Do you currently run or plan to run events that require handling bookings, such as seminars, community courses, charity fundraisers, corporate functions, or even a large-scale event such as a dance party, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Managing event registrations is a complex process. You have to manage event schedules, event dates, attendee numbers, data entry, payments and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders and alerts, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to attendees.
There are lots of advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower costs, help you easily duplicate similar events, give you more control, improve customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that this can be quite expensive.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-based web site, you can download and install an inexpensive and highly professional web-based event booking solution.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Management System
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP allows you to easily set up your event and start receiving registrations in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and accept online event bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Customize registration forms
You can use a range of event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up ticket-selling, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media and autoresponders.
View detailed information about event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is fundamentally different than the older Event Espresso 3, as it is being rebuilt using a different structure to accommodate 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 Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Benefits
Here are just some of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
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 attendee limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically eliminating the chore of processing registrations and sign-ups manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating participants to perform the registration on their own.
Letting your clients to do the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you direct more resources on delivering a more enjoyable event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn in a moment, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management process that you want your clients to experience.
Additional benefits include:
- Lower Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd-party provider. The cost is kept to a minimum by using a model where users pay for the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then purchase addons when you need new functionality.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept online event registrations outside normal business hours. In addition, Event Espresso social features and addons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event share your information with their friends who may be interested in attending.
- Green Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event registration process remains wholly in digital form, reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks associated with admin and record-storage.
- Own Your Information. You control all the information gathered from event participants.
Plugin Features
The Event Espresso software provides functionality to users via standard features (these are included with the software) and optional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers a number of great features to WP users. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and easy to install and use. Ready to start using in no time.
- Custom Event Registration. Event Espresso lets you gather unique information using custom event registration forms on your website to create a customized experience for your clients.
- Customizable Event Page Designs. Customize your events and bookings page using Event Espresso’s limitless template options and components, plus HTML and/or CSS.
- Ticket Selector. Present multiple ticket options to prospects and let them choose the ticket(s) that will best fit their needs.
- Intelligent Single Page Checkout Process. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically duplicate the primary attendee’s registration information for any additional registrants.
- Spam Protection. Reduce the risk of spamming and bot software programs making fake registrations on your site with reCAPTCHA option to authenticate human activity.
- Promotional Codes. Offer promotional and discount codes to incentivize prospects to register now, or simply make your events more affordable for price-sensitive customers. This is also practical if you want to sell out events close to timelines.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. EE 4 lets you know who your clients are and how you’ve done business with your clients. Your Contact Profile page stores the name, biography, contact information, event registration history, private comments, etc. about each customer.
- No Ticket Events. Set up events without the requirement for attendees to book tickets. Event Espresso can be used for all kinds of events, not just those that require tickets.
- Private Contact Comments. Record comments about event attendees on their profile. Private commenting helps you keep a record of when event participants contacted you, your internal comments, and how you have assisted them.
- Works With The Most Recent Version Of WordPress. The Event Espresso 4 user interface follows the WordPress guidelines to help you create aesthetically beautiful event pages that are responsive and mobile-friendly.
- Multi-Language Plugin. Event Espresso is is available in over 15 languages, with more languages planned.
- Default Tickets. If you find yourself creating similar tickets for your events, you can easily set one of those tickets as your default ticket for your new events simply by ticking a checkbox.
- Register Multiple Participants. Event Espresso 4 allows one person or an organization to order multiple tickets and different ticket types at the same time. Event managers specify how many people can register in one booking session by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Automatic Updating. Event Espresso provides simple one-click plugin installation updating to make sure that you have the newest features and to keep your installation compatible with new versions of WordPress.
- Social Sharing. Event attendees and site visitors can help create a wider exposure for your event using social media share buttons.
- Accurate Participant Management. You control your customers’ date; who has enrolled, for what event and what amount they have paid. With the attendee manager, you can get a quick overview of registered participants and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export a list of event attendees to Excel for additional reports, send custom payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your participants on a person-by-person basis or collectively.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows you to have more control and options over your event pages and how the information displays to readers.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. EE 4 allows you to generate a log file with debugging data which can be helpful for web developers who are troubleshooting.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And Value: According to the mission statement on their site, Event Espresso’s goal 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 and highly efficient model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium version of Event Espresso also includes over 40 additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes that includes customer data in emails and email newsletters.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse commonly asked questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow users to further enhance the capabilities of the event management process.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Addon: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display your upcoming events by location. Four maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Custom Template Add-on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize events with many datetimes into a dropdown list.
- Events Category Accordion Template Addon: The Category Accordion template displays categories in a simple list. Clicking the category name displays the events associated with that category and closes any previously open categories.
- Social Coupons Integration Addon: If your website uses Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can also specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- Custom Files Add on: The Custom Files addon lets you bypass certain aspects of the plugin.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add-on Versions: This add-on lets you include other users in the event management process 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 allow them different permissions with different capabilities, allowing others to help you manage your events or the events that others create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain sections of your WP dashboard and/or certain areas 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.
- Multiple Event Registration Add on: The Multi-Event registration add-on gives your potential customers 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.
- EE4 Events Calendar Add on: This WordPress events calendar displays events and event categories using an attractive graphical calendar.
- JSON API Addon: The Event Espresso JSON API add-on permits other 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.
For more information about the latest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
User Testimonials
Here are just some of the many testimonials that customers have posted about Event Espresso:
”Event Espresso is so easy to use yet feature rich and stable. It is a cornerstone of our site and our success.” Fraser Barner, Speaker’s Lab
”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
”Event Espresso is very nice and functional plugin. Set it up is not very easy for a beginner like me, but you have one of the best support team in your side. They answer all questions in a timely manor. I didn’t know anything about setting up the plugins, Thanks to Event Espresso Support team that now I can find my way around this plugin. Event Espresso helps our company to manage the workshops, keep track of our students, manage the emails, and much more. We upgrade from personal License to Business license in just two weeks of using Personal license. I strongly recommend the Business license.” Ted Karlsalr, Omnilargess
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, teacher, concert promoter, or event management professional, there are just endless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, go through the support forum for inspiration and practical ways to improve your event management workflow or enhance the experience of your attendees.
Support
Event Espresso works with with most WP plugins and WordPress themes that follow WP coding standards. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent user support, as many of its satisfied 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
Event Espresso provides exceptional support including access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base 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.
In addition, Event Espresso boasts an established team of experienced web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can depend on to manage your events.
Event Espresso Cost
Event Espresso is available in a range of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software options, however, you should consider downloading one of the premium plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This allows you to set up Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This license lets you configure Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This option allows you to run Event Espresso on 5 domains. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Current pricing for 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 pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current price: Event Espresso – Event Management And Registration System For WordPress
Please Note: The pricing above was current when this article was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin author when you visit the site.
Additional Information
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the software’s documentation tools for answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to a specific use-case, or to notify developers about issues and leave feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event booking and ticketing management plugin, used and trusted by thousands.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you plan to run events that require scheduling dates and venues, registering attendees, and/or booking tickets, 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 Management & Ticketing Registration Software For WordPress
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