Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that need managing bookings or registrations, such as workshops, community classes, charity fund raisers, networking conferences, or even a large-scale event like a rave party, 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 will probably need to co-ordinate calendar schedules, dates, participant numbers, data processing, payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders and alerts, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to attendees.
There are many advantages to setting up an automated online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower costs, help you easily replicate similar events, give you more control, create a better customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event registration system can be very expensive.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-based web site, you can install a very inexpensive and professional web-based event registration solution.
Presenting …
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Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticket Registration Plugin For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WP software enables you to easily schedule your event and start receiving bookings literally in minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and take online event bookings)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed plugin that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Customize registration forms
You can employ several event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your event attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media and autoresponders.
View detailed information about event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is considerably different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the platform is being revamped using a different structure to allow for future expansion. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually retire EE 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and features of using the plugin.
Learn more here:
Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current website into a fully-featured and automated event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by virtually doing away with the chore of processing registrations manually.
Essentially, you are enabling attendees to perform the sign-up process themselves.
Letting your customers to do all of the data entry frees you up from doing administration and lets you concentrate more of your resources on delivering a more unique event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover shortly, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management and registration process that you want your participants to experience.
Additional benefits and advantages include the following:
- Significantly Lower Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd party service. The cost is kept to a minimum through a model where Event Espresso users buy the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then purchase addons when you need added functionality.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online bookings outside normal business hours. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing addons (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with others who may also be interested.
- Green Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign up process remains wholly online, eliminating typical paper consumption from tasks associated with administration.
- Own Your Data. You own all the information you obtain from event attendees.
Plugin Features
The Event Espresso plugin delivers functionality to its customers via built-in features (these come with the plugin) and additional features that customers can buy for an additional cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many built-in to website owners. Here are just a few:
- Fast and simple to install and set up. Be up and running in minutes.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso lets you create as many different types of tickets as you need and specify different pricing options, number of tickets, etc.
- Custom Notification Email Message. Set up automatic registration and payment confirmation emails to communicate with your participants.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso provides integration with several payment gateways, allowing you to collect payments before running your events.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your WordPress theme and display registrant details throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types let event managers create new prices that adjust the base ticket pricing of your system-default ticket.
- Promotional Codes. Provide promotion and multiple discount codes to encourage prospects to make a buying decision now, or make your offers more appealing for others. This is also practical for helping to sell-out events close to deadlines.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. EE 4 lets you understand who your customers are and how they have done business with you.
- No-Ticket Events. You can list events without the requirement for participants to get tickets. Use Event Espresso for all forms of events, not only when tickets are needed.
- Private Contact Comments. Keep comments about a contact on their profile and how you have assisted them. Private commenting enables you to keep a record of when users contacted you, your internal observations, and how you’ve helped them.
- Keyword Rich Event Page Web Links. Keyword-rich Web links leverage your Permalinks configuration settings. “Pretty” urls that use relevant keywords enhance the context of your events and improves your search rankings, helping you drive more visitors to your website.
- Country Settings. Event managers can configure the country and currency settings to be used to host your events, such as currency, currency symbols, decimal characters and places, country codes, regions, and so on.
- Exportable Data. You can output all of your data gathered from event participants into Excel or CSV format for creating reports, planning new marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, etc..
- Event Venue Profiles. The venue manager in EE 4 allows details about venues to appear throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front-end of your website to inform users of your event’s location. The venue record has many standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also lets you add information such as venue capacity, venue web address, venue phone number, physical and/or virtual location, Google map, etc. You can also display all of your venues on different areas in your theme and on a venue listing page on your website where you can set up and publish venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a specific venue.
- Attendee Records. Manage your customer’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their records organized and easily accessible.
- Staff Management. Save time and stay organized by reusing staff member profiles for multiple events or displaying profile information such as team member’s contact information, resume and photo using a shortcode in an event description.
- Attendee Reporting. Quick-view event reports provides you with information of all of your registrations and transactions, allowing you to measure the performance of your events with the aggregate number of people who have registered and amount of revenue you’ve collected.
Extra features include:
- Hooks, Actions And Filters. These allow web-based software developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso plugin that are 100% compatible with the WordPress software platform.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. EE 4 allows you to generate a log file with debugging data that can be useful for developers who are potential errors.
- Autonomy, Flexibility And Value: According to the philosophy stated on their website, Event Espresso’s goal 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 model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium version of Event Espresso also provides you with over 40 additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – streamlines the work of re-entering event data when adding new events.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse a common set of questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
In addition to an amazing number of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow customers to further expand the capabilities of your event management process.
Some of these add ons include:
- EE4 Events Grid Template Addon: Displays events in a pure CSS grid-like structure using the featured image. Hovering over the image will display further information. If the event does not have a featured image, a default image will be used.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize multiple datetime events 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 show the event thumbnail instead of a 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 also specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration add-on lets you take advantage of the WordPress user system. With the WP User Integration add-on you can give your users a special incentive by offering member prices and overriding event pricing when members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered website users will have access to these special events. Members can also input personal data into their profile page allowing them fast registration for events by auto-filling in the personal information on the event registration form. Users can also view event history and make payment for events.
- 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 addon lets you 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 attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to each seat.
- EE4 Event Ticketing And Bar Scanning Add on: The Ticketing addon adds the ability to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add-on adds the ability to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing addon includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for handling check-in scans at the door. People 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.
- Events Table Template Addon: The Events Table Template add-on provides event managers with an easy-to-use system that allows you to edit 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 design custom templates using one of the templates provided as a base template.
- MailChimp Integration Addon: The MailChimp add on allows you to automatically register attendees to a selected mailing list or group within your MailChimp account.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software, including new addons.
For full details about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, visit the plugin website:
Customers – Testimonials
Below are just some of the many testimonials that plugin users have posted about Event Espresso:
”Thanks to you and the rest of the team for Event Espresso – Every time I get a signup for an event, I think about how much time EE saves me – and signups happen while I’m out on the water teaching kayaking, not answering the phone. :-)” Tue Brems Olesen, OnAdventure
”I have been using Event Espresso to run my festival and have been very happy with how it has worked out. They have provided tremendous support and their iPhone app is amazing and easy to use. I suggest using it for your event.” Alex Grant, Byron Spirit Festival
”Loving the functions and support from Event Espresso. One of the best plugins I’ve ever bought!” Nathan
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, teacher, seminar planner, or event management consultant, there are just countless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a registered user, search the support forum for inspiration and practical suggestions to streamline your event management process and enhance the experience of your participants.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with most WordPress plugins and WP themes that follow standard WordPress coding rules. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent user support, as many of its end-users confirm:
”Your plugin saved our client nearly $9000 in development costs because it handled the majority of the functionality we were looking for at a much lower cost. EventEspresso’s staff have been very responsive to our needs when we have them (which has been rare, because the plugin is so well coded). Great job on a great plugin!” Brandon P., Experience Farm
Event Espresso provides amazing support that includes access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, priority 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 an established team of experienced WordPress web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can rely on to manage your events.
Plugin Pricing
Event Espresso is available in different editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software functionality, however, you should consider using one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This lets you run Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This license option lets you set up Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This enables you to set up Event Espresso on five domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The cost to purchase the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Presently, the software sells for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager
Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this review was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin developer when you visit the website.
Additional Plugin Info
Event Espresso regularly adds 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.
Use the software’s online documentation tools for answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to a particular use-case, or to notify developers about problems and give feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event registration and ticketing manager software, used by thousands of WP users.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you intend to run any event that involves managing dates and venues, enrolling participants, and selling seating, then you will probably not find a better software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso
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