Do you currently run or plan to run events that need to accept bookings, such as workshops, group courses, non-profit fundraisers, marketing functions, or even a large-scale event like a school concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Managing event bookings can be a complicated and time-consuming process. You will probably need to manage event schedules, availability, attendee numbers, data collection, payments and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to event 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 copy settings for recurring events, give you more control, create a better customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that this can be quite costly.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-based site, you can install an inexpensive and professional online event booking system.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Management System
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress software enables you to easily set up your event and start processing registrations in just minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and process online event registrations)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich software that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
Customize your event registration forms
You can use a number of event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up ticket-selling, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your attendees, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing follow-ups.
View detailed information about event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is fundamentally different than the older Event Espresso 3, as it is being revamped using a different structure to allow for future growth. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually migrate completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
More info:
Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current digital presence into a feature-rich and professional event management site … 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.
Better Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by practically doing away with the chore of processing registrations manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for participants to perform the enrolment process themselves.
Letting your attendees to do all of the data entry frees up your time and lets you concentrate more of your time on creating a more enjoyable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover shortly, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and booking process that you want your participants to experience.
Additional benefits and advantages include:
- Lower Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to developing your own solution or using a 3rd-party service provider. The cost is kept low by using a model where Event Espresso users purchase the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then purchase add ons when you need extra functionality.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online registrations 24 hrs a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social features (see below) let people interested in registering for your event invite friends who may also be interested.
- Green & Paperless Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign-up process can remain wholly in digital form, eliminating typical paper waste from tasks associated with administration.
- All Data Belongs To You. You control all the data gathered from event attendees.
Plugin Features
The Event Espresso software provides functionality to users via built-in features (these come with the plugin) and additional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many built-in to website owners. Here are just a few:
- Quick and simple to install and set up. Ready to start using in very little time.
- Custom Event Registration. With Event Espresso you can collect specific information using custom event registration forms on your web site to plan a unique experience for your customers.
- Event Calendar. Attendees can easily find your events and add these to their schedule using the WordPress calendar.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso provides integration with leading payment gateways, allowing you to collect payments before running the events.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your theme and display venue information throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow you to create new prices that adjust the base ticket pricing for your system-default ticket.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 includes three comprehensive in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of registrants and check in everyone who attends.
- Admin Pre-approval. Be selective about who can attend your events.
- Private Comments On Contacts. Record observations about users on their profile and how you’ve interacted with them. Private commenting lets you keep a record of when users contacted you, your internal notes, and how you have assisted them.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events let you develop your event in your own time-frame without displaying it live on your website. You can continue working on your event until you are ready to publish it live to your site, or schedule to publish your event at a later date and time.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your organization’s profile to display throughout Event Espresso and your front-end templates. The organization fields include: company name, address, city, state, country, zip/postal code, email, telephone, tax number, logo, Facebook profile URL, Twitter URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ profile URL, Instagram URL.
- Default Tickets. If you create identical tickets for your events, you can easily set one of those tickets as your default ticket for the next time you create an event simply by ticking a checkbox.
- WYSIWYG Editor. Event Espresso uses the built-in WP WYSIWYG editor, allowing you to quickly and easily add photos and create your event descriptions without having to know HTML or CSS, just like any WP post.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso lets you interact with a community of experienced event managers, programmers, designers, marketers and business owners who also use the software. You can interact with other members of the Event Espresso community using their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media pages on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Social Sharing. Event attendees and your website visitors can tell others about your events using social media sharing buttons.
- 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 your page templates to display event information in your own custom way.
Additional features include:
- Hooks, Actions & Filters. These features allow web-based software developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso plugin that are fully compatible with the WordPress development platform.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 allows you to output a log file with debugging data which can be useful for web developers who are diagnosing application problems.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value: According to the mission statement on their web 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 goals, the software has been built using a modular and highly efficient model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also includes 40+ added features, including:
- Duplicating events – reduces the work of re-entering event information when creating new events.
- Default surcharge (the same as applying a service tax to all tickets).
- Default payment status.
Add-Ons
In addition to an amazing range of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow end-users to further expand the capabilities of managing your event.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add-on: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display upcoming events by location. 4 maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Custom Template Addon: 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 also be customized to show an event thumbnail image instead of a date.
- Social Coupons Integration Addon: If your web 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.
- Custom Files Addon: The Custom Files add-on provides PHP files that allow you to override certain aspects of the plugin.
- 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 ideal for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart addon allows you to offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart add on lets you control the environment for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to every seat.
- EE4 Event Ticketing Addon: The Ticketing add on gives you the capacity to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon adds the ability to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing add on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for managing check-in scans at the venue door. Customers 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 registrants and to validate tickets.
- EE4 Events Table Template Addon: The Events Table Template add on provides you with a simple and easy-to-use system that allows you to edit the look and feel 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 build their own custom templates using one of the included templates as a source template.
- JSON API Addon: The Event Espresso JSON API add-on allows other applications, web sites, mobile applications, etc… to access your Event Espresso information through an Application Programming Interface (API).
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin, including new addons.
For complete details about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
Testimonials
Here are a few of the testimonials that customers have posted about Event Espresso:
”My hope with this whole integration is to be able to show other school districts an affordable and easy solution to these registrations. I cannot believe how much money they are charged for less by other companies. This has the potential to save schools tens of thousands, which is huge right now.” Kelly, College Station Independent School District
”Your plugin rocks! Seriously, saved me hours on the phone setting up attendance manually. Kudos. :)” William, Petruzzo Photography
”You guys have done an AWESOME job with this system…promise me to keep up the excellent work you guys are doing, for as long as you can… Respect!” Robert Jarnroth, Jarnroth Digital Productions
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, trainer, conference promoter, or event consultant, there are simply unlimited possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a registered owner, search the support forum for useful ideas and practical suggestions to streamline your event management and registration workflow and enhance the experience of your event attendees.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with other 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 highly responsive end-user support, as so many of its satisfied plugin users attest:
“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 great support that includes access to support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase 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.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can count on to manage your events.
Product Price
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 options, however, you need to consider using one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This option allows you to install Event Espresso on one domain only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License – This edition allows you to configure Event Espresso on one site only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This option lets you install Event Espresso on five sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Price details for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the software sells for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Management & Registration Plugin For WordPress
Note: The above reflects the pricing when this review was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin author when you visit the website.
Additional Plugin Information
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the software’s online documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to your particular situation, or to report errors and give feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event booking and ticketing manager plugin, used by thousands of WordPress website owners.
If you are a WordPress user and you intend to run any event that requires scheduling dates, times and venues, registering attendees, and/or selling tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Manager Plugin
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