Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that require co-ordinating bookings, such as workshops, community courses, non-profit fund raisers, networking conferences, or even a large-scale event like an exhibition, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Co-ordinating event registrations is a complex process. You may be required to manage calendar schedules, dates, attendee numbers, data administration, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders and notifications, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to attendees.
There are many benefits to setting up an automated web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower expenses, help you easily copy settings for previously-run events, give you more control, create a better user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be very costly.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-based website or blog, you can easily set up an inexpensive and professional online event booking system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticketing Registration System For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily create your event and start processing online bookings literally in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and accept online bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed application that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Customize your event registration forms
You can employ a number of event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your participants, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing notifications.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Note: Currently, Event Espresso supports 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 the plugin has been revamped using a different structure to enable future growth. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually phase out EE 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and advantages of this plugin.
Learn more here:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just some of the many benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current online presence into a fully-featured and automated event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by literally doing away with the chore of processing registrations and signups manually.
Basically, you are enabling event participants to enroll themselves.
Letting your attendees to do all of the data entry frees up your time and lets you invest more energy on planning a more enjoyable event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon discover, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management process that you want your customers to experience.
Some additional benefits of the plugin include:
- Less Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own system or using a third-party service. This is made possible by using a model where users purchase the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and purchase optional add ons when you need additional functionality.
- More Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept new event registrations outside normal business hours. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social features (see below) let people interested in registering for your event invite other people they know who may also be interested in attending.
- Green And Paperless Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event booking process remains wholly online, eliminating traditional paper consumption from tasks related to enrollment.
- All Information Belongs To You. You own all the data obtained from event participants.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to end-users via standard features (these are included with the software) and optional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many built-in to site owners. Here are just some of these:
- Fast and easy to install and set up. Ready to use in very little time.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In Event Espresso 4, events can have many dates and times (datetimes), that these can be managed from a single event.
- Customized Notification Emails. Set up automated booking and payment confirmation emails to communicate with your registrants.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso provides integration with payment gateways, allowing you to collect money before running events.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your theme and reuse attendee information throughout other areas of your site.
- Spam Protection. Prevent the chance of spamming and robots making fake registrations on your site by using reCAPTCHA features to provide human validation.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 includes three built-in in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. EE 4 provides you with the tools to gain a better understanding of who your clients are and how you have previously engaged with your customers. The Contact Profile page stores updated records such as the name, biography, contact details, event registration information, private comments, etc. about each attendee.
- Waiting Lists. Latecomers can join a waiting list if your event is full. Additionally, you can make it a requirement wait-list attendees pre-pay if you plan to add more capacity for the event.
- RSS Feeds. Keep your users up-to-date about your events, drive quality traffic and reach a wider audience with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Keyword Rich Event Page URLs. Keyword-rich Web links leverage your WP Permalinks configuration settings. SEO-friendly urls with topic-relevant keywords enhance the context of your events and is favored by search engines, helping you get more potential customers to your events.
- Multi-Language Software. Event Espresso has been translated into more than 15 languages, with more translations planned.
- Default Tickets. If you find yourself creating identical tickets for your events, you can set one of those tickets as your default ticket for the next event simply by checking a box.
- Multiple Attendee Enrolments. EE 4 allows an individual or a group to purchase multiple tickets and different ticket types simultaneously. You decide how many attendees are allowed to register in a single session by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso lets you engage with a community of experienced event managers, software programmers, designers, digital marketers and businesses who also use the plugin. You can network with other members of the Event Espresso community using their community chat room, support forums, job board, and social media pages on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Social Sharing. Event attendees and your site visitors can help publicize your event using social media sharing buttons.
- Attendee Reports. Event reports gives you information of your registrations and transactions, allowing you to measure the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and amount of revenue you have collected.
Additional features include:
- Hooks, Actions And Filters. These allow web-based software developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso plugin that are fully compatible with the WordPress software platform.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 allows you to create a log file with debugging data which can be helpful for developers who are potential software errors.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value For Money: According to the philosophy stated 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 goals, the software has been built using a model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also comes with over 40 additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – limits the work of re-entering event data when creating new events.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing the same group of questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
In addition to an incredible array of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow software users to further enhance the functionality of the event management system.
Some of these addons include:
- EE4 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, a default image will be used instead.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Template Addon: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes multiple datetime events into a dropdown list.
- Events Date Range Template Add on: The Date Range custom event list template enables your users to search for events that take place within a certain date range.
- Social Coupons Integration Add-on: 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.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration add-on allows you to take advantage of the WordPress user system. With the WP User Integration addon you can give users a special incentive by offering member pricing and overriding event pricing when members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered users of the website can have access to your special events. Members can also input personal information into their profile page allowing them fast registration for events by auto-filling in their personal information on the event booking form. Your users can also view past events and make payment for new events.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add on Versions: This add on lets you include your staff 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 WP users roles and give them different permissions with different privileges, so others can help you manage your events or the events that others create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain areas of your WP dashboard and/or certain parts of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to allow users to control factors geographically for events and users, use the Roles and Permissions Pro add on.
- Multi-Event Registration Addon: 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 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.
- Events Table Template Add-on: The Events Table Template add-on provides you 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 included as a base template.
- MailChimp Integration Addon: The MailChimp add-on allows you to auto-register attendees to a selected mailing autoresponder list or group within your MailChimp account.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software, including new add ons.
For more information about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website here:
Customer Feedback
Here are some of the many great 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 just completed my first event using Event Espresso. I really believe without Event Espresso my event would not have been the success it was.” Cathy Earle, Women Only Weekend
”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
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, presenter, concert promoter, or event professional, there are simply countless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed user, go through the support forum for new ideas and practical suggestions to improve your event management workflow and improve the experience of your customers.
Support
Event Espresso works with with other WordPress plugins and WordPress themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent support, as so many of its satisfied customers 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 robust support that includes access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, premium 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 plugin you can rely on to run your events.
Event Espresso Price
Event Espresso is available in a number of editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you may want to consider purchasing one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This option enables you to configure Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This enables you to configure Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This lets you run Event Espresso on five domains. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Pricing details of the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. When we last checked, the software sells for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Management
Note: The above reflects the pricing when this review was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin developer when you visit the site.
Additional Plugin 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.
Look up the plugin’s documentation tools for answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to your specific use-case, or to notify developers about problems and share feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
Our Recommendation
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 intend to run events that involve scheduling dates, times and venues (offline and online), enrolling participants, and/or reserving tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticket Registration Plugin For WordPress
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