Do you currently run or plan to run events that require managing bookings or registrations, such as seminars, group courses, non-profit fund-raisers, marketing functions, or even a big event such as a dance party, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups can be a complex and time-consuming process. You will probably need to co-ordinate scheduling, available dates and seating, participant numbers, data processing, payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to event attendees.
There are lots of benefits to setting up an automated web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily replicate previous events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable user experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that this can be very expensive.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-based digital presence, you can easily set up a very inexpensive and professional web-based event registration system.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticketing Registration Plugin For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily create your event and start processing online registrations in just minutes.
(Set up multiple events and accept online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
Customize registration forms
You can employ several event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your event participants, or integrating your event registration forms with social media and email marketing applications.
View detailed information about event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is fundamentally different than the older EE 3, as it is being redeveloped using a different structure to enable future expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually phase out EE 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and advantages of using the plugin.
More info:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just some of the many benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing digital presence into an automated and fully featured event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by literally eliminating the need to process registrations manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for event participants to perform the registration on their own.
Letting your attendees to do the data themselves frees up your time and lets you focus more of your attention on delivering a memorable event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will see in a moment, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and booking process that you want your clients to experience.
Some additional plugin benefits include the following:
- Significantly Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin provides you with an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own software or using a 3rd-party service. The cost is kept low through a model where users purchase the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then purchase add ons only if you need added functionality.
- More Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept new sign-ups any time of day or night. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social addons (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with other people they know who may be interested.
- Green Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, the event signup process can be transacted entirely online, eliminating typical paper consumption from tasks associated with admin and record-storage.
- All Data Belongs To You. You control all the data you obtain from your event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
The Event Espresso software provides functionality to its users via built-in features (these come with the software) and optional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many unique features to web site owners. Here are just some:
- Fast and simple to install and set up. Be up and running in no time.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso lets you configure as many different types of tickets as you need and specify unique pricing options, ticket quantity limits, etc.
- Customized Confirmation Emails. Set up automatic registration and payment confirmation emails to communicate with event customers.
- Ticket Selector. Present a number of ticket options to registrants so they can purchase the ticket(s) that will best fit their needs.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your theme and reuse venue information throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Prices. Set up events fast with pre-configured default pricing.
- In-App Documentation Systems. Event Espresso 4 comes with 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 send in paper registration forms for manual processing later.
- Waiting Lists. Interested persons can subscribe to a waiting list if your event is completely sold out. Additionally, you can make it a requirement waiting list registrants pre-pay if you plan to add more capacity for the event.
- Private Commenting On Contacts. Record comments about contacts on their profile. Private commenting lets you keep records of when event participants contacted you, your internal notes, and how you’ve assisted your customers.
- Works With The Latest WordPress Version. The Event Espresso 4 user interface follows all WordPress guidelines to help you create visually enhanced event pages that are responsive and mobile-friendly.
- Country Settings. You can configure the country and currency settings to be used when promoting your events, such as currency, currency signs, decimal characters and places, country codes, states or provinces, and so on.
- Import Events. Event Espresso 4 provides an advanced importing feature that enables you to upload a lot of event data all at one time. You can export, edit and upload information about events, datetimes, tickets, pricing, registration questions, venues, terminology, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- WordPress Visual Editor. Event Espresso uses the standard WP Visual editor, allowing you to quickly and easily insert photos and format your event descriptions without knowledge of HTML or CSS, just like any WP post.
- Event Espresso Community. Event Espresso lets you engage with a community of experienced event managers, programmers, web designers, digital marketers and businesses who also use the software. You can interact with other Event Espresso users via their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential clients who have not paid yet for their enrollment with a standard but personalized invoice with one click. Your invoices will address pre-registered participants who have not paid their registration in full by name, give them the balance they owe, and include a link to the event information, a payment link and a url where they can download the invoice.
- Event Reporting. Quick-view event reporting gives you information of all registrations and transactions, enabling you to track the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and amount of revenue you have collected.
