Do you currently run or plan to run events that need co-ordinating bookings or registrations, such as workshops, community courses, charity fund raisers, marketing functions, or even a big event such as an exhibition, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups is a complex process. You may be required to manage calendar schedules, date availability, attendee numbers, data processing and storage, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and issuing tickets to event participants.
There are lots of advantages to setting up an online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower costs, help you easily reproduce recurring events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be expensive.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-powered site, you can download and install a very inexpensive and highly professional online event registration solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Manager
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily create multiple events and start receiving registrations in just minutes.
(Set up multiple events and accept online bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich application that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can use several event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your attendees, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing follow-ups.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Note: Currently, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is completely different than the older Event Espresso 3, as it has been rebuilt using a different structure to allow for future expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software 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 using this plugin.
Learn more here:
Benefits
Here are just some of the many benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current website or blog into a feature-rich and professional event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response 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 solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by literally eliminating the need to process registrations and bookings manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating participants to enrol on their own.
Allowing your participants to do all of the data entry frees up your time and lets you direct more of your attention on creating a memorable event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon discover, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and booking process that you want your participants to experience.
Some additional plugin benefits include the following:
- Less Costs: Event Espresso is an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own software or using a third-party service. This is made possible through a model where you buy the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then purchase optional addons when you need extra functionality.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online registrations any time of day or night. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing add-ons (see below) let people interested in registering for your event share your information with others who may be interested in attending.
- Green And Paperless Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, your event signup process can be transacted entirely in digital form, significantly reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks related to admin and record-keeping.
- All Data Belongs To You. You own all the data you collect from your event participants.
Plugin Features
The Event Espresso plugin delivers functionality to its users through standard features (these come with the plugin) and additional features that customers can buy for an added cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers a number of features to WP users. Here are just a few:
- Fast and simple to install and implement. Be up and running in minutes.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In Event Espresso 4, events can have multiple dates and times (datetimes), and these can be managed from one single event.
- Customized Confirmation Emails. Easily configure custom automated booking and payment confirmation emails to communicate with event attendees.
- Ticket Selector. Present multiple ticket options to prospects and let them choose the ticket(s) that best fits their needs.
- Smart Single Page Checkout. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is smart, fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically duplicate the primary registrant’s details for any additional participants.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow event managers to create new prices that adjust the base ticket price of your default ticket.
- Promotional Codes. Leverage promotional and discount codes to encourage visitors to make a decision without delays, or simply make your offerings more attractive for others. Also useful for helping to increase sales of events close to deadlines.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. Event Espresso 4 lets you know who your clients are and how you have done past business with them. The Contact Profile section records the name, biography, contact details, event registration information, comments, and more about each registrant.
- Event Manager Pre-approval. Control who can attend your events.
- RSS Event Feeds. Provide automatic updates to your users, bring in more visitors and reach a wider audience with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Optimized For The Latest WP Version. The Event Espresso 4 user interface follows all WordPress guidelines to help you build visually attractive event pages that are easier to use and mobile-friendly.
- Country-specific Settings. You can configure the country and currency settings that will be used throughout Event Espresso, including currency, currency symbols, decimal signs, characters and places, country codes, states or provinces, etc.
- Exportable Data. You can export all of your information gathered from your event customers into Excel or CSV format for producing advanced reports, devising new marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, etc..
- Event Venue Management. The venue manager in EE 4 allows details about venues to be published throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front-end of your website to inform attendees of your event’s location. The venue record has many standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also lets you republish venue information like venue capacity, venue web address, venue phone number, venue location details, map, etc. You can also display venues on different locations on your WordPress theme and on a venue listing page on your website where you can set up and reuse venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a given venue.
- Registrant Records. You can manage your attendee’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their information organized and easily accessible.
- Social Sharing. Event registrants and website visitors can help increase exposure for your event using social media share buttons.
- Categorize Events. If you have several different types of events like free and paid, workshops and breakout sessions, different types of courses, etc. you can categorize them to help your participants to locate what they’re looking for. You can display all the events in a category on an event category page, make events searchable by category, and color-code your events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make these easier to find, in addition to suggesting other events in the categories that appeal to your existing customers.
Additional features include:
- Hooks, Actions And Filters. These features allow developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso software that are completely compatible with WordPress.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 allows you to output a log file with debugging data which can be helpful for web developers who are potential software problems.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value For Money: According to the philosophy stated 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 software has been built using a modular that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also provides you with over 40 added features, including:
- Duplicating events – reduces the work of re-entering event data when creating new events.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing a series of questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Addons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow end-users to significantly enhance the functionality of managing an event.
Some of these addons include:
- EE4 Events Grid Template Addon: 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 available, a default image will be used instead.
- Recurring Events Manager Add-on: The Recurring Events management add on enables you to put your events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months ahead. You can add as many events in advance as you like. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close bookings for all of these recurring events.
- Events Date Range Template Add on: The Date Range custom event list template allows your users to search for events that take place within a certain date range.
- Events Social Sharing Add-on: This add on adds social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that allows your registrants to post a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after booking.
- Custom Files Add on: The Custom Files addon provides PHP files that allow you to bypass certain aspects of the Event Espresso plugin.
- Seating Chart Add on: 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 add-on lets you promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart add on lets you manage the experience for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to each seat.
- Multi-Event Registration Add-on: The Multi-Event registration addon gives potential attendees 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 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 Table Template Addon: The Events Table Template add-on provides event managers with a simple and easy-to-use system that lets you change 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 enables developers to design custom templates using one of the templates included as a base template.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp add-on allows you to auto-register attendees to a selected mailing list or group within MailChimp.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add-ons.
For full details about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
User Testimonials
Here are just some of the many great testimonials that users have posted about Event Espresso:
”My clients have used Event Espresso for Transportation (Cadet Bus for leave), Parties (tailgates and brewery tours), and Horse-back riding lessons and camps. What a terrific plug-in and fantastic support from Seth!” Nina, Blue Iris Web Design
”I searched long and hard to find something that would serve my needs. This is, by far, the most complete and comprehensive solution I have found.” Bill Hepper, We Teach Live
”Thank you, we just did 2 sell out seminars of 50 attendees in 48 hours using Event Espresso and it was awesome. My wife was able to pick up on the processing backend with ease. You have done a great job on getting this system together – very simple, clear and well laid out With powerful functionality. I am so glad I dumped the old booking application we had and gave Event Espresso a go. Just wanted to say thanks, and thanks for the very patient, friendly and speedy assistance in helping me to get it all set up at the start. Many thanks to you and your team. A grateful customer.” Nicholas de Castella, Emotional Intelligence Trainings
Plugin Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, presenter, event promoter, or event management professional, there are simply unlimited possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a licensed user, visit the forums for inspiration and practical suggestions to streamline your event management and registration process and enhance the experience of your event customers.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with other WordPress plugins and themes that follow standard WP development guidelines. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent technical support, as many of its clients attest:
”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 great support with access to support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase 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 solid track record of support, so this is definitely software you can depend on to organize and manage your events.
Software Pricing
Event Espresso is available in a number of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you need to consider using one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This license enables you to configure Event Espresso on one domain only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This enables you to install Event Espresso on one 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 run Event Espresso on five sites. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 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 specials being offered. When we last checked, the plugin retails for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Note: The pricing above was current when this review was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin developer when you visit the site.
Additional Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the software’s online documentation pages for answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to a particular use-case, or to report bugs and share feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event booking and ticketing management software, used and trusted by thousands of users.
If you own a WordPress website and you plan to run any event that requires scheduling dates, times and venues, registering attendees, or booking tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Registration Plugin
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