Do you currently run or plan to run events that require bookings or registrations, such as workshops, training courses, not-for-profit fundraisers, marketing functions, or even a big event like a concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups is a time-consuming process. You have to manage scheduling, event dates, attendee numbers, data processing, payments and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders and notifications, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to event participants.
There are a number of benefits to setting up an online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily copy settings for previous events, give event managers more control, create a better user experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that this can be costly.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-powered website, you can easily install an inexpensive and highly professional web-based event booking system.
Introducing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WP software allows you to easily set up multiple events and begin receiving online bookings literally in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and accept online bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed software that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can use various event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your event attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media and email marketing systems.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Important: Currently, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is completely different than the older EE 3, as it is being rebuilt using a different structure to accommodate future growth. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually retire Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and advantages of using this plugin.
Learn more about the plugin here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
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 online presence into a fully-featured and automated event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by virtually eliminating the need to process registrations and signups manually.
Basically, you are facilitating participants to enrol by themselves.
Allowing your clients to do all of the data entry frees you up from doing admin work and lets you concentrate more resources on delivering a more enjoyable 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 users to experience.
Some additional benefits of the plugin include the following:
- Significantly Lower Costs: Event Espresso is a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own system or using a 3rd-party service provider. The cost is kept low by using a model where you pay for the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then buy addons only when you need added features.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new registrations 24 hours a day. In addition, Event Espresso social add-ons (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with their friends who may be interested.
- Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, the event registration process can remain wholly online, significantly reducing traditional paper waste from tasks associated with administration.
- Own Your Information. You control all the data you acquire from event participants.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to end-users via standard features (these are included with the software) and optional features that customers can buy for an added cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many great built-in to site owners. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and simple to install and set up. Be up and running in minutes.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso lets you configure multiple ticket types and specify unique pricing options, limits on ticket quantities, etc.
- Event Calendar. Customers can easily find your events and add these to their schedule with a calendar.
- Ticket Selector. Present several ticket options to prospects so they can choose the ticket(s) that will best fit their needs.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your WP theme and reuse contact details throughout other areas of your site.
- Spam Protection. Reduce the chance of spamming and bots creating bogus registrations with reCAPTCHA option to provide human validation.
- In-App Documentation Systems. Event Espresso 4 provides three useful in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. EE 4 provides you with the tools to understand who your customers are and how you’ve previously done business with your customers. Your Contact Profile section stores updated records like the name, biography, contact information, event registration information, private comments, etc. about each registrant.
- No-Ticket Events. You can create events without the requirement for participants to select tickets. Event Espresso can be used for all forms of events, not just those that accept tickets.
- Public Commenting. Add social engagement to your event page by encouraging potential attendees to ask questions about your event and past attendees to post reviews that can help others consider whether or not to enroll. Moderation settings for comments are set up in the WordPress commenting admin area.
- SEO Friendly Event Page URLs. Keyword rich URLs leverage your Permalinks configuration settings. Search engine friendly urls with relevant keywords add to the context of your events and improves your search rankings, helping you drive a more targeted audience to your events.
- Easy Event Management. Event Espresso puts event managers in complete control of all aspects of your event’s registration and ticketing processes, and lets you automate this process with event management tools that include staff and venue management, custom event page designs, payment processing and handling, list waiting, limits on attendees, printable ticketing and more.
- Exportable Data. You can output all the information gathered from your event participants into Excel or CSV format for compiling advanced reports, implementing marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, and so on.
- WYSIWYG Editor. Event Espresso uses the standard WP WYSIWYG editor, so you can quickly and easily insert graphic images and stylize your event descriptions without knowing HTML or CSS, just like any typical WordPress post or page.
- Registrant Profiles. You can manage each registrant’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their data organized.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential event clients who have not paid in full for their enrollment with a standard but personalized PDF invoice with one click of a button. Your invoices will address registered customers who have not paid their registration yet by name, display the amount they owe, and include links to the event details, a payment link and a url to download a PDF invoice.
- Accurate Event Attendee Manager. You have control of your attendees’ information; who has enrolled, for what event and what amount they’ve paid. With the attendee manager, you can get a quick overview of registered attendees and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export an event attendee list to a spreadsheet for additional uses, send custom payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your event participants on a person-by-person basis or all at once.
Additional features include:
- Hooks, Actions & Filters. These allow developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso software that are compatible with the WordPress development platform.
- Metabox Management & Reorganization. Event Espresso lets you leverage the WordPress user interface, which brings the ability to reorder the user interface to suit your workflow. Each control box can be collapsed, re-arranged or completely removed from your page.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & Value For Money: According to the mission statement on their web site, Event Espresso’s objective is to “empower business and organization leaders with the event registration, ticketing and management tools that maximize the success of events.” To achieve their mission, the company operates on a modular that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium version of Event Espresso also comes with over 40 added features, including:
- Email shortcodes for including customer data in notification emails and newsletters.
- Default surcharge (the same as applying a service tax to tickets).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As well as an amazing array of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow end-users to significantly enhance the capabilities of your event management system.
Some of these addons include:
- 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, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Manager Addon: The Recurring Events manager addon lets you put your events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months in advance. You can schedule as many future events as you want. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close bookings for all of these recurring events.
- Events Date Range Template Add on: The Date Range custom event list template allows your users to browse for events that take place in 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 attendees to post a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after booking.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration add-on lets you take full 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 will have access to these special events. Members can also store personal data into their profile page allowing them fast registration for events by auto-filling in their personal information on the event registration form. Users can also look up event history and make payment for future events.
- Seating Chart Add on: The seating chart add-on is great 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 promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues directly from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart add-on lets you manage the experience for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to every seat.
- Multi-Event Registration Add on: The Multiple Event registration add-on gives your 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 shopping cart. With the Multiple Event Registration addon, 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 addon uses the WordPress calendar to display events and categories of events via an attractive graphical calendar.
- JSON API Add on: The Event Espresso JSON API add-on allows other applications, web sites, mobile applications, etc… to access your Event Espresso data through an API (Application Programming Interface).
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software, including new addons.
For more details about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
Testimonials
Below are a few of the many testimonials that satisfied users have posted about Event Espresso:
”Tri-South, Inc is using Event Espresso to manage the course catalog, event ticketing, and class registration. [As their developer] I have customized a few items to make the site and plugin a seamless integration. The client is very pleased!” Jenifer Design
”I searched long and hard to find something that would serve my needs. This is, by far, the most complete and comprehensive solution I have found.” Bill Hepper, We Teach Live
”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
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, presenter, workshop planner, or event consultant, there are just countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed user, spend a little time researching the support forum for tips and practical ways to streamline your event management and registration workflow and improve the experience of your attendees.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with other WordPress plugins and themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great support, as so many of its satisfied plugin customers attest:
”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
Event Espresso provides exceptional support including access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, priority 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 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.
Software Pricing
Event Espresso is available in various editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin features, however, you may want to consider purchasing one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This lets you set up Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This license option allows you to configure Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This edition enables you to configure Event Espresso on five domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Price details for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Presently, the software retails for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest price: Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticket Registration Plugin For WordPress
Note: The above reflects the pricing when this review was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin seller 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 documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to your particular situation, or to report problems and give feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event booking and ticketing management software, used and trusted by thousands of users.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you currently run events that require managing dates, times and venues (offline and online), enrolling attendees, or reserving tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Registration Software
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