Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that require managing registrations, such as seminars, group courses, non-profit fundraisers, corporate conferences, or even a big event such as a dance party, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event bookings is a complex and time-consuming process. You may have to co-ordinate scheduling, date availability, participant numbers, data collection and storage, payments and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to participants.
There are lots of advantages to setting up an online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower expenses, help you easily reproduce recurring events, give event managers more control, create a better user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be expensive.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-based web site, you can set up an inexpensive and highly professional online event registration system.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Manager Plugin
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin allows you to easily set up an event and begin processing online bookings literally in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and take online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
Customize registration forms
You can employ a number of event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up selling tickets, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with an autoresponder system for ongoing notifications.
View detailed information about event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their software: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is fundamentally different than the older EE 3, as the platform has been redeveloped using a different structure to accommodate future expansion. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually move completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Automated Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current digital presence into an automated and feature-rich event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically eliminating the chore of processing registrations manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating event attendees to perform the registration by themselves.
Letting your clients to do all of the data entry frees you up from doing admin work and lets you spend more of your attention on creating a better event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon discover, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and registration process that you want your participants to experience.
Additional plugin benefits include:
- Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin is a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third party provider. This is made possible through a model where you buy the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and buy add-ons when you need new features.
- Higher Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online sign-ups any time of day or night. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social addons (see below) let people interested in attending your event invite their friends who may be interested in attending.
- Green And Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, the event signup process remains entirely online, significantly reducing typical paper waste from tasks related to administration.
- Own Your Data. You own all the data collected from event attendees.
Features
The Event Espresso plugin delivers functionality to its users via built-in features (these come with the software) and optional features that customers can buy for an additional cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of features to WP users. Here are just a few of these:
- Fast and easy to install and set up. Be up and running in no time.
- Customized Event Registration Forms. Event Espresso lets you collect unique data using a custom event registration form on your web site to prepare a customized experience for your customers.
- Customizable Event Page Designs. Match your site’s look and feel for your events and bookings page using Event Espresso’s unlimited template options and parts, plus HTML or CSS.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso seamlessly integrates with payment gateways, allowing you to collect payments before running your events.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your theme and display venue information throughout other areas of your site.
- Spam Protection. Prevent the chance of spamming and bot software programs making bogus registrations by using reCAPTCHA features that provide human validation.
- In-App Documentation Systems. Event Espresso 4 comes with 3 useful in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Event Check-In List. Generate an exportable list of event participants and check in those who have attended.
- Administrative Pre-approval. Be selective about who can and can’t attend your events.
- RSS Event Feeds. Keep your site readers up-to-date about your events, bring in more visitors and expand your content distribution with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events allow you to develop an event page in your own timeframe without displaying it live on your site. You can work on your event pages until you are ready to go live, or schedule your event pages to publish at a later time and date.
- Easy Event Management. Event Espresso puts you in complete control of all aspects of an event’s registration and ticketing, and also allows you to automate the process with event management tools that include staff and venue management, customizable event designs, payment processing, list waiting, attendee limits, printable tickets and more.
- Bulk Upload Event Information. Event Espresso 4 provides a CSV-based importing capability that enables you to upload bulk event data at once. You can export, edit and upload data for events, datetimes, tickets, pricing, custom registration questions, venues, terms, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Multiple Participant Enrollments. Event Espresso 4 allows one person or a group to purchase multiple tickets and different ticket types simultaneously. You control how many people are allowed to register in one registration by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso lets you engage with a community of experienced event managers, web developers, designers, internet marketers and business owners who also use the software. You can network with other Event Espresso users using their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential event participants who have not paid in full for their booking with a standard but personalized PDF invoice with one click of a button. Your invoices will address registered customers who have not paid their registration in full by name, display the balance owing, and include a link to the event information, a payment link and a url where they can download a PDF invoice.
