Does your business currently run or plan to run events that need managing registrations, such as workshops, training classes, charity fund raisers, corporate events, or even a large-scale event such as a regional festival, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Co-ordinating event bookings is a time-consuming process. You will probably need to co-ordinate event schedules, availability, registration numbers, data administration, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders and alerts, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to attendees.
There are many advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce costs, help you easily duplicate recurring events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event booking system can be very expensive.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-powered site, you can download and install a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event registration system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Manager Plugin
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily create your event and start accepting online bookings in a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and take online bookings)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed software that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize event registration forms
You can use multiple event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up selling tickets, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event attendees, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing follow-ups.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is considerably different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the platform has been revamped 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 price. The company plans to eventually phase out EE 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
Go here to learn more about the plugin:
Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages 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 existing online presence 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 even seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by virtually eliminating the chore of processing registrations and sign-ups manually.
Basically, you are facilitating attendees to enrol by themselves.
Allowing your participants to do the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you direct more energy on delivering a memorable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon see, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your attendees to experience.
Additional plugin benefits include:
- Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own software or using a third party service provider. This is made possible by using a model where you buy the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then purchase addons when you need additional features.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept new event bookings any time of day or night. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing add ons (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with other people they know who may also be interested.
- Green And Paperless Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign up process can be completed wholly online, significantly reducing traditional paper waste from tasks associated with administration.
- All Data Belongs To You. You own all the information gathered from your event participants.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to its users via built-in features (these are included with the plugin) and additional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many great features to WordPress users. Here are just a few:
- Fast and simple to install and configure. Ready to start accepting registrations in minutes.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso allows you to configure multiple ticket types and set separate prices, limits on ticket quantities, and more.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Attendees can easily find your upcoming events and add these to their schedule using the calendar.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso provides integration with leading payment gateways, enabling you to collect payments before running events.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration allows event managers to configure the settings of Google Maps on the event listing and event details pages.
- Spam Protection. Reduce the chance of spamming and bot software programs creating false registrations on your website by using reCAPTCHA option to provide human authentication.
- Promotional Codes. Leverage promotional and discount codes to encourage people to take action immediately, or simply make your offerings more appealing for others. This is also practical if you want to sell-out events close to timelines.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. EE 4 provides you with the tools to understand who your clients are and how you have done business with them. The Contact Profile page records the name, biography, contact details, event registration history, private comments, and more about each customer.
- Waiting Lists. Latecomers can subscribe to a waiting list if your event is full. You can also make it a requirement wait-list registrants pay for their spots if you plan to expand capacity for the event.
- XML RSS Feeds. Provide automatic updates to users, bring in more visitors and expand your content distribution with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- SEO Friendly Event Page Web Links. Keyword-rich Web links take advantage of your Permalinks configuration settings. SEO-friendly permalinks with relevant keywords enhance the context of your pages and improves your search rankings, helping you get a more targeted audience to your events.
- Country-specific Settings. You can configure the country and currency settings that will be used for your events, including currency, currency signs, decimal characters and places, country codes, regions, etc.
- Bulk Upload Events. EE 4 provides an advanced importing feature that enables you to easily upload bulk event data at once. You can export, edit and import details about events, datetimes, tickets, prices, custom registration questions, venue info, terminology, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Register Multiple Participants. Event Espresso 4 allows one person or people to book multiple attendees at the same time. You can control how many attendees are able to enrol in a single session by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Automatic Software Upgrading. Event Espresso offers easy 1-click upgrading to ensure that you have the newest features and to keep your software installation compatible with new versions of WordPress.
- Social Sharing. Event registrants and your website visitors can help 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 page templates to display events in your own custom way.
Additional features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming. Event Espresso is simple enough for basic users, and also extremely robust and customizable for higher end users and web developers. The bottom line is that by using Object-oriented programming (OOP), EE 4 facilitates more complex developments and customizations to the software.
- Control Box Management And Reorganization. Event Espresso lets you leverage the WP user interface, which gives you the ability to reorganize the user interface to match your workflow process. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or removed from your workflow configuration.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value For Money: 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 model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also comes with 40+ additional features, including:
- Live-filtering when you search for events within the Event Espresso admin.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse the same questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Add-Ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow end-users to significantly expand the functionality of events.
Some of these add-ons 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 Management Add on: The Recurring Events manager add on enables you to put events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months ahead. You can schedule as many future events as you need. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close bookings for all of these recurring events.
- 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 the event thumbnail image instead of the date.
- Events Social Sharing Addon: This add-on adds social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that lets your attendees to post a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after booking.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration addon lets you take full advantage of the WP user system. With the WP User Integration add-on you can give 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 site users will have access to your special events. Members can also input personal details into their profile page allowing them to quickly register for events by auto-filling in the personal information on the event booking form. Users can also look up previous events and make payment for future events.
- Seating Chart Add on: The seating chart add-on is suitable 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 add on lets you promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues directly from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart add-on lets you manage the experience for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach single pricing to each seat.
- EE4 Event Ticketing & Bar Scanning Add on: The Ticketing add on adds the capacity to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add-on adds the capacity to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing add on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for handling check-in scans at the venue door. 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 registrants and to validate tickets.
- EE4 Events Calendar Add on: This add-on uses the WP calendar to display events and event categories via an attractive graphical calendar.
- JSON API Add on: The Event Espresso JSON API add on permits other software applications, online tools, mobile apps, 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 add-ons.
For more information about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
Testimonials
Here are a few of the many testimonials that customers have posted about Event Espresso:
“It is a very, very slick plugin. It’s one of those plugins where you install it, change a couple of settings, and boom you’re selling tickets.” Brad Williams, WebDevStudios
“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
”I am in love with your product, I work with many educational institutions that hold classes/events and I will definitely recommend this to all of them, the only time I have seen a system this comprehensive and sophisticated is when an organization I worked with paid a programmer nearly $8,000 for a custom solution, and yet still there are features in your registration system that his didn’t have. Thank you so much for your help and patience.” Abdullah J.
Useful Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, teacher, event promoter, or event professional, there are just endless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, visit the forums for inspiration and practical ways to streamline your event management process or enhance the experience of your participants.
Product Support
Event Espresso works with with all WP plugins and WP themes that follow WP coding standards. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent user support, as so many of its customers confirm:
”No complaints here. Satisfied customer. You can teach us all few things about customer service. Thanks!” Charles
Event Espresso provides amazing support with access to a support forum, 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.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely software you can depend on to run and manage your events.
Software Price
Event Espresso is available in a range of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software options, however, you should consider downloading one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal Edition – This license option allows you to set up Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License – This license option allows you to set up Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This option enables you to configure Event Espresso on five sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Pricing for 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 is being retailed for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticketing Registration Software For WordPress
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this review was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin seller when you visit the website.
Additional Info
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the software’s online documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to your specific use-case, or to notify developers about bugs and give feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product web site.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event registration and ticketing management plugin, used by thousands of people.
If you are a WordPress user and you intend to run events that require managing dates and venues (offline and online), booking participants, or booking seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticket Registration System For WordPress
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