Do you currently run or plan to run events that require handling registrations, such as seminars, community courses, non-profit fund-raisers, social conferences, or even a large-scale 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?
Managing event bookings can be a time-consuming process. You need to manage calendar schedules, availability, registration numbers, data processing, collecting payments and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders and notifications, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to participants.
There are a number of benefits to setting up an online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower costs, help you easily copy settings for previous events, give event managers more control, create a more enjoyable customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event booking system can be costly.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-powered site, you can install an inexpensive and professional web-based event registration system.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticketing Registration Plugin For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily schedule an event and start processing bookings in just a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and take online registrations)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed application that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Customize event registration forms
You can employ several event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your participants, or integrating your event registration forms with social media sites like Facebook.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Note: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is considerably different than the older EE 3, as the platform has been revamped using a different structure to enable future expansion. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually retire EE 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and advantages of this plugin.
For more details go here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just some of the many 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 current digital presence into a fully-featured and automated event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to attendee limits, multiple price levels 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 manually.
Basically, you are enabling participants to complete the enrolment process by themselves.
Allowing your enrollees to do the data entry frees up your time and lets you invest more of your energy on creating a more enjoyable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover in a moment, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and registration process that you want your participants to experience.
Some additional benefits of the plugin include:
- Significantly Lower Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third-party service provider. This is made possible by using a model where users purchase the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then buy add ons when you need new features.
- Higher Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new sign-ups any time of day or night. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event invite other people they know who may also be interested.
- Green Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, your event signup process can remain entirely in digital form, eliminating typical paper waste from tasks associated with admin and record-keeping.
- Own Your Data. You own all the information you obtain from your event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
The Event Espresso plugin delivers functionality to its users via built-in features (these come with the plugin) and optional features that you can buy for an additional cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many unique built-in to WP users. Here are just some:
- Quick and simple to install and use. Be up and running in very little time.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In Event Espresso 4, events can have multiple dates and times (datetimes), that these can be managed from a single event.
- Event Calendar. Participants can easily find your upcoming events and add these to their schedule with a WordPress calendar.
- Ticket Selector. Present a number of ticket options to registrants so they can choose the ticket(s) that will best fit their needs.
- Intelligent Single Page Checkout. 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 attendees.
- Spam Protection. Reduce the risk of spammers and bots creating fake registrations by using reCAPTCHA option that provide human validation.
- Discount & Promotional Codes. Set up promotion and discount codes to encourage prospects to make a decision immediately, or simply make your offerings more appealing for others. This is also practical for helping to increase sales of events close to timelines.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. EE 4 provides you with the tools to understand who your clients are and how they’ve done business with you.
- No-Ticket Events. Set up events without making it necessary for attendees to get tickets. Use Event Espresso for all forms of events, not only those that need tickets.
- Private Contact Notes. Keep observations about event registrants on their profile and how you have interacted with them. Private commenting helps you keep records of when users contacted you, your internal notes, and how you’ve assisted your contacts.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events allow you to build an event over multiple work sessions without publishing it to your website. You can work on your event pages until you are ready to take things live, or schedule your event to publish at a future time and date.
- Your Organization Settings. Configure your profile to be used throughout Event Espresso and your WordPress themes. Your organization information include: company name, address, city, state, country, zip/postal code, primary contact email address, phone, VAT/tax number, company logo, Facebook profile URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ profile URL, Instagram URL.
- Default Tickets. If you create similar tickets for most of your events, you can set one of those tickets as your default ticket for all new events simply by ticking a checkbox.
- Register Multiple Event Participants. EE 4 allows one person or a group to buy multiple tickets and different ticket types at the same time. Event managers decide how many people are able to enrol in a single booking session by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Automatic Upgrades. Event Espresso provides simple 1-click plugin updating to make sure that you have the newest features and to keep your software installation working with the latest version of WordPress.
- Social Sharing. Event attendees and site visitors can help spread the word about your event using social share buttons.
- Categorize Events. If you have several different types of events such as free and paid, conference speakers and mastermind sessions, different kinds of courses, etc. you can categorize them to help event attendees to locate what they’re looking for. You can display all events in a category on an event category page, make the events searchable by category, and colour-code your events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make these easier to find, as well as suggesting new events in the categories that appeal to your existing customers.
Additional 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.
- Metabox Management & Organization. Event Espresso leverages the WP user interface, which gives you the ability to organize the user interface to match your workflow process. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or entirely removed from your page.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & 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 mission, the company operates on a modular and effective model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium version of Event Espresso also includes over 40 added features, including:
- Live-filtering when you search for events in the Event Espresso admin.
- Default surcharge (similar to applying a service tax to tickets).
- Option to skip the confirmation page during the registration process.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
In addition to an incredible range of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow you to significantly expand the functionality of managing your event.
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 available, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Manager Add-on: The Recurring Events manager addon allows you to put your events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months ahead. You can schedule as many future events as you need. Event Espresso will automatically open and close bookings for all of these recurring events.
- Events Date Range Template Addon: The Date Range custom event list template allows your users to search for events that take place within a certain date range.
- Events Social Sharing Addon: This add on 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 registration.
- Custom Template Addon: The Custom Template add on lets you display your events in a range of visually exciting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Addon Editions: This addon lets you include staff in the event management process and give new users permission to create events or regional managers the ability to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WordPress users roles and assign them different permissions with different capabilities, allowing staff to help you manage your events or the events that other people create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain sections of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain parts 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.
- Multi-Event Registration Add on: The Multi-Event registration add-on gives your 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 cart. With the Multi-Event Registration addon, 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 View Template Add on: The Events Table Template add on gives you 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 their own custom templates using one of the included templates as a source template.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp add on lets you automatically register participants to a particular mailing list or group within MailChimp.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software, including new add ons.
For more details about the newest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
User Testimonials
Here are some of the testimonials that satisfied plugin 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
”Over the next 5-6 years we should be able to claim that we saved the company over $100,000 – Thanks Event Espresso!” David Waterman, KT Benefits & InkItDigital.com
”Event Espresso is very nice and functional plugin. Set it up is not very easy for a beginner like me, but you have one of the best support team in your side. They answer all questions in a timely manor. I didn’t know anything about setting up the plugins, Thanks to Event Espresso Support team that now I can find my way around this plugin. Event Espresso helps our company to manage the workshops, keep track of our students, manage the emails, and much more. We upgrade from personal License to Business license in just two weeks of using Personal license. I strongly recommend the Business license.” Ted Karlsalr, Omnilargess
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, presenter, concert planner, or event consultant, there are simply endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered user, search the forums for inspiration and practical ways to improve your event management and registration process or enhance the experience of your participants.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso works with with most WordPress plugins and themes that follow standard WP coding rules. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive customer support, as so many of its customers 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
Event Espresso provides amazing support with access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, priority 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 web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can rely on to run and manage your events.
Plugin Cost
Event Espresso is available in a range of editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin options, however, you will want to consider downloading one of the paid plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This enables you to set up Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This edition allows you to install Event Espresso on one domain only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Edition – This lets you configure Event Espresso on five domains. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The cost to purchase the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the software retails for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Note: The above reflects the pricing when this article was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the website.
Additional Plugin Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the software’s documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to a particular use-case, or to report errors and share feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event booking and ticketing manager software, used and trusted by thousands.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you currently run an event that requires managing dates, times and venues, booking participants, and booking seating, then you will probably not find a better software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
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