Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that require managing bookings, such as seminars, group courses, non-profit fund raisers, networking conferences, or even a big event such as an exhibition, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Co-ordinating event bookings can be a complex process. You need to manage calendar schedules, availability, participant numbers, data entry, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders and alerts, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to attendees.
There are lots of advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower expenses, help you easily replicate previous events, give event managers more control, improve user experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that this can be very costly.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-powered website, you can download and install a very inexpensive and professional online event booking system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticket Registration Software For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP enables you to easily set up an event and begin receiving registrations in just minutes.
(Set up multiple events and receive online bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich software that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize event registration forms
You can employ multiple event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up ticket sales, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your event attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media and email marketing systems.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their software: EE 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is completely different than the older Event Espresso 3, as it has been redeveloped using a different structure to enable future growth. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually retire EE 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
More info:
Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website or blog into a fully-featured and automated event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by practically eliminating the chore of processing registrations manually.
Essentially, you are enabling participants to register themselves.
Letting your enrollees to do all of the data entry frees you up from doing admin work and lets you invest more of your time on organizing a more unique event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will see shortly, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and booking process that you want your attendees to experience.
Some additional benefits of the plugin include the following:
- Reduced Costs: Event Espresso gives you an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd party provider. This is made possible through a model where Event Espresso users purchase the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then buy optional add ons only when you need new functionality.
- Higher Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new event signups 24/7. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social and marketing features and addons (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event share your information with friends who may also be interested in attending.
- Green Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, the event registration process can remain wholly online, eliminating typical paper waste from tasks associated with administration.
- All Information Belongs To You. You own all the data gathered from event attendees.
Plugin Features
The Event Espresso plugin provides functionality to end-users via built-in features (these come with the software) and additional features that you can buy for an additional cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers a number of great features to site owners. Here are just some:
- Quick and easy to install and implement. Ready to start accepting registrations in very little time.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso lets you configure as many different types of tickets as you need and specify separate pricing options, limits on ticket quantities, etc.
- Customizable Event Page Designs. Match your site’s design for your events and bookings page using Event Espresso’s unlimited template options and elements, plus HTML and/or CSS.
- Tax Admin & Reporting Options. Event Espresso 4 provides a number of ways to handle taxes for an event and report tax fees to registrants when purchasing tickets. Event managers can administer taxes globally and on a per-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your theme and display events data throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow event managers to create new prices that adjust the default ticket price of your system-default ticket.
- In-App Documentation Systems. Event Espresso 4 includes three detailed in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. EE 4 provides you with the tools to understand who your customers are and how you’ve done past business with them. Your Contact Profile section records the name, biography, contact details, event registration data, private comments, and more about each client.
- Event Manager Pre-approval. Be selective about who can and cannot attend your events.
- Private Notes On Contacts. Record comments about a contact on their profile and how you have helped them. Private notes lets you keep a record of when users contacted you, your internal observations, and how you have interacted with them.
- Optimized For The Most Up-To-Date WP Version. The Event Espresso 4 user interface follows all WordPress guidelines to help you create beautiful event pages that are responsive and mobile-friendly.
- Your Organization Settings. Configure your profile to display throughout the software and your WP themes. The organization data include: organization name, street address, city, state, country, zip code, email, telephone, tax number, business logo, Facebook URL, Twitter URL, LinkedIn URL, Pinterest profile URL, Google+ URL, Instagram URL.
- Bulk Import Event Data. EE 4 provides an advanced importing feature that allows you to import a lot of event data at once. You can export, edit and import details about events, datetimes, ticketing information, prices, registration questions, venues, terminology, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Event Venue Management. The venue manager feature in Event Espresso 4 lets information about venues to be published throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front end of your website to inform site visitors of your event’s location. The venue record displays many of the standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also includes details such as venue seating capacity, venue web address, telephone number, venue location details, Google map, etc. You can also display venue profiles throughout various areas of your theme as well as on a venue archive 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.
- Registrant Records. You can manage your registrant’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their information organized.
- Staff Member Management. Save time and keep your data organized by reusing team member profiles for multiple events or displaying their profile using a shortcode in your event description.
- Categorize Events. If you have a number of types of events like free and paid, workshops and mastermind sessions, different types of programs and program modules, etc. you can categorize these to make it easier for your registrants to locate what they’re searching for. You can list all events in a category on a custom event category page, make all events searchable by category, and colour-code events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make them easier to find, in addition to suggesting other events in the categories that appeal to your existing customers.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows developers to have more control and options over the content of your events and how your information displays to prospects.
- Maintenance Mode. Pause registration capabilities for regular site traffic when website maintenance is required. You can continue to work on your content during maintenance mode.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And 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 effective model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also includes over 40 additional features, including:
- Live-filtering when you search for events inside 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
In addition to a very large number of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow customers to further enhance the capabilities of the event management process.
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, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Manager Add-on: The Recurring Events management add on lets you put events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months … even years in advance. You can create as many future events as you like. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close bookings for all recurring events.
- Events Category Accordion Template Addon: The Category Accordion template shows categories in a simple list. Clicking a category name displays all events related to that category and closes previously open categories.
- Social Media Buttons Add-on: The social media add-on displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media add on comes free with all of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration addon lets you take advantage of the WP user system. With the WP User Integration addon you can give users a special incentive by offering member prices and overriding event pricing when members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered users of the website can have access to these special events. Members can also enter 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.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add-on Versions: This add on lets you include 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 assign them different permissions with different capabilities, so others can help you manage your events or the events that others create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain areas of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain parts of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to create geographic regions for other people to manage events, use the Roles and Permissions Pro add-on.
- EE4 Event Ticketing & Bar Scanning Addon: The Ticketing addon adds the ability to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon adds the ability to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing add on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for managing check-in scans at venues. People 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 Calendar Add-on: This WordPress events calendar displays events and categories of events in an attractive graphical calendar.
- JSON API Addon: The new Event Espresso JSON API add on gives permission for other software applications, websites, mobile apps, etc… to access your Event Espresso content through an API (Application Programming Interface).
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin, including new add-ons.
To learn more about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website here:
Plugin Users – Testimonials
Here are a few of the many testimonials that satisfied users 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
”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 played around with the free version for a couple hours then purchased the Pro for a client. Love it and so do they! Sweetest Event plugin I have tried.” Bill Chambers, Bill Chambers Design
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, presenter, concert promoter, or event management consultant, 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 licensed owner, search the support forum for new ideas and practical ways to improve your event management workflow or enhance the experience of your event attendees.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with other WP plugins and WordPress themes that follow standard WordPress development guidelines. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent support, as many of its plugin customers confirm:
”These guys are right on any problem or issue or even general questions. You can’t really put a value high enough on the kind of support these guys offer.” Mark Wigston, Muskoka Graphics
The software provides great support including access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, custom development 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.
In addition, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely software you can rely on to run your events.
Event Espresso Cost
Event Espresso is available in a range of editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin features, however, you should consider purchasing one of the premium plugin versions below:
- Personal Edition – This option lets you set up Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This enables you to install Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This lets you configure Event Espresso on five sites. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Current pricing for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Presently, the software is being retailed for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Please Note: The pricing above was current when this article was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the site.
Additional Plugin Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the software’s online documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to a particular situation, 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 information pages.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WP event booking and ticketing management software, used by thousands of WP users.
If you own a WordPress website and you currently run events that require managing dates, times and venues (offline and online), booking participants, and/or reserving tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable WP plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
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