Does your business currently run or plan to run events that require managing bookings or registrations, such as seminars, group classes, non-profit fund-raisers, networking conferences, or even a big event such as a food fair, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Managing event sign-ups can be a time-consuming process. You may need to co-ordinate event schedules, dates, participant numbers, data administration, payments and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders and notifications, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to attendees.
There are lots of benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily replicate similar events, give event managers more control, create a better customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be quite costly.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-powered web site, you can easily set up a very inexpensive and highly professional online event booking system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress allows you to easily create an event and begin receiving bookings in just minutes.
(Set up multiple events and process online bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can use several event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up ticket sales, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event participants, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing follow-ups.
View detailed information about event attendees
Please Note: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is considerably different than the older EE 3, as the platform 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 move completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
Learn more here:
Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing online presence into a feature-rich and professional event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to 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 system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically doing away with the chore of processing registrations and bookings manually.
Essentially, you are making it easier for attendees to enrol themselves.
Allowing your participants to do the data themselves frees up your time and lets you invest more attention on delivering a better event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn shortly, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your attendees to experience.
Some additional benefits and advantages include the following:
- Lower Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd-party service. This is made possible by using a model where Event Espresso users buy the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then purchase add-ons when you need extra features.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new sign-ups any time of day or night. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social features (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event invite other people they know who may also be interested.
- Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign-up process can remain wholly in digital form, eliminating traditional paper consumption from tasks related to administration.
- Own Your Data. You control all the information acquired from event participants.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to its customers via standard features (these come with the software) and additional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many features to web site owners. Here are just a few:
- Quick and easy to install and set up. Be up and running in very little time.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In EE 4, events can have multiple dates and times (datetimes), that these can be managed from a single event.
- Customizable Event And Registration Page Designs. Create a unique look and feel for your events and enrollments page using Event Espresso’s unlimited template options and elements, and HTML or CSS.
- Ticket Selector. Present a number of ticket options to registrants so they can choose the ticket(s) that best fits their needs.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration enables event managers to configure the display of Google Maps on the event listing and event details sections.
- Default Prices. Create events quickly and easily with pre-configured default prices.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 comes with 3 comprehensive in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of registering event attendees at the door, or send in paper-based forms for manual inputting later.
- Ticketless Events. List events without requiring attendees to book tickets. Use Event Espresso for all forms of events, not only when tickets are for sale.
- XML RSS Event Feeds. Keep your site visitors updated about your events, bring in more visitors and reach a wider number of potential customers with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Optimized For The Most Up-To-Date WordPress Version. The Event Espresso 4 user interface follows all WordPress guidelines to help you build visually enhanced event pages that are responsive and mobile-friendly.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your organization’s profile to display throughout Event Espresso and your front-end templates. The organization data include: organization name, street address, city, state, country, zip/postal code, email, telephone number, tax number, company logo, Facebook URL, Twitter URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ URL, Instagram profile URL.
- Exportable Information. You can export all of your information gathered from event participants into Excel or CSV format for producing reports, planning marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, and so on.
- Venue Profiles. The venue manager in EE 4 lets details about a venue to appear throughout the Event Espresso admin and the public areas of your website to inform users of the location of your event. The venue record displays many standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also displays information such as venue seating capacity, venue site URL, phone number, physical and/or virtual location, Google map, etc. You can also display venue profiles in specific locations of your theme and on a venue listing page on your site where you can set up and display venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have booked for a specific venue.
- Registrant Profiles. You can manage your attendee’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their information organized and easily accessible.
- Social Sharing. Event attendees and website visitors can spread the word about your event using social sharing buttons.
- Transaction Reports. Event reports gives you data of your registrations and transactions, enabling you to measure the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and how much money has been collected.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows developers to have more control and options over the content of your event page and how your information displays to your readers.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registrations for regular website visitors whenever you need to carry out maintenance on your website. You can continue to work on the back-end of your site during maintenance mode.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And Value For Money: 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 goals, the software has been built using a modular and highly efficient model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also provides you with over 40 added features, including:
- Live-filtering when you search for events inside the Event Espresso admin.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing commonly asked questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page during the registration process.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
In addition to a very large number of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow users to further enhance the capabilities of managing your event.
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 the event does not have a featured image, a default image will be used.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Template Addon: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize the events with many datetimes into a dropdown list.
- Events Calendar Table Template Add-on: The Calendar Table template is a list template with a bold date and customizable “register now” button. The template can be customized to show the event thumbnail image instead of a date.
- EE4 Events Social Sharing Addon: Add social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that lets your registrants to post a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after registration.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration addon allows you to take full advantage of the WP user system. With the WP User Integration addon you can give users a special incentive by offering member pricing and overriding event prices when your 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 store personal details into their profile page allowing them to quickly register for events by auto-filling in their personal information on the event registration form. Users can also view previous events and pay for events.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Addon Editions: This add-on lets you involve your staff 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 WP users roles and assign them different permissions with different capabilities, allowing others to help you manage your events or events that others create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain parts of your WP 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.
- Multiple Event Registration Add-on: The Multi-Event registration addon gives potential attendees the ability to book multiple events at once. In each event listing attendees will be given the option to either register for a single event or add multiple events to their cart. With the Multi-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.
- EE4 Events Table View Template Add on: The Events Table Template add on provides you with 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 enables developers to build their own custom templates using one of the included templates as a base template.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp add-on lets you auto-register participants to a chosen mailing list or group within your MailChimp account.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software, including new add-ons.
To learn more about the latest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
User Feedback
Here are just some of the testimonials that satisfied users have written about Event Espresso:
”It’s been very comprehensive and covers exactly the aspects of event registration that we needed for our site plus some features that we didn’t even need but could still use in the future. Very Excellent Plugin!” Tristan Hall, Area 12:2 Youth Group
”Your plugin rocks! Seriously, saved me hours on the phone setting up attendance manually. Kudos. :)” William, Petruzzo Photography
”You guys have done an AWESOME job with this system…promise me to keep up the excellent work you guys are doing, for as long as you can… Respect!” Robert Jarnroth, Jarnroth Digital Productions
Useful Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, presenter, workshop planner, or event consultant, there are simply unlimited possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered owner, visit the support forum for new ideas and practical suggestions to streamline your event management and registration process and enhance the experience of your event customers.
Product Support
Event Espresso is compatible with most WordPress plugins and themes that follow WP coding standards. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive user support, as many of its customers 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
The plugin provides robust support with access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base 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.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts an established team of experienced web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely software you can rely on to run your events.
Event Espresso Pricing
Event Espresso is available in a number of editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software functionality, however, you should consider purchasing one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This license option allows you to configure Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This license option enables you to install Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This enables you to install Event Espresso on five sites. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Price details for the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Presently, the plugin is selling for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticketing Registration System For WordPress
Note: The pricing above was current when this article was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin developer when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Info
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the plugin’s documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to your particular situation, or to report problems and share feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WP event registration and ticketing management plugin, used and trusted by thousands of businesses.
If you are a WordPress user and you currently run any event that requires managing dates, times and venues (offline and online), booking attendees, and selling tickets, then you will probably not find a better plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Management
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