Do you currently run or plan to run events that need managing bookings, such as seminars, training courses, not-for-profit fundraisers, corporate functions, or even a big event like an exhibition, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Co-ordinating event registrations is a complex process. You will probably need to co-ordinate event schedules, available dates and spaces, registration numbers, data collection and admin, collecting payments and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to event participants.
There are lots of benefits to setting up an online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce costs, help you easily replicate previous events, give you more control, improve customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that this can be expensive.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-powered website or blog, you can easily set up an inexpensive and highly professional web-based event registration system.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticket Registration System
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily create multiple events and start processing bookings in just minutes.
(Set up multiple events and take online bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Customize your event registration forms
You can use a range of event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event participants, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing follow-ups.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Note: Currently, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is impressively different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the plugin has been revamped using a different structure to enable future growth. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually move completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
For more details go here:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current web site into a fully-featured and automated event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by virtually doing away with the need to process registrations and sign-ups manually.
Basically, you are enabling attendees to perform the registration themselves.
Letting your enrollees to do all of the data themselves frees up your time and lets you focus more energy on creating a memorable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will see in a moment, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management process that you want your customers to experience.
Some additional benefits include the following:
- Lower Costs: Event Espresso is a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third-party service. The cost is kept low through a model where you start with the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then buy optional add-ons when you need new features.
- More Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept new event bookings 24 hours a day. In addition, Event Espresso social features (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event invite other people they know who may be interested in attending.
- Green And Paperless Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event signup process is conducted entirely in digital form, eliminating typical paper consumption from tasks associated with admin and record-keeping.
- Own Your Data. You control all the data you acquire from your event participants.
Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to its customers through standard features (these are included with the plugin) and additional features that users can buy for an added cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many features to WP users. Here are just some of these:
- Quick and easy to install and configure. Ready to start using in minutes.
- Custom Event Registration Forms. With Event Espresso you can collect specific information using custom event registration forms on your site to plan a customized experience for your customers.
- Customized Notification Emails. Easily set up automatic registration and payment notification email messages to communicate with your customers.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso integrates with leading payment gateways, allowing you to collect booking fees before running events.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration allows you to customize the display of Google Maps on your event listing and event details pages.
- Default Prices. Create events quickly and easily with pre-configured system-default ticket pricing.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 comes with three built-in in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Manual Registration Option. you have the option of registering event attendees when they show up, or send in paper-based registration forms for manual processing later.
- Waiting Lists. Latecomers can join a waiting list if your event has reached maximum attendance. You can also make it a requirement wait-listed registrants pre-pay if you plan to expand numbers for your event.
- Public Commenting. Add social engagement to your event page by encouraging potential attendees to interact with you online via commenting and past participants to post comments that can help others choose whether or not to enroll. Moderation settings for public comments are configured via the WordPress commenting settings.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events allow you to develop an event page over multiple sessions without publishing it to your site. You can work on your events until you are ready to take things live, or schedule to publish your event at a future time and date.
- Country Settings. You can configure the country and currency settings to be used to run events, such as currency name, currency signs, decimal signs, characters and places, country codes, regions, and so on.
- Bulk Import Event Data. Event Espresso 4 provides an advanced importing capability that allows you to quickly upload bulk event data all at one time. You can export, edit and upload data for events, datetimes, tickets, pricing, custom registration questions, venues, terms, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Multiple Event Participant. Event Espresso 4 allows a single person or an organization to pay for multiple tickets and different types of tickets at once. Event managers specify how many people are able to register in a single session by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Registrant Profiles. You can manage your registrant’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their data organized.
- Social Sharing. Event participants and website visitors can tell others about your events using social sharing buttons.
- Accurate Event Attendee Manager. You control your participants’ details; who has enrolled, for what event and how much they 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 uses, send customized payment reminders and receipts and send messages to your participants on a person-by-person basis or all at once.
Additional features include:
- Hooks, Actions & Filters. These allow web-based software developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso plugin that are completely compatible with the WordPress development platform.
- Maintenance Mode. Pause registration capabilities for normal website visitors whenever you need to perform maintenance on your website. You can still work on the back-end of your site during maintenance mode.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & 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 company operates on a modular 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 over 40 additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes that includes attendee data in emails and newsletters.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse the same group of questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Add ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow customers to significantly enhance the functionality of events.
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.
- Recurring Events Manager Addon: The Recurring Events manager add-on lets you put your events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months ahead. You can add as many future events as you like. Event Espresso will automatically open and close registrations for all recurring events.
- Events Date Range Template Addon: The Date Range custom event list template allows your users to search for events that occur within a certain date range.
- EE4 Events Social Sharing Add-on: This addon adds 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 booking.
- Custom Files Add on: The Custom Files add on provides PHP files that let you override certain aspects of the Event Espresso plugin.
- 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 perfect for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart addon lets you offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart add-on lets you control the experience for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach single prices to every seat.
- Multiple Event Registration Add on: The Multi-Event registration add-on gives potential attendees the ability to book multiple events at once. In each event listing registrants will be given the option to either register for a single event or add multiple events to their shopping cart. With the Multiple 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 Add on: The Events Table Template add-on provides you with an easy-to-use system that lets you modify 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 web developers to build custom templates using one of the included templates as a base template.
- EE4 Infusionsoft Integration Addon: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and marketing software add-on, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture event attendee data, track registrations, and accept payments from your Event Espresso powered website.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software, including new add-ons.
For more information about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
Plugin Users – Testimonials
Below are some of the many testimonials that customers have written about Event Espresso:
”Broadcasting my support for Event Espresso will be a pleasure. I recently helped the Webmaster at a sister church configure your event manager for their site, so I can say with confidence and from experience, that Event Espresso is the best Event Manager plugin ever!” Philip Simpson, The Charlotte Church
”I have been using Event Espresso to run my festival and have been very happy with how it has worked out. They have provided tremendous support and their iPhone app is amazing and easy to use. I suggest using it for your event.” Alex Grant, Byron Spirit Festival
“Love the plugin, we only use it once a year for a race we have in February. This saved us tons of time in data entry. In addition, we had more runners register than any other year. We attribute that to the ease of registering online. Thanks for your work.” Ed, Friends of Oscar Scherer Park
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, teacher, show planner, or event management professional, there are just unlimited possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered user, spend a little time visiting the user forum for tips and practical suggestions to improve your event management and registration process or enhance the experience of your customers.
Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with all WP plugins and themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you find that you need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent support, as so many of its plugin end-users 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 plugin provides great support including access to support forums, in-depth 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 an established team of experienced WordPress developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely software you can rely on to manage your events.
Product Pricing
Event Espresso is available in different editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin features, however, you should consider purchasing one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This edition allows you to configure Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This edition allows you to configure Event Espresso on 1 site only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License – This license lets you configure Event Espresso on 5 sites. Cost 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. Currently, the software sells for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Management And Registration Software For WordPress
Please Note: The pricing above was current when this review was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin author when you visit the site.
Additional Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the plugin’s online documentation tools for answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to a specific use-case, or to notify developers about issues and give feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product site.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event booking and ticketing manager software, used and trusted by thousands.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you intend to run events that involve scheduling dates and venues, booking attendees, and/or booking tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Registration Software
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