: The Event Espresso plugin provides you with an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd-party service. The cost is kept low by using a model where users buy the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and buy add ons only when you need extra features.
- Higher Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online event sign-ups outside traditional business hours. In addition, Event Espresso social features (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event invite their friends who may also be interested.
- Paperless Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign up process remains entirely in digital form, significantly reducing typical paper waste from tasks associated with administration.
- All Information Belongs To You. You own all the data obtained from your event attendees.
Features
The Event Espresso software delivers functionality to its customers via built-in features (these come with the software) and optional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers a number of built-in to WordPress users. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and simple to install and configure. Be up and running in no time.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso allows you to create as many different types of tickets as you need and set different pricing options, maximum number of tickets, and more.
- Customizable Event & Registration Page Designs. Customize your events and signup page using Event Espresso’s template options and elements, plus HTML and CSS.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso seamlessly integrates with several payment gateways, allowing you to collect payments prior to running events.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your WordPress theme and reuse events details throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Prices. Set up events quickly and easily with pre-configured default ticket pricing.
- In-App Documentation Systems. Event Espresso 4 provides three comprehensive in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. EE 4 lets you know who your customers are and how you’ve previously engaged with them. Your Contact Profile page stores updated records like the name, biography, contact details, event registration information, private comments, etc. about each client.
- Event Manager Pre-approval. Control who can and cannot attend your events.
- Public Commenting. Add “social proof” by allowing potential prospects to interact with you online via commenting and previous customers to post comments that can help others decide whether or not to enroll. Moderation settings for public commenting are configured via the WordPress built-in commenting system.
- Draft Events. Draft events enable you to build your event page in your own time-frame without displaying it live on your website. You can keep building your event until you are ready to go live, or schedule to publish your event pages at a future time and date.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your organization’s profile to be used throughout the plugin and your WordPress themes. Organization fields include: business name, street address, city, state, country, zip code, email, telephone number, VAT/tax number, your logo, Facebook URL, Twitter URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ URL, Instagram URL.
- Default Tickets. If you create similar tickets for your events, you can set one of those tickets as your default ticket for the next event simply by checking a box.
- Multiple Attendee Enrolments. EE 4 allows one person or a group to pay for multiple tickets and different ticket types at the same time. Event managers can control how many attendees are able to enrol in one booking session by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Automatic Updating. Event Espresso offers simple one-click plugin installation upgrades to make sure that you have the latest features and to keep your software installation up-to-date with new versions of WordPress.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential customers who have not fully paid for their registration with a standard but personalized invoice with one click of a button. Your invoices will address pre-registered customers who have not paid their registration in full by name, display the balance owing, and include a link to the event, a payment url and a link to download a PDF invoice.
- Accurate Event Attendee Manager. You have control of your customers’ records; who has enrolled, for what event and what amount they’ve paid. With the attendee manager, you can get a quick overview of registered participants and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export an event attendee list to an Excel spreadsheet for additional uses, send custom payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your attendees on a person-by-person basis or all at once.
Extra features include:
- Hooks, Actions & Filters. These allow you to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso plugin that are compatible with WordPress.
- Control Box Management And Reorganization. Event Espresso leverages the WordPress user interface, which gives you the ability to reorganize the user interface to match your workflow. Each control box can be collapsed, re-arranged or entirely deleted from your page.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & 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 model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium version of Event Espresso also includes over 40 additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes that includes registrant data in confirmation emails and email newsletters.
- Default surcharge (the same as adding a service fee to each ticket).
- Option to skip the confirmation page in the registration process.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow software users to significantly enhance the functionality of events.
Some of these add ons 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, a default image will be used.
- Recurring Events Management Add-on: The Recurring Events manager addon lets you put events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years ahead. You can schedule as many events in the future as you want. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close registrations for all recurring events.
- 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 show an event thumbnail image instead of the date.
- Social Media Buttons Add on: The social media addon displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media addon is included free with all of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- Custom Template Add on: The Custom Template addon lets you display your events in a variety of exciting and interesting ways.
- Seating Chart Add-on: The seating chart addon is great 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 add on allows you to promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues directly from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart addon lets you manage the experience for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to every seat.
- EE4 Event Ticketing And Bar Scanning Addon: The Ticketing add-on adds the capacity to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon gives you 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 venues. People 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.
- EE4 Events Table Template Add-on: The Events Table Template add-on provides you with a simple and easy-to-use system that allows you to change 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 lets developers design custom templates using one of the templates included as a base template.
- Infusionsoft Integration Add on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and business 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 website.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin, including new addons.
For full details about the latest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
User Testimonials
Below are a few of the many testimonials that users have written about Event Espresso:
”It’s been very comprehensive and covers exactly the aspects of event registration that we needed for our site plus some features that we didn’t even need but could still use in the future. Very Excellent Plugin!” Tristan Hall, Area 12:2 Youth Group
”Your plugin rocks! Seriously, saved me hours on the phone setting up attendance manually. Kudos. :)” William, Petruzzo Photography
”I’m using it on multiple sites and enjoying it. It’s simple and as others have stated… fast service and real help.” Arlen Nagata
Useful Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, teacher, conference planner, or event management consultant, there are simply unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing your copy of 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 and improve the experience of your customers.
Support
Event Espresso works with with most WordPress plugins and themes that follow WP coding standards. If you find that you need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great support, as many of its satisfied plugin customers attest:
“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
Event Espresso provides amazing support with access to support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase 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.
In addition, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely software you can depend on to organize and manage your events.
Product Pricing
Event Espresso is available in various editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin features, however, you may want to consider purchasing one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal Edition – This allows you to run Event Espresso on 1 site only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This edition enables you to configure Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This edition lets you configure Event Espresso on 5 sites. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Price details for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Presently, the software is selling for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticketing Registration Software For WordPress
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing 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 site.
Event Espresso – Additional Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the plugin’s documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to a particular use-case, or to notify developers about errors and give feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event registration and ticketing management plugin, used and trusted by thousands of event promoters.
If you are a WordPress user and you intend to run any event that requires scheduling dates, times and venues, registering participants, and booking tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better WP plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
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