Does your business currently run or plan to run events that need managing bookings, such as seminars, group courses, charity fundraisers, social functions, or even a large-scale event such as an exhibition, 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 time-consuming process. You may be required to manage event schedules, available dates and spaces, attendee numbers, data collection and storage, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to attendees.
There are lots of benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce costs, help you easily replicate previously-run events, give event managers more control, improve client experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that this can be quite expensive.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-based site, you can easily install an inexpensive and highly professional web-based event registration solution.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticketing Registration Plugin
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP allows you to easily schedule an event and begin receiving online bookings literally in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and receive online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed application that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can use several event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up selling tickets, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your event attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media and email marketing applications.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Note: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is significantly different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the plugin is being rebuilt using a different structure to enable future growth and expansion. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually retire EE 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
Go here to learn more about the plugin:
Benefits
Here are just some of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website or blog into a fully-featured event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by virtually doing away with the need to process registrations manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for event attendees to register by themselves.
Allowing your clients to do all of the data entry frees you up from doing administration and lets you spend more of your energy on organizing a more enjoyable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover shortly, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management and booking process that you want your attendees to experience.
Some additional benefits of the plugin include the following:
- Reduced Costs: The Event Espresso plugin provides you with a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to building your own system or using a 3rd-party service provider. This is made possible by using a model where Event Espresso users purchase the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and purchase optional addons when you need added functionality.
- More Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept new event sign-ups outside normal business hours. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing features and add ons (see below) let people interested in registering for your event invite others who may also be interested in attending.
- Green Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, your event registration process can remain entirely online, significantly reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks associated with enrollment.
- Own Your Information. You control all the data gathered from event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
The Event Espresso plugin provides functionality to end-users through standard features (these come with the plugin) and additional features that users can buy for an added cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many great features to web site owners. Here are just some of these:
- Quick and simple to install and set up. Be up and running in minutes.
- Customized Event Registration Form. With Event Espresso you can gather specific data using a custom event registration form on your web site to prepare a tailored experience for your event participants.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Attendees can easily see your events and add these to their schedule using the WordPress calendar.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso integrates with payment gateways, allowing you to collect money prior to running events.
- Smart Single Page Checkout. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is smart, fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically duplicate the primary attendee’s registration information for any additional registrants.
- Spam Protection. Reduce the chance of spamming and bot software programs creating bogus registrations by using reCAPTCHA features to authenticate human activity.
- Promotional Codes. Provide promotion and discount codes to encourage people to make a decision without delaying, or simply make your offers more affordable for price-sensitive customers. This is also practical if you want to sell out events close to deadlines.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. EE 4 provides you with the tools to know who your customers are and how they’ve done business with you.
- No Ticket Events. You can promote events without making it necessary for attendees to book tickets. Use Event Espresso for all types of events, not only those that accept tickets.
- Private Commenting On Contacts. Record notes about contacts on their profile. Private commenting helps you keep records of when event registrants contacted you, your internal observations, and how you’ve assisted them.
- Draft Events. Draft events let you develop an event over time without publishing it to your website. You can work on your events until you are ready to take things live, or schedule your event pages to publish at a later date and time.
- Complete Control Of Your Event Management. Event Espresso puts you in complete control of all aspects of your event’s registration and ticketing processes, and also allows you to automate the process with event management tools that include staff and venue manager, customizable event page designs, payment processing, list waiting, attendee limits, printable tickets and more.
- Exportable Data. You can output all of your information collected from your event attendees into Excel or CSV format for compiling advanced reports, planning new marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, and so on.
- Register Multiple Participants. Event Espresso 4 allows one person or a group to pay for multiple tickets and different ticket types simultaneously. Event managers decide how many people are allowed to enroll in one booking session by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Event Espresso Community. Event Espresso lets you network with a community of experienced event managers, software programmers, designers, marketers and business owners who also use the software. You can network with other members of the Event Espresso community via their community chat room, support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Staff Management. Save time and keep your information organized by reusing team member profiles for multiple events or displaying profile information such as team member’s contact information, resume and photo using a shortcode in your event description.
- Transaction Reports. Quick-view event reporting gives you information of all the registrations and transactions, enabling you to measure the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and amount of revenue you’ve collected.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows developers to have more control and options over the content of your event pages and how the information displays to your readers.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 lets you generate a log file with debugging data which can be helpful for web developers who are diagnosing software errors.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & Value: According to the mission statement on their 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 objectives, the software has been built using a modular that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also provides you with 40+ added features, including:
- Live-filtering when you search for events within the Event Espresso admin.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing a group of questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Addons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow software users to significantly enhance the capabilities of the event management process.
Some of these add-ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display your upcoming events by location. There are 4 maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Custom Template Addon: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes many datetime events into a drop-down list.
- Events Date Range Template Add-on: The Date Range custom event list template lets your users to search for events that occur in a certain date range.
- Social Media Buttons Addon: The social media add-on displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media add on comes free with all of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- Custom Template Add on: The Custom Template add-on is capable of displaying your event lists in a range of visually exciting ways.
- Seating Chart Add-on: The seating chart addon is great 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 add on lets you offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues directly from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart add on lets you control the experience for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to every seat.
- Multi-Event Registration Add-on: The Multi-Event registration addon gives potential attendees the ability to register for 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 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.
- Events Table Template Addon: The Events Table Template add on provides you with a simple and easy-to-use system that allows you to change 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 web developers build their own custom templates using one of the templates provided as a source template.
- JSON API Add on: The Event Espresso JSON API addon permits other software applications, online tools, mobile applications, etc… to access your Event Espresso content through an Application Programming Interface (API).
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, check out the plugin here:
Customer Feedback
Here are a few of the testimonials that plugin users have posted about Event Espresso:
”My clients have used Event Espresso for Transportation (Cadet Bus for leave), Parties (tailgates and brewery tours), and Horse-back riding lessons and camps. What a terrific plug-in and fantastic support from Seth!” Nina, Blue Iris Web Design
”Probably the best event management plugin available.” Materia Inspiration Centre
”Event Espresso plugin still rocks. Saw you guys were up for the WP Honors too. Glad I paid for it! If you need event management on your WordPress site I recommend Event Espresso.” Patrick Allmond, Focus Consulting
Useful Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, trainer, concert planner, or event management consultant, there are just countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a registered owner, spend a little time visiting the support forum for useful ideas and practical ways to improve your event management and registration process and enhance the experience of your event participants.
Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with all WordPress plugins and WordPress themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you do need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive support, as so many of its 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
The software provides great 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 WordPress web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely software you can depend on to manage your events.
Event Espresso Pricing
Event Espresso is available in different plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software options, however, you should consider using one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal Edition – This option enables you to configure Event Espresso on one site only. It includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This allows you to run Event Espresso on one site only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This option enables you to run Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Current pricing for the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the software sells for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Management
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this review was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin author when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding 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 pages for 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 report errors and leave feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event registration and ticketing management software, used by thousands of WordPress site owners.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you plan to run events that require scheduling dates, times and venues, enrolling attendees, or booking tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
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