Does your company currently run or plan to run events that require bookings or registrations, such as workshops, group classes, not-for-profit fund raisers, networking conferences, or even a big event such as a school concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event bookings can be a complicated and time-consuming process. You need to co-ordinate scheduling, event dates, participant numbers, data processing, payments and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders and alerts, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to event registrants.
There are lots of benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily replicate similar events, give you more control, improve user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event booking system can be very expensive.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-based website, you can easily set up an inexpensive and highly professional online event registration solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Management Software
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin lets you easily set up your event and begin processing registrations literally in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and accept online event registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can use a range of event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up selling tickets, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event participants, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing follow-ups.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their software: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is significantly different than the older EE 3, as it is being rebuilt using a different structure to allow for future expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually retire Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
Learn more about the plugin here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just a few of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website or blog into a feature-rich and professional event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by literally eliminating the chore of processing registrations manually.
Basically, you are facilitating event attendees to enrol on their own.
Allowing your clients to do all of the data entry frees you up from doing admin work and lets you spend more time on organizing a more unique event.
More 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.
Additional plugin benefits include:
- Less Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd party service provider. This is made possible by using a model where Event Espresso users start with the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and buy addons only if you need additional functionality.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online event registrations any time of day or night. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social and marketing features and add-ons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event share your information with friends who may also be interested.
- Green Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, your event signup process can remain wholly online, significantly reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks associated with enrollment.
- All Information Belongs To You. You own all the information collected from your event participants.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to users via standard features (these come with the plugin) and additional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many features to website owners. Here are just some of these:
- Quick and easy to install and set up. Ready to use in minutes.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso allows you to configure as many kinds of tickets as you need and set unique pricing options, limits on ticket quantities, and more.
- Customizable Event & Registration Page Designs. Match your website’s design for your events and signup page using Event Espresso’s template options and parts, as well as HTML and/or CSS.
- Tax Admin And Reporting. Event Espresso 4 gives you a number of ways to handle taxes for your event and provide reports of tax fees to customers who purchase tickets. You can configure taxes globally and on a per-ticket basis.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration enables you to customize the settings of Google Maps on your event listing and event details pages.
- Spam Protection. Eliminate the risk of spamming and robots making fake registrations on your web site by using reCAPTCHA option that authenticate human activity.
- In-App Documentation Systems. Event Espresso 4 includes three useful in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Manual Registration Option. you have the option of registering event participants when they show up, or sending in paper registration forms for manual processing later.
- Waiting Lists. Interested persons can subscribe to a waiting list if your event is full. You can also specify that wait-listed members pay for their spots if you plan to expand capacity for your event.
- Private Contact Comments. Record observations about users on their profile. Private commenting enables you to keep a record of when users contacted you, your internal observations, and how you have assisted your customers.
- Works With The Most Recent Version Of WP. The EE 4 user interface follows all WordPress guidelines to help you build visually enhanced event pages that are responsive and mobile-friendly.
- Country-specific Settings. Event managers can configure the country and currency settings to be used when running your events, including currency, currency signs, decimal signs, characters and places, country codes, regions, and so on.
- Default Tickets. If you create similar tickets for your events, you can easily set one of those tickets as your default ticket for the next event simply by checking a box.
- Multiple Attendee Bookings. Event Espresso 4 allows one person or a group to pay for multiple tickets and different types of tickets at once. You decide how many attendees can register in a single session by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Automatic Software Installation Updates. Event Espresso provides simple 1-click plugin upgrades to make sure that you have the latest features and to keep your installation up-to-date with new versions of WordPress.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential registrants who have not paid yet for their enrollment with a standard but personalized invoice with just one click of a button. Your invoices will address registered attendees who have not paid their registration yet by name, give them the balance they owe, and include links to the event information, a payment url and a url to download the invoice.
- Accurate Event Attendee Manager. You have control of your participants’ records; who has enrolled, for what event and how much they’ve paid. With the attendee manager, you can get a quick overview of registered attendees and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export a list of attendees to Excel for additional reports, send customizable payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your event registrants individually or all at once.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows web-based software developers to have more control and options over the content of your event page and how your information displays to visitors.
- 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.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value For Money: Event Espresso states on their website that their mission 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 comes with over 40 added features, including:
- Duplicating events – eliminates the work of re-entering event details when adding new events.
- 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 “addons”, which allow software users to further 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 the scheduled events by location. 4 maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Custom Template Add-on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize multiple datetime events into a dropdown list.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add on: The Category Accordion template displays categories as a simple list. Clicking the category name shows the events related to that category and closes any previously open categories.
- EE4 Events Social Sharing Add-on: This add on adds social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that allows your registrants to post a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after booking.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration add-on lets you take advantage of the WP user system. With the WP User Integration addon you can give your users a special incentive by offering member pricing and overriding event prices when members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered website users will have access to these special events. Members can also enter personal details into their profile page allowing them to quickly register for events by auto-filling in the personal information on the event registration form. Your users can also look up event history and make payment for events.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Addon Versions: This addon lets you include other users 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 assign them different permissions with different capabilities, allowing staff 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 WordPress 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.
- Multiple Event Registration Add-on: The Multiple Event registration add-on gives your potential attendees 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 cart. With the Multi-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 Calendar Addon: This add on uses the WP calendar to display events and categories of events using an attractive graphical calendar.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp add-on allows you to auto-register attendees to a particular autoresponder list or group within your MailChimp account.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add-ons.
To learn more about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
User Feedback
Below are just some of the many great testimonials that customers have posted about Event Espresso:
”I want to commend you on a fabulous product which is just the right price for a small non-profit. People are happy with the registration process, as are we! …Thank you SO much for a great product.” Sandra Forero Bush, World Trade Center Tacoma
”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
”I’m using it on multiple sites and enjoying it. It’s simple and as others have stated… fast service and real help.” Arlen Nagata
Useful Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, teacher, workshop promoter, or event consultant, there are just countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, search the support forum for inspiration and practical ways to streamline your event management and registration workflow and improve the experience of your attendees.
Support
Event Espresso works with with most WP plugins and WP themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great user support, as so many of its satisfied plugin end-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
Event Espresso provides amazing support including access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase 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.
Additionally, 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 your events.
Plugin Cost
Event Espresso is available in various editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you may want to consider downloading one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This edition lets you set up Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This allows you to run Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This edition enables you to configure Event Espresso on five domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Pricing details of the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Presently, the software is selling for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager
Please Note: The pricing above was current when this review was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the plugin’s online documentation pages for answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to a particular use-case, or to report bugs 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 WP event registration and ticketing management software, used by thousands of businesses.
If you are a WordPress user and you intend to run events that require managing dates and venues, registering attendees, and/or booking tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable WordPress plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Registration System
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