Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that require managing registrations, such as workshops, training courses, not-for-profit fund raisers, social conferences, or even a large-scale event like a show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups can be a complex process. You may need to co-ordinate scheduling, available dates and seating, participant numbers, data collection and admin, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to attendees.
There are a number of advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily replicate similar events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that this can be very costly.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-powered web site, you can easily set up a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event booking solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – Event Manager & Registration Software For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily create your event and start receiving online bookings literally in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and receive online event bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich software that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can use a range of event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with an autoresponder system for ongoing notifications.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Note: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their software: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is fundamentally different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the software is being rebuilt using a different structure to accommodate future growth and expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually transition completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and features of this plugin.
More info:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just a few of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website or blog into an automated and feature-rich event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by virtually eliminating the chore of processing registrations and bookings manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for attendees to perform the registration by themselves.
Letting your attendees to do all of the data entry frees up your time and lets you direct more attention on planning a more unique event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will see in a moment, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and booking process that you want your attendees to experience.
Some additional plugin benefits include:
- Less Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third party service. The cost is kept low through a model where users start with the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and buy addons when you need new functionality.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept new event registrations any time of day or night. In addition, Event Espresso social and marketing features (see below) let people interested in attending your event invite other people they know who may be interested in attending.
- Green Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event booking process is performed entirely online, reducing typical paper consumption from tasks associated with administration.
- Own Your Data. You own all the data gathered from your event participants.
Features
The Event Espresso plugin provides functionality to end-users through standard features (these are included with the software) and additional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many great features to website owners. Here are just some:
- Quick and simple to install and implement. Ready to start accepting registrations in minutes.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso allows you to set up as many different types of tickets as you need and specify different pricing options, number of tickets, and more.
- Event Calendar. Participants can easily find your events and add these to their schedule using a calendar.
- Tax Administration. Event Espresso 4 provides a number of options to administer taxes for an event and report tax fee components to customers when purchasing tickets. You can configure taxes globally and on a per-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your theme and display attendee information throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow you to create new prices that adjust the default ticket pricing for the default ticket.
- Mobile Registration & Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system lets you validate tickets, speed up in-venue registrations, set up multiple check-in “stations” and track participants.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of registering event participants when they show up, or sending in paper-based forms for manual registration later.
- Administrative Pre-approval. Be selective about who can attend your events.
- Event RSS Feeds. Keep your users updated about your events, drive quality traffic and widen your content reach with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- SEO Friendly URLs. Keyword rich Web links take advantage of your WordPress site’s Permalinks configuration settings. SEO-friendly web links that use relevant keywords enhance the context of your pages and is favored by search engines, helping you drive a more targeted audience to your website.
- Country-specific Settings. Event managers can configure the country and currency settings that will be used throughout Event Espresso, including currency name, currency symbols, decimal signs, characters and places, country codes, regions, and so on.
- Upload Event Information. Event Espresso 4 provides an advanced importing capability that lets you easily upload bulk event data at once. You can export, edit and upload information about events, datetimes, ticketing details, pricing, registration questions, venues, terminology, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Multiple Event Attendee. Event Espresso 4 allows an individual or a group to purchase multiple tickets and different types of tickets at once. You decide how many attendees are allowed to enroll in one session by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Event Espresso Community. Event Espresso provides users with access to a community of experienced event managers, software programmers, web designers, digital marketers and business owners who also use the plugin. You can engage with other Event Espresso users via their community chat room, support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Team Member Manager. Save time and keep your data organized by reusing staff profiles for multiple events or displaying their profile using a shortcode in any event description.
- 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 also customize the templates to display event information in your own unique way.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows you to have more control and options over your event page content and how the information displays to prospects.
- Control Box Management & Reorganization. Event Espresso leverages the WP user interface, which gives you the ability to reorder the user interface to match your workflow processes. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or removed from the page.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value: According to the mission statement 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 mission, the software has been built using a 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 40+ added features, including:
- Live-filtering when searching for events inside the Event Espresso admin.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse commonly asked questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Add-Ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow end-users to significantly enhance the functionality of managing your event.
Some of these add ons include:
- EE4 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 the event does not have a featured image, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Template Add-on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize the events with multiple datetimes into a drop-down list.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add on: The Category Accordion template displays categories as a simple list. Clicking on a category name shows all events related to that category and closes previously open categories.
- EE4 Events Social Sharing Add-on: This addon adds social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that lets your attendees to share a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after booking.
- Custom Files Addon: The Custom Files add on allows you to bypass certain aspects of the plugin.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Addon Versions: This add on lets you include your staff in the event management process 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 WordPress users roles and allow them different permissions with different capabilities, allowing others to help you manage your events or events that other people create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain parts of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain parts of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to allow users to have geographic responsibilities for events and users, use the Roles and Permissions Pro add-on.
- Multiple Event Registration Addon: The Multi-Event registration addon 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 Multi-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.
- Events Calendar Addon: This WordPress events calendar displays events and categories of events using an attractive graphical calendar.
- Infusionsoft Integration Add-on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and marketing plugin add-on, you can completely automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture customer data, track enrollments, and accept payments from your web site.
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 newest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
Testimonials
Here are just some of the many testimonials that plugin users have written about Event Espresso:
”Congratulations on an absolutely fantastic plugin. I’m really impressed with its functionality and add on features and will definitely upgrade my client’s production site to the premium version (when ready for launch) to incorporate all the features. As I have told another client “this plugin is the cat’s meow”.” Pete Mansel
”…it really does blow everything else that’s out there out of the water.” Chris Reynolds, Arcane Palette Creative Design
”Just bought an Event Espresso license for an upcoming conference website we are working on. The custom registration forms functionality rocks!” Eric Sopp, Inside Design
Useful Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, trainer, festival planner, or event professional, there are just endless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered owner, spend a little time researching the user forum for new ideas and practical ways to improve your event management process or enhance the experience of your event attendees.
Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with other WordPress plugins and WordPress themes that follow standard WP coding rules. If you find that you need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive support, as so many of its satisfied users confirm:
“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, knowledge base 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.
In addition, Event Espresso boasts an established team of experienced web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely software you can rely on to manage your events.
Software Pricing
Event Espresso is available in different editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin features, however, you need to consider purchasing one of the paid plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This option enables you to configure 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 License – This license lets you run Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This license option enables you to install Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The cost of purchasing the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the software sells for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing when this article was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin developer when you visit the website.
Additional Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the plugin’s online documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to your particular situation, or to notify developers about issues and give feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WP event booking and ticketing manager software, used and trusted by thousands.
If you are a WordPress user and you intend to run an event that involves scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), enrolling attendees, and/or selling seating, then you will probably not find a better plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Manager Software
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