Do you currently run or plan to run events that need handling bookings, such as seminars, training courses, non-profit fundraisers, social conferences, or even a large-scale event such as a concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Managing event registrations can be a time-consuming process. You will most likely be required to manage event schedules, available dates and seating, participant numbers, data collection and admin, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders and alerts, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to event registrants.
There are a number 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 copy settings for recurring events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event registration system can be expensive.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-based website, you can download and install an inexpensive and professional web-based event registration system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Manager
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily schedule an event and begin receiving bookings in just a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and accept online bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
Customize registration forms
You can employ a number of event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with an autoresponder system for ongoing follow-ups.
View detailed information about event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is completely different than the older EE 3, as the platform is being rebuilt using a different structure to allow for future growth and 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 EE 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 of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Automated Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing digital presence into a fully-featured and automated event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by virtually eliminating the need to process registrations manually.
Basically, you are facilitating participants to complete the enrolment process on their own.
Allowing your participants to do all of the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you spend more energy on creating a more enjoyable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon learn, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and registration process that you want your customers to experience.
Additional benefits and advantages include the following:
- Significantly Lower Costs: Event Espresso provides you with a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third-party provider. The cost is kept low through a model where Event Espresso users buy the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and buy addons when you need new features.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online event bookings 24 hours a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social features and addons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event share your information with others who may be interested.
- Paperless Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign-up process can be conducted wholly online, reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks related to enrollment.
- Own Your Data. You own all the data acquired from event participants.
Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to end-users via built-in features (these are included with the software) and optional features that you can buy for an added cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many built-in to website owners. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and easy to install and configure. Ready to use in no time.
- Custom Event Registration. Event Espresso lets you gather unique information using custom event registration forms on your web pages to prepare a tailored experience for your clients.
- Customizable Event And Registration Page Designs. Create a unique look and feel for your events and registrations page using Event Espresso’s limitless template options and elements, plus HTML and/or CSS.
- Tax Admin And Reporting. Event Espresso 4 gives you a number of options to administer taxes for an event and provide reports of tax fee components to registrants when purchasing tickets. Event managers can administer taxes globally and on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
- Smart Single Page Checkout. 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 attendees.
- Spam Protection. Prevent the chance of spammers and robots creating bogus registrations on your site with reCAPTCHA tools that provide human validation.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system allows you to validate tickets, speed up door registrations, create multiple check-in “stations” and track participants.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. Event Espresso 4 provides you with the tools to gain a better understanding of who your customers are and how they’ve done business with you.
- Administrative Pre-approval. Control who can register for your events.
- Public Commenting. Add “social proof” by encouraging potential customers to interact with you online via commenting and previous attendees to post comments that can help others decide whether or not to register. Moderation settings for comments are set using the WordPress built-in commenting settings.
- Draft Events. Draft events allow you to develop an event over time without displaying it live on your website. You can work on your events until you are ready to take things live, or schedule to publish your event pages at a later time and date.
- Your Organization Settings. Configure your organization’s profile to display throughout Event Espresso and your WordPress themes. The organization fields include: organization name, street address, city, state, country, zip code, email, phone number, VAT/tax number, logo, Facebook profile URL, Twitter URL, LinkedIn URL, Pinterest profile URL, Google+ profile URL, Instagram URL.
- Upload Events. EE 4 provides a CSV-based importing feature that allows you to easily import a lot of event data all at one time. You can export, edit and import data for events, datetimes, ticketing details, pricing, custom registration questions, venue info, terminology, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Event Venue Profiles. The venue manager in Event Espresso 4 lets details about venues to appear throughout the Event Espresso admin and the public areas of your site to inform attendees of the location of your event. The venue record has many standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also lets you add details such as venue capacity, venue web address, phone number, venue address, map, etc. You can also list all of your event venues on different locations of your WP theme and on a venue listing page on your site where you can set up and reuse venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a given venue.
- Event Espresso Community. Event Espresso gives you access to a community of experienced event managers, programmers, designers, marketers and businesses who also use the software. You can interact with other members of the Event Espresso community through their community chat room, support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential event customers who have not paid in full for their registration with a standard but personalized PDF invoice with just one click of a button. Your invoices will reference registered customers who have not paid their registration yet by name, give them the balance they owe, and include links to the event, a payment url and a link where they can download a PDF invoice.
- Transaction Reporting. Event reporting provides you with data of all of your registrations and transactions, enabling you to track the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and how much money has been collected.
Extra features include:
- Hooks, Actions & Filters. These features allow web-based software developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso plugin that are completely compatible with WordPress.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 lets you create a log file with debugging data that can be useful for web developers when troubleshooting.
- Autonomy, Flexibility And 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 and efficient model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium version of Event Espresso also comes with 40+ added features, including:
- Email shortcodes that includes attendee data in confirmation emails and updates.
- Default surcharge (similar to adding a service fee to all tickets).
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow software users to further enhance the functionality of events.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display upcoming events by location. There are four maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Manager Add-on: The Recurring Events management add-on lets you put your events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months ahead. You can schedule as many events in advance as you want. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close bookings for all of these recurring events.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add-on: The Category Accordion template shows event categories as a simple list. Clicking a category name shows all events associated with that category and closes any previously open categories.
- Social Coupons Integration Add on: If your web site 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 Addon: The Custom Files add-on allows you to bypass certain aspects of the Event Espresso plugin.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add-on Editions: This addon lets you involve other 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 give 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 parts of your WP dashboard and/or certain parts 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 add on.
- EE4 Event Ticketing & Bar Scanning Addon: The Ticketing addon 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 handling check-in scans at the door. 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 registrants and to validate tickets.
- EE4 Events Table Template Add on: The Events Table Template add on provides event managers with 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 lets developers design custom templates using one of the templates provided as a source template.
- MailChimp Integration Addon: The MailChimp add-on allows you to auto-register participants to a specified autoresponder list or group within your MailChimp account.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software, including new add ons.
To learn more about the latest Event Espreso features and add-ons, visit the plugin website:
User Testimonials
Below are some of the many great testimonials that satisfied plugin users have written 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
”This really is a hell of a plugin. For me, it’s probably the final nail in the coffin for Joomla, as WP can now pretty much do EVERYTHING Joomla does, but better. Love the simplicity of this plugin!” Sam, Web Contempo
“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
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, presenter, seminar planner, or event management professional, there are just unlimited possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, spend a little time visiting the forums for tips and practical ways to improve your event management and registration workflow and improve the experience of your participants.
Product Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with all WordPress plugins and WP themes that follow WP coding standards. If you find that you need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive support, as so many of its satisfied plugin clients 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 great support with access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, email 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 WordPress developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can depend on to organize and manage your events.
Event Espresso Cost
Event Espresso is available in different plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin features, however, you need to consider purchasing one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This enables you to run Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This allows you to install Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This license option lets you install Event Espresso on five sites. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The cost of purchasing the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the software retails for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Note: The pricing above was current when this review was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin author when you visit the website.
Additional Info
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the software’s documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to a particular use-case, or to report issues and give feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event registration and ticketing management plugin, used by thousands of event managers.
If you own a WordPress web site and you intend to run events that require managing dates and venues (offline and online), registering attendees, or selling tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticketing Registration Plugin For WordPress
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