Do you currently run or plan to run events that need handling bookings or registrations, such as seminars, community courses, non-profit fund raisers, corporate conferences, or even a large-scale event such as a dance party, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups is a time-consuming process. You may be required to co-ordinate scheduling, availability, registration numbers, data processing and storage, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders and notifications, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to participants.
There are many benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower expenses, help you easily replicate repeat events, give event managers more control, create a more enjoyable user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event booking system can be very expensive.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-based site, you can install an inexpensive and professional web-based event registration system.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Management
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin enables you to easily set up multiple events and begin receiving online registrations in minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and receive online event registrations)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize event registration forms
You can use several event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up selling tickets, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your participants, or integrating your event bookings with social media and autoresponders.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is completely different than the older EE 3, as it is being revamped using a different structure to allow for future growth and expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually phase out EE 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and advantages of this plugin.
To learn more about the plugin go here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current web site into a feature-rich and professional event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by virtually eliminating the need to process registrations manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for event participants to enrol themselves.
Allowing your participants to do the data entry frees up your time and lets you focus more of your resources on creating a better event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon learn, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and registration process that you want your participants to experience.
Some additional benefits include:
- Significantly Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin provides you with an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own system or using a 3rd-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 purchase add ons when you need new features.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept online registrations 24 hrs a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing features and add-ons (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event invite friends who may be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, your event booking process remains wholly online, reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks associated with administration.
- All Data Belongs To You. You control all the information obtained from event participants.
Event Espresso Features
The Event Espresso software provides functionality to users 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 site owners. Here are just some of these:
- Quick and simple to install and use. Be up and running in very little time.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso allows you to configure as many kinds of tickets as you want and specify prices, number of tickets, etc.
- Customized Confirmation Emails. Set up automated booking and payment notification email messages to communicate with your customers.
- Ticket Selector. Present a number of ticket options to registrants so they can purchase the ticket(s) that best suits their needs.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your WordPress theme and reuse venue data 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 default ticket.
- Promotional Codes. Provide promotion and discount codes to encourage people to take action immediately, or simply make your offers more affordable for price-sensitive customers. Also useful for helping to sell-out events close to timelines.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of event registrants and check-in those who have attended.
- Admin Pre-approval. Be selective about who can attend your events.
- Public Commenting. Add “social proof” by allowing potential attendees to ask questions about your event and past participants to post feedback that can help others decide whether or not to sign up. Moderation settings for comments are set up using the WP commenting system.
- Keyword Rich URLs. Keyword rich Web links take advantage of your WordPress Permalinks configuration settings. SEO-friendly web links that include topic-relevant keywords add to the context of your pages and is favored by search engines, helping you drive a more targeted audience to your events.
- Country-specific Settings. Event managers can configure the country and currency settings to be used in your events, including currency name, currency symbols, decimal signs, characters and places, country codes, states or provinces, etc.
- Default Tickets. If you create similar tickets for most of your events, you can automatically set up as your default ticket for your new events simply by checking a box.
- Register Multiple Attendees. EE 4 allows one person or an organization to purchase multiple tickets and different ticket types at once. Event managers decide how many people are able to register in one session by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Automatic Software Updates. Event Espresso provides easy one-click upgrades to make sure that you have the newest features and to keep your plugin installation working with the latest version of WordPress.
- Social Sharing. Event participants and site visitors can spread the word about your event using social media share buttons.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post types. You can even customize the templates to display event information in your own custom way.
Additional features include:
- Hooks, Actions & Filters. These features allow developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso plugin that are fully compatible with the WordPress software platform.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registration capabilities for regular site traffic whenever you need to make changes on your website. You can still work on your event pages 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 goals, 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:
- Email shortcodes that includes registrant data in emails and email updates.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse commonly asked questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page during registration.
Add-Ons
As well as an amazing range of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow plugin users to further enhance the capabilities 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 an event does not have a featured image, a default image will be used.
- Recurring Events Management Add on: The Recurring Events management addon allows you to put events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years in advance. You can schedule as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in advance as you like. Event Espresso will automatically open and close registrations for all of these recurring events.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add on: The Category Accordion template displays categories as a simple list. Clicking a category name shows all events related to that category and closes any previously open categories.
- Social Coupons Integration Addon: If your web site is featured on Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can even 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 addon you can give your users a special incentive by offering member pricing and overriding event pricing when your members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered users of the site will have access to your special events. Members can also enter personal details into their profile page allowing them fast registration for events by auto-filling in their personal information on the event booking form. Users can also view event history and make payment for future events.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add-on Editions: This add-on lets you involve other users in your organization to help manage your events and give new users the capacity to create events or regional managers the capacity to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WordPress users roles and give them different permissions with different privileges, allowing others to help you manage your events or events that other people create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain parts of your WP dashboard and/or certain sections 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.
- EE4 Event Ticketing Add-on: The Ticketing addon gives you the capacity to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add-on gives you the ability 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 venues. Registrants 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.
- EE4 Events Calendar Add on: This add-on uses the WordPress calendar to display events and categories of events in a nice graphical calendar.
- JSON API Add-on: The new Event Espresso JSON API add on enables other software applications, online tools, mobile applications, etc… to access your Event Espresso data through an API (Application Programming Interface).
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add-ons.
For complete details about the newest Event Espreso features and add ons, visit the plugin website:
Customers – Feedback
Here are just some of the many testimonials that users have posted about Event Espresso:
”Event Espresso is one of the nicest Event Managers (WP Plugin) I have come across.” Joe Distefano, Citizen Joe
”I have to say that it has been the right choice for me…I’ve been extremely pleased with the way my site is working.” Robin, RobinTime
”Loving the functions and support from Event Espresso. One of the best plugins I’ve ever bought!” Nathan
Useful Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, presenter, show promoter, or event consultant, there are just countless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, search the support forum for inspiration and practical suggestions to improve your event management process or improve the experience of your event participants.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with most WP plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress development guidelines. If you find that you need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great user support, as many of its satisfied customers attest:
”It’s magical. Support is amazing, plugin is simple to use, a 3 year old could use the iPhone app…it all is very impressive and professional.” David, House of Prayer
Event Espresso provides great support with access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, premium 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 developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely software you can depend on to run your events.
Software Pricing
Event Espresso is available in various editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you need to consider purchasing one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This enables you to set up Event Espresso on one site only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This option lets you configure Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This lets you set up Event Espresso on five domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons 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. Presently, the plugin sells for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest price: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing when this review was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin author when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Info
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the plugin’s documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to your specific situation, or to notify developers about issues and leave feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event registration and ticketing management software, used by thousands of WordPress users.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you plan to run events that involve managing dates and venues (offline and online), booking participants, and selling tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Manager System
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