Does your company currently run or plan to run events that require co-ordinating bookings, such as workshops, training classes, non-profit fund raisers, corporate events, or even a large-scale event like a music show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event registrations is a complicated and time-consuming process. You will most likely have to co-ordinate calendar schedules, available dates and spaces, registration numbers, data collection and storage, payments and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to event participants.
There are a number of advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce costs, help you easily copy settings for recurring events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable client experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be quite expensive.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-based site, you can download and install a very inexpensive and professional online event registration solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Registration System
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress enables you to easily schedule an event and begin receiving online bookings in just minutes.
(Set up multiple events and receive online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can use a range of event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments 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 social media and autoresponders.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is fundamentally different than the older Event Espresso 3, as it is being revamped using a different structure to enable future expansion. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually migrate completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and advantages of using this plugin.
For more details go here:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just some of the many benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your site:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current website or blog into a feature-rich and professional event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to attendee limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by practically eliminating the need to process registrations manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for participants to perform the sign-up process on their own.
Letting your participants to do all of the data entry frees up your time and lets you direct more resources on planning a more enjoyable event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn in a moment, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and registration process that you want your users to experience.
Some additional plugin benefits include the following:
- Significantly Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin is a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own solution or using a third-party service provider. This is made possible by using a model where users pay for the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then buy optional add-ons when you need extra functionality.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept online bookings any time of day or night. In addition, Event Espresso social and marketing add-ons (see below) let people interested in attending your event invite others who may be interested.
- Paperless Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, your event signup process can remain wholly in digital form, significantly reducing traditional paper waste from tasks associated with admin and record-storage.
- All Information Belongs To You. You control all the information you acquire from event attendees.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to its users through built-in features (these come with the software) and optional features that you can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many built-in to WordPress users. Here are just some:
- Quick and easy to install and use. Be up and running in very little time.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In EE 4, events can have many dates and times (called datetimes), which these can be managed from one single event.
- Custom Confirmation Email Message. Set up automated registration and payment notification emails to communicate with event registrants.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso provides integration with payment gateways, allowing you to collect payments before running events.
- Smart Single Page Checkout Process. 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 added registrants.
- Spam Protection. Prevent the risk of spamming and bot software programs creating bogus registrations on your website with reCAPTCHA option that provide human authentication.
- Mobile Registration & Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system lets you authenticate tickets, speed up door registrations, set up multiple check-in “stations” and track participants.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. EE 4 provides you with the tools to understand who your customers are and how you’ve done business with your customers. The Contact Profile section stores the name, biography, contact information, event registration information, private comments, and more about each attendee.
- Waiting Lists. Prospective attendees can join a waiting list if your event is sold out. Additionally, you can specify that wait-listed members pay for their spots if you plan to expand capacity for the event.
- Private Comments On Contacts. Record observations about users on their profile. Private notes helps you keep records of when users contacted you, your internal notes, and how you’ve interacted with your contacts.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events enable you to build your event page at your own pace without displaying it live on your site. You can continue working on your event until you are ready to take things live, or schedule your event pages to publish at a future time and date.
- 15+ Languages. Event Espresso is currently available in 15+ languages, with more translations coming soon.
- Exportable Data. You can output all of your data collected from event customers into Excel or CSV format for compiling reports, implementing new marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, etc..
- Register Multiple Event Attendees. Event Espresso 4 allows a single person or an organization to register multiple attendees at the same time. You can control how many people can enrol in a single session by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- 1-Click Updates. Event Espresso provides simple one-click software installation updating to make sure that you have the latest features and to keep your installation working with new versions of WordPress.
- Social Sharing. Event registrants and your website visitors can help increase exposure for your event using social media sharing buttons.
- Transaction Reporting. Event reports gives you information of all the registrations and transactions, enabling you to measure the performance of your events with the aggregate number of people who have registered and how much money you’ve collected.
Extra features include:
- Hooks, Actions & Filters. These allow you to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso software that are compatible with WordPress.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registrations for normal site visitors when you need to carry out maintenance on your site. You can continue to work on the back-end of your site during maintenance mode.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And Value: According to the mission statement on their web 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 mission, the software has been built using a modular and efficient model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also provides you with 40+ additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes for including attendee data in emails and email updates.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse a series of questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow end-users to significantly expand the capabilities of your event management system.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Grid Template Add on: 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, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Custom Template Add-on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes the events with many datetimes into a dropdown list.
- Events Date Range Template Add on: The Date Range custom event list template enables your users to browse for events that occur within a certain date range.
- Social Media Buttons Add-on: The social media add-on displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media addon is included free with any of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- Custom Files Addon: The Custom Files add on provides PHP files that let you bypass certain aspects of the plugin.
- Seating Chart Add on: The seating chart add-on is for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart addon allows you to promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart addon lets you manage the environment for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to every seat.
- Multiple Event Registration Addon: The Multi-Event registration add-on gives potential customers 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 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 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 allows web developers to build custom templates using one of the included templates as a source template.
- JSON API Add-on: The Event Espresso JSON API addon allows other applications, web sites, mobile apps, etc… to access your Event Espresso data through an API (Application Programming Interface).
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin, including new addons.
For complete details about the latest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
Testimonials
Below are a few of the many testimonials that customers 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
”You can tell that the Event Espresso team is really passionate about their work, and that they care and spend a lot of time helping people work with their plugin and use it with their events – it’s something every WordPress service should aim for.” Ryan Imel, WPCandy
”Hello. I wanted to say that I’ve purchased Event Espresso twice now for two different organizations and have had great success with the purchases. Outside of photography, I also build small websites with WordPress as the CMS. I built two websites for two different martial arts organizations who host yearly seminars and tournaments. The plug in has provided a way for attendees to sign up online from both Canada and the United States with ease, and also allowed the organizations to easily manage payments, attendee lists, and many other aspects of the events. Thanks to Seth for creating such a great plug in, and for your constant support!” James Zedd, James Zedd Photography
Useful Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, presenter, conference promoter, or event consultant, there are just endless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, search the support forum for useful ideas and practical ways to streamline your event management and registration workflow and improve the experience of your participants.
Event Espresso Support
Event Espresso works with with all WP plugins and 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 many of its satisfied end-users attest:
”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, 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.
In addition, Event Espresso boasts an established team of experienced WordPress developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can count on to run and manage your events.
Software Price
Event Espresso is available in a number of editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin options, however, you should consider purchasing one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal License Edition – This lets you configure Event Espresso on 1 site only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This allows you to configure Event Espresso on one site only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Edition – This enables you to install Event Espresso on 5 domains. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The cost to purchase the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Presently, the plugin is selling for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest price: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing when this review was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the site.
Additional Plugin Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software. Make sure to stay 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 how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to a specific situation, or to notify developers about errors and leave feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WP event registration and ticketing management software, used and trusted by thousands of users.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you intend to run any event that requires managing dates, times and venues (offline and online), registering participants, and booking tickets, then you will probably not find a better software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
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