Do you currently run or plan to run events that need managing registrations, such as workshops, group courses, not-for-profit fundraisers, corporate functions, or even a large-scale event such as a music concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups can be a time-consuming process. You will probably have to co-ordinate scheduling, available dates and spaces, participant numbers, data entry, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and providing tickets to participants.
There are many benefits to setting up an automated web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily replicate previously-run events, give you more control, improve user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that this can be expensive.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-based site, you can download and install a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event registration system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Management
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP enables you to easily schedule an event and begin receiving online bookings in a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and accept online event bookings)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed plugin that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Customize your event registration forms
You can employ multiple event registration strategies, from simple online bookings 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 sites like Facebook.
View detailed information about event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their software: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is impressively different than the older EE 3, as the plugin is being redeveloped using a different structure to allow for future expansion. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually phase out Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
For more details go here:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just a few of the 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 website or blog into a fully-featured event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to attendee limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by virtually eliminating the chore of processing registrations manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating attendees to perform the registration themselves.
Allowing your enrollees to do the data entry frees you up from doing admin work and lets you spend more time on creating a better event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover in a moment, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management process that you want your participants to experience.
Additional plugin benefits include:
- Less Costs: Event Espresso provides you with a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third-party service. The cost is kept to a minimum by using a model where you buy the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then purchase add ons only when you need extra features.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept online event bookings outside traditional business hours. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social and marketing features (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event invite other people they know who may also be interested.
- Paperless Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, the event signup process is transacted entirely online, reducing typical paper waste from tasks related to enrollment.
- All Data Belongs To You. You own all the data collected from your event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to its customers via built-in features (these are included with the plugin) and additional features that you can buy for an additional cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many built-in to WP users. Here are just some of these:
- Quick and easy to install and set up. Be up and running in minutes.
- Custom Event Registration. With Event Espresso you can collect unique data using a custom event registration form on your site to create a great experience for your attendees.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Participants can easily find your events and add these to their schedule with a calendar.
- Ticket Selector. Present multiple ticket options to prospective attendees so they can purchase the ticket(s) that will best fit their needs.
- Smart Single Page Checkout. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically duplicate the primary registrant’s information for any added participants.
- Default Prices. Create events quickly and easily by pre-configuring default ticket pricing.
- Discount Codes. Leverage promotion and multiple discount codes to incentivize prospects to register without delaying, or make your offerings more affordable for price-sensitive customers. Also useful if you want to sell-out events close to timelines.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. EE 4 provides you with the tools to know who your customers are and how they’ve done business with you.
- Waiting Lists. Latecomers can subscribe to a waiting list if your event is full. Additionally, you can make it a requirement waiting list attendees pay for their spots if you plan to expand capacity for your event.
- Event RSS Feeds. Provide automatic updates to your users, bring in more visitors and widen your content distribution with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Keyword-Rich URLs. Keyword-rich URLs leverage your WP Permalinks configuration settings. Search engine friendly urls with topic-relevant keywords add to the context of your pages and improves your search rankings, helping you drive a more targeted audience to your site.
- Country-specific Settings. Event managers can configure the country and currency settings to be used when running events, such as currency name, currency signs, decimal characters and places, country codes, states or provinces, and so on.
- Exportable Information. You can export all the data collected from your event attendees into Excel or CSV format for producing reports, implementing marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, and so on.
- Venue Profiles. The venue manager in Event Espresso 4 lets details about a venue to appear throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front end of your site to inform site visitors of your event’s location. The venue record has many standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also includes venue information like venue capacity, venue website, phone number, physical and virtual location, map, etc. You can also list venues on various locations in your WordPress theme and on a venue archive page on your site where you can set up and publish venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have booked for a particular venue.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso gives you access to an expert community of event managers and other plugin users. You can interact with other Event Espresso users using 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 registrants who have not fully paid for their registration with a standard but personalized invoice with one click. Your invoices will address registered customers who have not paid their registration yet by name, give them the balance owing, and include a link to the event information, a payment link and a url to download a PDF invoice.
- Transaction 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 have collected.
Additional features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for basic users, and also extremely robust and customizable for higher end users and developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, Event Espresso 4 enables more complex enhancements and customizations to the application.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 lets you output a log file with debugging data which can be useful for web developers when potential errors.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value For Money: According to the philosophy stated on their site, Event Espresso’s aim 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 company operates on a modular and highly effective model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also includes over 40 added features, including:
- Email shortcodes for including participant data in emails and email newsletters.
- Default surcharge (similar to applying a service tax to all tickets).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow plugin users to significantly enhance the capabilities of the event management process.
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 Drop-down Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize the events with multiple datetimes into a drop-down list.
- Events Date Range Template Add on: The Date Range custom event list template enables your users to search for events that take place in a certain date range.
- EE4 Events Social Sharing Add-on: Add social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that lets your attendees to post a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after booking.
- Custom Files Add-on: The Custom Files add-on lets you bypass certain aspects of the plugin.
- Seating Chart Addon: The seating chart addon is suitable for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart addon allows you to promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart add-on lets you control the experience for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to every seat.
- EE4 Event Ticketing & Bar Scanning Addon: The Ticketing addon gives you the ability to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon gives you the capacity 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. 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 Calendar Addon: This add-on uses the WordPress calendar to display events and event categories using an attractive graphical calendar.
- JSON API Add on: The new Event Espresso JSON API add-on allows other software applications, websites, mobile applications, etc… to access your Event Espresso content through an Application Programming Interface (API).
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin, including new add-ons.
For more details about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
Customers – Testimonials
Below are just some of the many great testimonials that plugin users have posted about Event Espresso:
”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
”This really is a hell of a plugin. For me, it’s probably the final nail in the coffin for Joomla, as WP can now pretty much do EVERYTHING Joomla does, but better. Love the simplicity of this plugin!” Sam, Web Contempo
”I am in love with your product, I work with many educational institutions that hold classes/events and I will definitely recommend this to all of them, the only time I have seen a system this comprehensive and sophisticated is when an organization I worked with paid a programmer nearly $8,000 for a custom solution, and yet still there are features in your registration system that his didn’t have. Thank you so much for your help and patience.” Abdullah J.
Useful Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, trainer, show planner, or event consultant, there are simply unlimited possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, visit the support forum for tips and practical suggestions to streamline your event management and registration workflow and improve the experience of your participants.
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 excellent end-user support, as so many of its satisfied plugin end-users confirm:
”No complaints here. Satisfied customer. You can teach us all few things about customer service. Thanks!” Charles
The plugin provides robust support including access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, email 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 developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely software you can count on to manage your events.
Software Price
Event Espresso is available in different plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin options, however, you need to consider purchasing one of the paid plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This enables you to configure Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This enables you to configure Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License – This option lets you set up Event Espresso on five sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one 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 specials being offered. When we last checked, the plugin sells for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing when this article was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin author when you visit the website.
Additional Info
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the software’s documentation pages for answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to your specific use-case, or to notify developers about issues and give feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event registration and ticketing management software, used and trusted by thousands of people.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you currently run events that involve scheduling dates and venues, registering participants, or selling tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable WP plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Registration Software
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