Does your business currently run or plan to run events that need co-ordinating bookings, such as workshops, community courses, non-profit fund-raisers, networking functions, or even a big event like a music concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Managing event sign-ups is a time-consuming process. You will most likely need to manage scheduling, availability, registration numbers, data collection and admin, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to event attendees.
There are many advantages to setting up an automated web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower expenses, help you easily duplicate previous events, give event managers more control, create a more enjoyable customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event registration system can be expensive.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-based website, you can install an inexpensive and professional web-based event booking system.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticket Registration Software
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily set up your event and start receiving online registrations in just minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and take online event registrations)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich application that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize your event registration forms
You can use a number of event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up ticket-selling, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your participants, or integrating your event bookings with social media sites like Facebook.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Please Note: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their software: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is fundamentally different than the older EE 3, as the plugin has been redeveloped 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 price. The developers aim to eventually move completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
More info:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just a few 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 website into a fully-featured event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to attendee limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by literally doing away with the chore of processing registrations and signups manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating participants to perform the registration by themselves.
Allowing your enrollees to do all of the data themselves frees you up from doing admin work and lets you spend more of your time on planning a better event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will see in a moment, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management process that you want your clients to experience.
Some additional benefits and advantages include the following:
- Less Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to building your own software or using a third party provider. The cost is kept to a minimum by using a model where users start with the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and buy add-ons only if you need extra functionality.
- Higher Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online event sign-ups 24 hrs a day. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing add ons (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event invite others who may also be interested.
- Paperless Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, the event signup process remains entirely online, significantly reducing traditional paper waste from tasks associated with enrollment.
- All Information Belongs To You. You control all the data you collect from your event attendees.
Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to users through standard features (these are included with the plugin) and optional features that users can buy for an added cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many great features to site owners. Here are just a few of these:
- Fast and simple to install and set up. Ready to start accepting registrations in very little time.
- Custom Event Registration Forms. Event Espresso lets you gather unique information using a custom event registration form on your site to create a customized experience for your attendees.
- Customizable Event Designs. Create a unique look and feel for your events and bookings page using Event Espresso’s limitless template options and components, and HTML or CSS.
- Tax Admin And Reporting. Event Espresso 4 gives you a number of ways to handle taxes for your event and report tax fee components to registrants who purchase tickets. You can administer taxes globally or on a per-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your theme and display events data throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Prices. Set up events quickly and easily with pre-configured default ticket pricing.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system allows you to authenticate tickets, speed up in-venue registrations, set up various check-in “stations” and track participants.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. Event Espresso 4 provides you with the tools to gain a better understanding of who your customers are and how you’ve done business with them. Your Contact Profile page stores updated records like the name, biography, contact details, event registration information, private comments, etc. about each attendee.
- Waiting Lists. Latecomers can subscribe to a waiting list if your event has reached maximum attendance. You can also specify that wait-listed registrants pre-pay if you plan to add more capacity for your event.
- Private Commenting On Contacts. Keep observations about contacts on their profile. Private notes helps you keep records of when event attendees contacted you, your internal comments, and how you have helped them.
- Optimized For The Most Recent Version Of WordPress. The EE 4 user interface follows all WordPress guidelines to help you create highly aesthetic event pages that are easier to use and mobile-friendly.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your organization’s profile to display throughout the plugin and your front-end templates. Your organization data include: business name, street address, city, state, country, zip code, primary contact email address, phone number, tax number, company logo, Facebook URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ profile URL, Instagram profile URL.
- Default Tickets. If you create similar tickets for your events, you can automatically set one of those tickets as your default ticket for the next time you create an event simply by checking a box.
- Venue Management. The venue manager feature in EE 4 allows information about a venue to be published throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front end of your website to inform users of the location of your event. The venue profile has many standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also displays information like venue capacity, venue web address, phone number, venue address, Google map, etc. You can also list all of your event venues in different parts in your theme as well as on a venue archive page on your website where you can set up and reuse venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a specific venue.
- Automatic Plugin Updating. Event Espresso provides simple 1-click updates to make sure that you have the latest features and to keep your plugin installation up-to-date with the latest version of WordPress.
- Team Member Manager. Save time and keep your data organized by reusing staff profiles for multiple events or displaying their profile using a shortcode in an event description.
- Accurate Event Attendee Manager. You control your participants’ records; who has enrolled, which event they have booked and what amount they have paid. With the attendee manager, you can get an overview of registered attendees and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export an event attendee list to a CSV file for additional reports, send customized payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your attendees individually or collectively.
Extra 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.
- Control Box Management And Reorganization. Event Espresso lets you leverage the WP user interface, which brings the ability to reorganize the user interface to match your workflow processes. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or removed from the workflow configuration.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & 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 objectives, the software has been built using a modular and efficient model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium version of Event Espresso also includes 40+ added features, including:
- Live-filtering when searching for events in the Event Espresso admin.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing a series of questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow end-users to further expand the functionality of events.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display the scheduled events by location. Four maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Manager Add on: The Recurring Events manager add-on allows you to put events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months ahead. You can schedule as many future events as you need. Event Espresso will automatically open and close bookings for all 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: Add social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that allows your registrants to share a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after registration.
- Custom Files Addon: The Custom Files add-on lets you bypass certain aspects of the Event Espresso plugin.
- Seating Chart Add-on: The seating chart add on is 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 offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues directly from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart add on lets you manage the environment for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to each seat.
- EE4 Event Ticketing And Bar Scanning Addon: The Ticketing addon adds the ability to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon gives you the capacity to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing addon includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for handling check-in scans at the 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 Table Template Add on: The Events Table Template add on gives event managers an 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 design custom templates using one of the included templates as a source template.
- EE4 Infusionsoft Integration Add on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and business marketing plugin add on, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture customer data, track enrollments, and accept payments from your Event Espresso powered website.
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 latest Event Espreso features and add ons, visit the plugin website:
Customer Feedback
Below are a few of the many testimonials that satisfied customers have posted about Event Espresso:
”Event Espresso rocks! I use it for my dance class registrations. Unlike most dance studios where people have to call or send an email in advance, Event Espresso puts a registration form right there in front of the user and allows me to collect valuable information from the user during the registration process with custom questions such as “Do you have previous dance experience?” or “How did you hear about us?”. It also gives my site a professional look and feel.” Ral, Ral’eau Salsa Dance Company
”Over the next 5-6 years we should be able to claim that we saved the company over $100,000 – Thanks Event Espresso!” David Waterman, KT Benefits & InkItDigital.com
”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 a motivational speaker, trainer, show promoter, or event professional, there are just unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a registered owner, visit the support forum for useful ideas and practical suggestions to improve your event management process and enhance the experience of your registrants.
Event Espresso Support
Event Espresso works with with other WordPress plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress development rules. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent support, as many of its users confirm:
”No complaints here. Satisfied customer. You can teach us all few things about customer service. Thanks!” Charles
The Event Espresso plugin provides incredible support that includes access to a support forum, 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.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts an established team of experienced web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can count on to organize and manage your events.
Product Cost
Event Espresso is available in various editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you may want to consider purchasing one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This edition enables you to configure Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This lets you run Event Espresso on one domain only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This license allows you to run Event Espresso on 5 domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The price of the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, the software sells for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing when this review was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Plugin Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the plugin’s documentation tools for answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to a specific situation, or to report errors and share feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WP event booking and ticketing management plugin, used and trusted by thousands of people.
If you are a WordPress user and you currently run events that require scheduling dates and venues, booking attendees, and booking seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management
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