Do you currently run or plan to run events that require co-ordinating bookings, such as workshops, community classes, not-for-profit fund raisers, corporate events, or even a large-scale event such as a school concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups can be a complicated and time-consuming process. You will probably need to co-ordinate calendar schedules, availability, attendee numbers, data administration, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to event registrants.
There are a number of benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower costs, help you easily copy settings for previous events, give you more control, improve user experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event booking system can be costly.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-powered site, you can install a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event booking solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Registration Software
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress plugin enables you to easily schedule your event and begin processing online registrations in just a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and process online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can use various event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up selling tickets, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your event participants, or integrating your event registration forms with an autoresponder system for ongoing notifications.
View detailed information about event attendees
Important: Currently, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is considerably different than the older EE 3, as the software has been rebuilt using a different structure to enable future growth. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually move completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
To learn more about the plugin go here:
Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website into a feature-rich and professional event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by literally eliminating the chore of processing registrations manually.
Basically, you are enabling attendees to enroll on their own.
Allowing your clients to do all of the data themselves frees up your time and lets you invest more attention on delivering a more unique event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn shortly, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management and booking process that you want your users to experience.
Additional benefits and advantages include the following:
- Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin provides you with an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own solution or using a 3rd-party provider. This is made possible through a model where users purchase the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and purchase addons only when you need extra features.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept new sign-ups any time of day or night. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social and marketing features and add-ons (see below) let people interested in attending your event invite others who may also be interested in attending.
- Green Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign-up process is completed wholly in digital form, eliminating traditional paper waste from tasks related to admin and record-keeping.
- All Information Belongs To You. You own all the information acquired from event attendees.
Features
The Event Espresso plugin delivers functionality to end-users via standard features (these are included with the plugin) and optional features that you can buy for an additional cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many unique built-in to WordPress users. Here are just a few:
- Fast and easy to install and implement. Be up and running in minutes.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso lets you set up as many different types of tickets as you need and specify separate prices, ticket quantity limits, etc.
- Customized Confirmation Emails. Easily configure customized automated booking and payment confirmation emails to communicate with your participants.
- Tax Admin & Reporting. Event Espresso 4 gives you a number of options to manage taxes for your event and provide reports of tax fee components to customers who purchase tickets. You can configure taxes globally and on a per-ticket basis.
- Smart Single Page Checkout Process. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically duplicate the primary registrant’s information for any additional participants.
- Default Prices. Create events quickly and easily with pre-configured system-default ticket pricing.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system allows you to validate tickets, speed up in-venue registrations, set up various check-in “stations” and track attendees.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. Event Espresso 4 lets you gain a better understanding of who your customers are and how they’ve done business with you.
- No Ticket Events. You can promote events without the requirement for registrants to get tickets. Event Espresso can be used for all forms of events, not just when tickets are for sale.
- Public Commenting. Add social a new level of interaction to your events page by encouraging potential prospects to ask questions about your event and previous participants to post reviews that can help others decide whether or not to register. Moderation settings for public comments are configured via the WordPress built-in commenting settings.
- Works With The Most Recent WP Version. The Event Espresso 4 user interface follows the WordPress guidelines to help you create beautifully-designed event pages that are responsive and mobile-friendly.
- Your Organization Settings. Configure your profile to be used throughout Event Espresso and your front-end templates. The organization data include: company name, address, city, state, country, zip/postal code, primary contact email address, telephone, VAT/tax number, logo, Facebook URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn URL, Pinterest profile URL, Google+ URL, Instagram URL.
- Upload Event Information. Event Espresso 4 provides a CSV-based importing feature that enables you to easily import bulk event data all at one time. You can export, edit and import information about events, datetimes, tickets, prices, registration questions, venues, terminology, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Register Multiple Participants. Event Espresso 4 allows a single person or a group to book multiple participants at the same time. You control how many attendees are able to register in a single registration by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Event Espresso Community. Event Espresso lets you engage with a community of experienced event managers, web developers, designers, digital marketers and businesses who also use the software. You can network with other members of the Event Espresso community through their community chat room, support forums, job board, and social media pages on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Social Sharing. Event attendees and website visitors can help promote your event using social media sharing buttons.
- Accurate Attendee Manager. You control your attendees’ date; who has registered, which event they have booked and what amount they’ve 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 attendee list to an Excel spreadsheet for additional uses, send customized payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your participants individually or collectively.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows developers to have more control and options over the content of your event pages and how your information displays to prospects.
- Control Box Management & Reorganization. Event Espresso leverages the WP user interface, which brings the ability to organize the user interface to suit your workflow processes. Each control box can be collapsed, re-arranged or deleted from your 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 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 inside the Event Espresso admin.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse a common set of questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Add-Ons
As well as a very large number of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow software users to significantly expand the capabilities of events.
Some of these addons include:
- EE4 Events Grid Template Add-on: Displays events in a pure CSS grid-like structure using the featured image. Hovering over the image will display further information. If the event does not have a featured image, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Custom Template Add-on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize many datetime events into a dropdown list.
- Events Date Range Template Add-on: The Date Range custom event list template lets your users to search for events that take place within a certain date range.
- Social Coupons Integration Add-on: If your web site is featured on Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can even specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration addon lets you take advantage of the WordPress user system. With the WP User Integration addon you can give users a special incentive by offering member pricing and overriding event prices when members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered users of the site will have access to these special events. Members can also enter personal information into their profile page allowing them fast registration for events by auto-filling in their personal information on the event registration form. Your users can also view previous events and make payment for events.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add-on Editions: This add-on lets you involve others in your organization to help manage your events and give new users permission to create events or regional managers the capacity 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, allowing staff to help you manage your events or the events that other people create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain sections of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain parts of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to allow users to control factors geographically for events and users, use the Roles and Permissions Pro add-on.
- Event Ticketing And Bar Scanning Add-on: The Ticketing add-on adds the capacity to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add-on gives you the capacity 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 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 attendees and to validate tickets.
- EE4 Events Table Template Add on: The Events Table Template add-on gives you a simple and 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 allows developers to design their own custom templates using one of the templates included 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 plugin addon, 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 details about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
User Testimonials
Below are a few of the testimonials that users have written about Event Espresso:
”Event Espresso is one of the nicest Event Managers (WP Plugin) I have come across.” Joe Distefano, Citizen Joe
”…it really does blow everything else that’s out there out of the water.” Chris Reynolds, Arcane Palette Creative Design
“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
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, presenter, event planner, or event professional, there are simply unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed user, go through the user forum for inspiration and practical ways to improve your event management workflow or enhance the experience of your event attendees.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso is compatible with all WP plugins and themes that follow standard WP coding guidelines. If you do need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great support, as so many of its end-users confirm:
”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
Event Espresso provides exceptional support that includes access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, premium 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 web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can depend on to manage your events.
Event Espresso Price
Event Espresso is available in a number of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin features, however, you need to consider purchasing one of the ”Pro” plugin editions below:
- Personal Edition – This edition allows you to install Event Espresso on 1 site only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License – This allows you to set up Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This license option enables you to run Event Espresso on 5 sites. It includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The cost to purchase the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the software is being retailed for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing: Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticket Registration Plugin For WordPress
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this review was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin seller when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional 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 software’s documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to a specific situation, or to report issues and leave feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product website.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event registration and ticketing manager plugin, used by thousands of companies.
If you own a WordPress website and you currently run events that involve scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), enrolling attendees, and/or selling seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
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