Do you currently run or plan to run events that require bookings, such as seminars, community courses, non-profit fundraisers, corporate events, or even a big event like a dance party, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups can be a time-consuming process. You may be required to co-ordinate calendar schedules, event dates, attendee numbers, data administration, payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders and alerts, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to event registrants.
There are lots of advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce costs, help you easily duplicate recurring events, give event managers more control, improve user experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that this can be quite expensive.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-based website, you can easily set up a very inexpensive and professional web-based event registration system.
Presenting …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily create your event and start processing online registrations literally in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and accept online event registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich software that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can use a range of event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event participants, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing updates.
View detailed information about event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is fundamentally different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the software is being rebuilt using a different structure to accommodate future growth and expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually retire Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and advantages of using this plugin.
More info:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just some of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current online presence into a fully-featured and automated event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to attendee limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by virtually doing away with the need to process registrations and signups manually.
Essentially, you are making it easier for participants to perform the registration by themselves.
Letting your participants to do the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you focus more of your time on creating a better event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon discover, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your customers to experience.
Some additional benefits of the plugin include:
- Less Costs: The Event Espresso plugin provides you with a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own system or using a 3rd party provider. This is made possible by using a model where users start with the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then buy optional add ons when you need new functionality.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online event signups 24/7. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing addons (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event invite their friends who may also be interested.
- Green Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, the event registration process can remain entirely in digital form, reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks related to admin and record-keeping.
- All Information Belongs To You. You control all the information you obtain from your event participants.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to users via built-in features (these are included with the plugin) and optional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many built-in to web site owners. Here are just some of these:
- Fast and easy to install and use. Ready to start accepting registrations in minutes.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In EE 4, events can have multiple dates and times (called datetimes), that these can be managed from a single event.
- Customized Confirmation Emails. Easily configure customized automatic registration and payment confirmation email messages to communicate with your customers.
- Ticket Selector. Present a number of ticket options to prospects and let them purchase the ticket(s) that will best fit their needs.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your theme and display attendee data throughout other areas of your site.
- Spam Protection. Reduce the likelihood of spammers and bot software programs creating false registrations on your web site with reCAPTCHA settings that validate human activity.
- Mobile Registration And Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system allows you to authenticate tickets, speed up door registrations, create multiple check-in “stations” and track participants.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of booking event participants at the door, or send in paper registration forms for manual inputting later.
- Event Manager Pre-approval. Control who can attend your events.
- XML RSS Feeds. Keep your website readers updated about your events, drive quality traffic and expand your content reach with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events let you develop an event page over time without publishing it to your site. You can keep editing your event pages until you are ready to publish it live on your site, or schedule to publish your event pages at a later date and time.
- Country-specific Settings. Event managers can configure the country and currency settings that will be used to run events, such as currency, currency signs, decimal characters and places, country codes, regions, and so on.
- Exportable Data. You can output all of your data collected from your event participants into Excel or CSV format for creating advanced reports, devising new marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, and so on.
- Event Venue Profiles. The venue manager feature in EE 4 lets information about a venue to be made available throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front-end of your website to inform registrants of the location of your event. The venue profile has many standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also includes details like venue seating capacity, venue website, venue phone number, physical, Google map, etc. You can also list venue profiles in various areas on your WP theme and on a venue listing page on your site where you can set up and publish venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a specific venue.
- Automatic Plugin Installation Upgrades. Event Espresso provides simple one-click upgrading to make sure that you have the newest features and to keep your plugin installation compatible with the latest version of WordPress.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential clients who have not paid in full for their booking with a standard but personalized invoice with one click. Your invoices will address registered customers who have not paid their registration yet by name, give them the balance owing, and include links to the event, a payment link and a link where they can download the invoice.
- 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 even customize your templates to display event information in your own unique way.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows you to have more control and options over your content and how your information displays to visitors.
- Maintenance Mode. Pause registrations for regular site traffic when site maintenance is needed. You can continue to work on the back-end of your site during maintenance mode.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value: 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 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 version of Event Espresso also provides you with over 40 added features, including:
- Live-filtering when you search for events in the Event Espresso admin.
- Default surcharge (the same as adding a service tax to all tickets).
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
In addition to an incredible number of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow you to significantly enhance the capabilities of the event management process.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Addon: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display scheduled 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 organizes many datetime events into a dropdown list.
- Events Date Range Template Addon: The Date Range custom event list template lets your users to search for events that take place within a certain date range.
- Social Media Buttons Addon: The social media addon displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media add on comes free with any of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- Custom Template Add-on: The Custom Template add-on is capable of displaying your event lists in a variety of visually exciting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add-on Editions: This addon lets you include other staff in your organization to help manage your events and give new users permission to create events or regional managers permission 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, so others can help you manage your events or events that others create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain sections of your WordPress 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 addon.
- Event Ticketing Add-on: The Ticketing add-on gives you the capacity to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add on gives you the ability to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing addon includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode 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 barcode scanner can be used for checking in or checking out attendees and to validate tickets.
- EE4 Events Table Template Add on: The Events Table Template add-on gives event managers an easy-to-use system that lets you modify the design of your event lists. It comes with a simple table template with category filters, table search, table paging and more. It also enables web developers to design their own custom templates using one of the included templates as a base template.
- MailChimp Integration Add-on: The MailChimp addon allows you to automatically register attendees to a specified mailing list or group within your MailChimp account.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin, including new addons.
For more information about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
User Feedback
Here are just some of the many testimonials that plugin users have written about Event Espresso:
”Tri-South, Inc is using Event Espresso to manage the course catalog, event ticketing, and class registration. [As their developer] I have customized a few items to make the site and plugin a seamless integration. The client is very pleased!” Jenifer Design
”You can tell that the Event Espresso team is really passionate about their work, and that they care and spend a lot of time helping people work with their plugin and use it with their events – it’s something every WordPress service should aim for.” Ryan Imel, WPCandy
”I’m using it on multiple sites and enjoying it. It’s simple and as others have stated… fast service and real help.” Arlen Nagata
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, trainer, event promoter, or event consultant, there are simply countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a registered user, search the support forum for tips and practical ways to streamline your event management and registration workflow and improve the experience of your customers.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso works with with all WordPress plugins and 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 users confirm:
”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 incredible support with access to support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, custom development 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 a plugin you can depend on to organize and manage your events.
Product Price
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software functionality, however, you may want to consider using one of the premium plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This enables you to configure Event Espresso on one domain only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This option enables you to run Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This allows you to install Event Espresso on 5 domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The cost of purchasing the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. When we last checked, the software is being retailed for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Management
Note: The pricing above was current at the time this review was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin author when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding 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 documentation tools for answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and 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 web site.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WP event booking and ticketing management software, used by thousands of WordPress website owners.
If you own a WordPress web site and you currently run events that require managing dates and venues, booking attendees, or selling tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Management System
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