Do you currently run or plan to run events that need co-ordinating registrations, such as workshops, group courses, non-profit fund raisers, social events, or even a big event such as a music concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Managing event registrations can be a complex process. You need to co-ordinate calendar schedules, available dates and seating, participant numbers, data entry, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to attendees.
There are many advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower expenses, help you easily duplicate recurring events, give event managers more control, create a better client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that this can be very costly.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-based website or blog, you can install an inexpensive and highly professional online event registration system.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Manager Software
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily set up your event and begin processing bookings in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and take online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you full control of 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 in order to better understand your participants, or integrating your event registration forms with an autoresponder system for ongoing follow-ups.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is impressively different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the plugin is being revamped using a different structure to accommodate future expansion. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually move completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and advantages of this plugin.
More info:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just some of the many benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current web site into a feature-rich and professional event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by literally doing away with the chore of processing registrations and sign-ups manually.
Essentially, you are enabling event participants to enroll by themselves.
Allowing your enrollees to do all of the data entry frees you up from doing administration and lets you spend more of your resources on organizing a better event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will see shortly, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management process that you want your users to experience.
Additional plugin benefits include:
- Less Costs: Event Espresso is a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to developing your own software or using a 3rd-party provider. The cost is kept to a minimum by using a model where Event Espresso users pay for the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and buy addons when you need added features.
- More Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept online signups 24 hrs a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social features and add ons (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event invite their friends who may also be interested.
- Paperless Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event signup process is conducted entirely online, reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks related to admin and record-storage.
- All Information Belongs To You. You own all the information you collect from event participants.
Event Espresso Features
The Event Espresso plugin provides functionality to end-users through built-in features (these come with the software) and additional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many unique features to web site owners. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and simple to install and configure. Ready to start accepting registrations in no time.
- Custom Event Registration. With Event Espresso you can gather specific data using a custom event registration form on your site to prepare a customized experience for your clients.
- Custom Notification Emails. Configure automated registration and payment notification emails to communicate with event clients.
- Ticket Selector. Present a number of ticket options to registrants and let them choose the ticket(s) that best fits their needs.
- Smart Single Page Checkout. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically copy the primary attendee’s registration information for any additional participants.
- Spam Protection. Reduce the chance of spammers and bot software programs creating bogus registrations on your web site with reCAPTCHA settings that validate human activity.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system enables you to validate tickets, speed up in-venue registrations, create various check-in “stations” and track all attendees.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. Event Espresso 4 lets you gain a better understanding of who your clients are and how you’ve previously engaged with your clients. Your Contact Profile page stores updated records like the name, biography, contact details, event registration details, comments, and more about each customer.
- No Ticket Events. You can create events without requiring attendees to select tickets. Use Event Espresso for all types of events, not just those that need tickets.
- XML RSS Event Feeds. Keep your blog visitors updated about your events, bring in more visitors and widen your content reach with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events let you build your event page at your own leisure without displaying it live on your site. You can keep developing your events until you are ready to take things live, or schedule to publish your event at a future time and date.
- Full Control Of Your Event Management. Event Espresso puts you in full control of every aspect of your event’s registration and ticketing processes, and lets you automate the process with event management tools that include staff and venue manager, custom event designs, payment processing and handling, wait lists, limits on attendees, printable ticketing and more.
- Exportable Data. You can output all the information collected from event participants into Excel or CSV format for creating reports, planning marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, and so on.
- Event Venue Management. The venue management feature in EE 4 lets details about venues to be made available throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front end of your website to inform users 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 venue information like venue capacity, venue site URL, venue phone number, venue address, maps, etc. You can also display venues in different areas of your WordPress theme and 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.
- Automatic Plugin Upgrades. Event Espresso offers easy 1-click plugin updates to ensure that you have the newest features and to keep your software installation compatible with new versions of WordPress.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential event registrants who have not fully paid for their registration with a standard but personalized PDF invoice with one click of a button. Your invoices will reference registered participants who have not paid their registration yet by name, display the balance they owe, and include links to the event details, a payment link and a url to download a PDF invoice.
- Accurate Event Attendee Manager. You have control of your customers’ information; who has enrolled, for what event and how much they have 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 an attendee list to a spreadsheet for additional reports, send custom payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your customers individually or all at once.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows web developers to have more control and options over the content of your events and how the information displays to your prospective event registrants.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registration capabilities for regular website traffic whenever you need to perform maintenance on your site. You can continue to work on the back-end of your site during maintenance mode.
- 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 objectives, the software has been built using a modular and efficient model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also provides you with over 40 additional features, including:
- Live-filtering when you search for events within the Event Espresso admin.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing a common set of questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Addons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow users to further expand the functionality of managing an event.
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 available, a default image will be used instead.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes the events with multiple datetimes into a drop-down 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 also be customized to display the event thumbnail instead of a date.
- Social Coupons Integration Addon: If your site 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 provides PHP files that allow you to override certain aspects of the plugin.
- Seating Chart Add-on: The seating chart add-on is for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is ideal for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart add-on allows you to offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart add-on lets you manage the environment for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to every seat.
- Multiple Event Registration Add-on: The Multi-Event registration add-on gives potential attendees the ability to book 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 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 Calendar Add-on: This add on uses the WP calendar to display events and event categories in a nice graphical calendar.
- Infusionsoft Integration Add on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft integration all-in-one sales and marketing plugin addon, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture event attendee data, track bookings, and accept payments from your web site.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin, including new add ons.
For full details about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
Customer Feedback
Below are just some of the testimonials that customers 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
”Event Espresso event management plugin for WordPress is really an awesome plugin.” Cheryl Smithem, Charleston PR & Design
”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
Plugin Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, teacher, festival planner, or event consultant, there are just endless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, go through the user forum for inspiration and practical ways to streamline your event management and registration process and enhance the experience of your customers.
Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with all WP plugins and WP themes that follow WP coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive support, as many of its satisfied users confirm:
”No complaints here. Satisfied customer. You can teach us all few things about customer service. Thanks!” Charles
Event Espresso provides exceptional support including access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, email 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 WordPress web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can depend on to manage your events.
Software Pricing
Event Espresso is available in a number of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you may want to consider purchasing one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This edition allows you to run Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This allows you to install Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License – This option lets you run Event Espresso on five sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The cost to purchase the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, the plugin retails for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Manager
Note: The pricing above was current when this review was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin developer when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Info
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the software’s documentation pages for answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to a particular situation, or to notify developers about errors and give feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product website.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event registration and ticketing management software, used and trusted by thousands.
If you are a WordPress user and you plan to run events that involve scheduling dates, times and venues (offline and online), booking attendees, and/or booking seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticketing Registration Plugin For WordPress
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