- Accurate Participant Manager. You have control of your participants’ records; who has registered, which event they have registered for and how much they have 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 a list of event attendees to a spreadsheet for additional reports, send customized payment reminders and receipts and send messages to your attendees on a person-by-person basis or collectively.
Additional features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for non-technical WordPress users, and also extremely robust and customizable for enterprise-level users and developers. The bottom line is that by using Object-oriented programming (OOP), EE 4 allows for more complex enhancements and customizations to the application.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registration capabilities for regular site visitors when you need to perform maintenance on your site. You can still work on your event pages during maintenance mode.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And Value: According to the mission statement on their website, 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 company operates on a model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium version of Event Espresso also comes with over 40 added features, including:
- Email shortcodes that includes participant data in confirmation emails and updates.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing the same group of questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As well as an incredible range of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow software users to further enhance the functionality of the event management process.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display your upcoming events by location. There are four maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Custom Template Add-on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize multiple datetime events 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 be customized to display the event thumbnail image instead of a date.
- Social Coupons Integration Addon: If your web 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 Template Addon: The Custom Template add on is capable of displaying your event lists in a range of exciting and interesting ways.
- Seating Chart Add on: The seating chart add on 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 website. The Seating Chart add-on lets you control the experience for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to every seat.
- Multiple Event Registration Add-on: The Multiple Event registration addon gives potential customers the ability to register for multiple events at once. In each event listing attendees will be given the option to either register for a single event or add multiple events to their 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.
- EE4 Events Calendar Add-on: This add-on uses the WP calendar to display events and categories of events via a nice graphical calendar.
- EE4 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 event attendee data, track bookings, and accept payments from your Event Espresso powered website.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add ons.
To learn more about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
Plugin Users – Feedback
Below are some of the testimonials that satisfied users have written 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
“I just completed my first event using Event Espresso. I really believe without Event Espresso my event would not have been the success it was.” Cathy Earle, Women Only Weekend
”At first we looked at CVENT for one of our clients and they wanted $16,000 per year for 3000 event attendees + fees totaling $22k. That is before Staff and Webinar fees. Worst of all we had to prepay the $16k amount even if we never used all 3000 attendees. That was when we looked at Event Espresso and we realized we could build our own event system for less than 16K. For the most part we have been very satisfied with our decision. The real ROI will come next year when they don’t have to pay another 16k-22K! Over the next 5-6 years we should be able to claim that we saved the company over $100,000 – Thanks Event Espresso!” David Waterman (Long Version), KT Benefits & InkItDigital.com
Plugin Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, trainer, seminar planner, or event professional, there are just endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered user, visit the support forum for tips and practical suggestions to improve your event management process and enhance the experience of your customers.
Support
Event Espresso works with with most WordPress plugins and themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you find that you need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent user support, as so many of its users confirm:
”Thank you Seth for being so responsive and going above and beyond the call of duty with your app! I highly recommend Event Espresso for its functionality and for the stellar support. Seth has a deep knowledge and understanding of WordPress and has built a tool that is seamless to use for both organizer and attendee alike! After looking at a bunch of alternatives, Event Espresso far surpasses the other apps that are available.” Wendy Troupe, ICS North Pole Express
The Event Espresso software provides robust support including access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, priority 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.
In addition, Event Espresso boasts an established team of experienced WordPress web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can count on to run your events.
Event Espresso Cost
Event Espresso is available in a number of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software functionality, however, you should consider using one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This enables you to install Event Espresso on one domain only. It includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This license lets you set up Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This license option lets you set up Event Espresso on 5 domains. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The price of the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, the software sells for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest price: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager
Note: The above reflects the pricing when this review was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin developer when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Plugin Information
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the plugin’s online documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to your specific use-case, or to notify developers about bugs and give feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event registration and ticketing management software, used by thousands of users.
If you are a WordPress user and you plan to run an event that involves managing dates and venues (offline and online), enrolling participants, and/or reserving tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticket Registration System
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