Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that require handling bookings, such as seminars, training courses, charity fund-raisers, marketing functions, or even a big event such as a dance party, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups is a complicated and time-consuming process. You will probably have to manage scheduling, available dates and spaces, registration numbers, data collection and admin, collecting payments and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and issuing tickets to event participants.
There are lots of benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower expenses, help you easily replicate repeat events, give event managers more control, create a more enjoyable client experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that this can be expensive.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-based site, you can easily install a very inexpensive and professional online event booking system.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily set up multiple events and start receiving registrations literally in minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and take online event bookings)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can employ a range of event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event participants, or integrating your event registration forms with social media and autoresponders.
View detailed information about event attendees
Important: Currently, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is significantly different than the older EE 3, as it is being revamped using a different structure to accommodate future growth and expansion. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually phase out EE 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
Go here to learn more about the plugin:
Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website into an automated and feature-rich event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating capacity 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 increase your business productivity by virtually eliminating the chore of processing registrations and bookings manually.
Basically, you are enabling event participants to enroll themselves.
Letting your attendees to do the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you invest more attention on creating a memorable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will see shortly, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and registration process that you want your attendees to experience.
Additional plugin benefits include:
- Reduced Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to building your own software or using a 3rd-party provider. The cost is kept low by using a model where users start with the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and purchase addons only if you need new functionality.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new registrations 24/7. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing addons (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with others who may also be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, your event registration process remains entirely online, eliminating traditional paper consumption from tasks associated with admin and record-keeping.
- Own Your Data. You own all the data you collect from your event participants.
Plugin Features
The Event Espresso software provides functionality to its users through standard features (these are included with the plugin) and additional features that users can buy for an added cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many built-in to site owners. Here are just some:
- Fast and simple to install and implement. Be up and running in very little time.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In Event Espresso 4, events can have multiple dates and times (datetimes), and these can be managed from a single event.
- Customizable Event & Registration Page Designs. Match your site’s look and feel for your events and registrations page using Event Espresso’s unlimited template options and parts, as well as HTML and/or CSS.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso seamlessly integrates with payment gateways, allowing you to collect registration fees prior to running your events.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your WordPress theme and reuse events data throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Prices. Set up events fast by pre-configuring default pricing.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system lets you validate tickets, speed up door registrations, create various check-in “stations” and track attendees.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of registering event attendees when they show up, or send in paper registration forms for manual inputting later.
- No-Ticket Events. Set up events without making it necessary for participants to select tickets. Event Espresso can be used for any type of event, not only when tickets are for sale.
- Public Commenting. Add social interactivity to your events by encouraging potential customers to ask questions about your event and past customers to post comments that can help others consider whether or not to sign up. Moderation settings for commenting are set up using the WP built-in commenting settings.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events enable you to build your event at your own leisure without displaying it live on your site. You can continue building your events until you are ready to publish it live on your website, or schedule your event to publish at a future time and date.
- Your Organization Settings. Configure your profile to be deployed throughout Event Espresso and your front-end templates. Organization fields include: organization name, address, city, state, country, zip code, primary contact email address, phone, tax number, company logo, Facebook URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest profile URL, Google+ profile URL, Instagram URL.
- Exportable Information. You can output all the data collected from your event customers into Excel or CSV format for compiling advanced reports, devising new marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, and so on.
- WP Visual Editor. Event Espresso uses the built-in WP Visual editor, so you can quickly and easily add graphic images and format your event descriptions without having to learn HTML or CSS, just like any WordPress post or page.
- Automatic Upgrades. Event Espresso offers easy 1-click software installation updating to ensure that you have the newest features and to keep your software installation compatible with the latest version of WordPress.
- Staff Member Manager. Save time and stay organized by reusing staff profiles for multiple events or displaying profile information such as team member’s contact information, resume and photo using a shortcode in an event description.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post types. You can also customize the templates to display events in your own custom way.
Additional features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for non-technical WordPress users, and also extremely robust and customizable for higher end users and developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, Event Espresso 4 facilitates more complex enhancements and customizations to the software.
- Control Box Management & Reorganization. Event Espresso lets you leverage the WordPress user interface, which gives you the ability to reorganize the user interface to suit your workflow processes. Each control box can be collapsed, re-arranged or deleted from your workflow configuration.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & Value For Money: According to the mission statement on their website, 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 objectives, the software has been built using a modular and highly 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 40+ additional features, including:
- Live-filtering when you search for events inside the Event Espresso admin.
- Default surcharge (similar to adding a service tax to tickets).
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
In addition to a comprehensive number of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow customers to significantly expand the functionality of events.
Some of these add-ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display upcoming events by location. Four maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes the events with multiple datetimes into a drop-down list.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add-on: The Category Accordion template shows the categories as a simple list. Clicking the category name shows the events related to that category and closes previously open categories.
- 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.
- Custom Template Addon: The Custom Template add-on is capable of displaying your events in a range of exciting and interesting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Addon Versions: This add on lets you include others in your organization to help manage your events and give new users the capacity to create events or regional managers permission to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WordPress users roles and give them different permissions with different capabilities, allowing staff to help you manage your events or events that other people create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain areas of your WP dashboard and/or certain sections 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 And Bar Scanning Add-on: The Ticketing add on adds the capacity to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon adds the capacity to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing add on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for handling check-in scans at the venue door. People can either print out their tickets or display them on their mobile devices. The mobile app can be used for checking in or checking out attendees and to validate tickets.
- Events Table View Template Add-on: The Events Table Template add on provides you with an easy-to-use system that lets you change 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 allows web developers to build their own custom templates using one of the included templates as a source template.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp addon allows you to auto-register attendees to a specific mailing autoresponder list or group within your MailChimp account.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add ons.
For more information about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website here:
Testimonials
Here are just some of the many great testimonials that plugin users have written 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 recently downloaded it to add to a nonprofit site for a Boy Scout troop and the features work wonderfully with what we wanted to accomplish for the site. It allows us to set up calendar, events, and even take payments for trips. At first, I thought that it would be overkill for such a small site, but now I see the possibilities and will definitely be offering Event Espresso to my clients that need an event organization system for their web sites.” Lucy Conn, Troop 462
”I’m so excited to fire Eventbrite! Event Espresso has an amazing WP plugin for event management. We’re testing it now & are very impressed! In a nutshell Event Espresso saves us money & does everything Eventbrite did before. :)” Dustin Nay
Useful Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, trainer, concert promoter, or event professional, there are just countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a registered owner, spend a little time visiting the support forum for inspiration and practical suggestions to streamline your event management and registration workflow and enhance the experience of your event customers.
Support
Event Espresso works with with other WP plugins and WP themes that follow WP coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive support, as so many of its users attest:
“I’m really impressed with not only the application itself but the support. I have rarely seen such a responsive support staff than at EE. They rock…I highly recommend this plugin!” sock2me
The software provides incredible support with access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase 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 a well-staffed team of experienced web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can rely on to run your events.
Plugin Price
Event Espresso is available in a number of editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin features, however, you need to consider downloading one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This enables you to set up Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This allows you to set up Event Espresso on one domain only. It includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This license lets you install Event Espresso on 5 sites. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The price of the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the plugin retails for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Please Note: The pricing above was current when this review was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin author when you visit the website.
Additional Plugin Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the plugin’s online documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to your particular situation, or to notify developers about problems and give feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event booking and ticketing manager plugin, used by thousands of event promoters.
If you own a WordPress-powered web site and you intend to run events that involve managing dates and venues (offline and online), registering participants, and/or booking tickets, then you will probably not find a better WP plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticketing Registration Software For WordPress
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