Additional features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming. Event Espresso is simple enough for general WordPress users, and also robust and customizable for enterprise-level users and web developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, EE 4 enables more complex enhancements and customizations to the application.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. EE 4 lets you create a log file with debugging data that can be useful for web developers when troubleshooting.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And 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 mission, 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 version of Event Espresso also includes over 40 added features, including:
- Duplicating events – limits the work of re-entering event details when adding new events.
- Default surcharge (similar to applying a service tax to all tickets).
- Default payment status.
Add-Ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow users to significantly expand the functionality of managing your event.
Some of these add-ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Addon: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display scheduled events by location. 4 maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Management Add-on: The Recurring Events management add on enables you to put events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months … even years ahead. You can create as many events in advance as you want. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close bookings for all recurring events.
- Events Category Accordion Template Addon: The Category Accordion template displays categories as a simple list. Clicking a category name shows all events associated with that category and closes any previously open categories.
- Social Coupons Integration Addon: If your web site uses Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can even specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- Custom Template Addon: The Custom Template add on is capable of displaying your event lists in a range of exciting and interesting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Addon Versions: This addon lets you include other users 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 WordPress users roles and assign them different permissions with different capabilities, so your staff can 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 parts of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain parts of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to allow users to have geographic responsibilities for events and users, use the Roles and Permissions Pro add on.
- Multiple Event Registration Add-on: The Multi-Event registration addon gives your potential attendees the ability to register for 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 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 Add on: This addon uses the WordPress calendar to display events and categories of events using a nice graphical calendar.
- JSON API Add on: The new Event Espresso JSON API addon allows other applications, web sites, mobile apps, etc… to access your Event Espresso details through an API (Application Programming Interface).
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin, including new addons.
For complete details about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, visit the plugin website here:
User Testimonials
Here are some of the many testimonials that satisfied users have written about Event Espresso:
”Congratulations on an absolutely fantastic plugin. I’m really impressed with its functionality and add on features and will definitely upgrade my client’s production site to the premium version (when ready for launch) to incorporate all the features. As I have told another client “this plugin is the cat’s meow”.” Pete Mansel
”Your plugin rocks! Seriously, saved me hours on the phone setting up attendance manually. Kudos. :)” William, Petruzzo Photography
”Thank you, we just did 2 sell out seminars of 50 attendees in 48 hours using Event Espresso and it was awesome. My wife was able to pick up on the processing backend with ease. You have done a great job on getting this system together – very simple, clear and well laid out With powerful functionality. I am so glad I dumped the old booking application we had and gave Event Espresso a go. Just wanted to say thanks, and thanks for the very patient, friendly and speedy assistance in helping me to get it all set up at the start. Many thanks to you and your team. A grateful customer.” Nicholas de Castella, Emotional Intelligence Trainings
Useful Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, presenter, workshop planner, or event consultant, there are simply countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed user, search the support forum for inspiration and practical ways to improve your event management and registration workflow or improve the experience of your event registrants.
Product Support
Event Espresso is compatible with all WordPress plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress coding rules. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive end-user support, as many of its users confirm:
”By far, the customer service experience with Event Espresso has been the best of any WordPress Theme or Paid Plugin that I’ve used in the past two years!” Megan Murray, Boys & Girls Club of Lake Tahoe
The Event Espresso plugin provides robust support with access to a support forum, in-depth 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 an established team of experienced WordPress web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can count on to run and manage your events.
Plugin Pricing
Event Espresso is available in different editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software options, however, you should consider downloading one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This license lets you install Event Espresso on one site only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This edition allows you to set up Event Espresso on one domain only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This enables you to configure Event Espresso on 5 domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The cost of purchasing the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, the software sells for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing 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 Info
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the plugin’s online documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to a particular use-case, or to report issues and give feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event booking and ticketing manager plugin, used and trusted by thousands.
If you are a WordPress user and you intend to run an event that requires scheduling dates and venues, registering attendees, and selling seating, then you will probably not find a better software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Ticketing Registration Plugin
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