Do you currently run or plan to run events that require bookings or registrations, such as seminars, group courses, not-for-profit fund-raisers, marketing functions, or even a large-scale event such as a rave party, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Co-ordinating event registrations can be a complex and time-consuming process. You have to manage calendar schedules, dates, participant numbers, data collection and admin, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders and notifications, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to participants.
There are lots of benefits to setting up an online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce costs, help you easily reproduce recurring events, give you more control, improve customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event booking system can be quite expensive.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-powered site, you can install an inexpensive and highly professional web-based event booking solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticketing Registration Software For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily schedule your event and begin receiving online registrations literally in minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and take online bookings)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can use a number of event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up ticket sales, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media and autoresponders.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is significantly different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the software has been revamped using a different structure to accommodate future expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually migrate completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
More info:
Benefits
Here are just some of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Automated Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing web site into a fully-featured and automated event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by literally doing away with the need to process registrations manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for participants to perform the sign-up process themselves.
Allowing your enrollees to do the data entry frees you up from doing administration and lets you invest more of your resources on delivering a more enjoyable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn shortly, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management process that you want your attendees to experience.
Some additional benefits and advantages include:
- Lower Costs: Event Espresso provides you with an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own system or using a 3rd party provider. The cost is kept to a minimum by using a model where Event Espresso users start with the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and purchase addons when you need extra functionality.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept new event sign-ups 24 hours a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features (see below) let people interested in attending your event invite other people they know who may be interested in attending.
- Green & Paperless Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event booking process is transacted wholly online, significantly reducing typical paper waste from tasks related to administration.
- All Data Belongs To You. You control all the information gathered from your event participants.
Plugin Features
The Event Espresso software delivers functionality to its users through standard features (these are included with the software) and additional features that users can buy for an added cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many great built-in to web site owners. Here are just some of these:
- Quick and easy to install and implement. Be up and running in minutes.
- Custom Event Registration Forms. Event Espresso lets you collect specific information using custom event registration forms on your web pages to create a tailored experience for your users.
- Custom Confirmation Emails. Configure automated registration and payment notification emails to communicate with event participants.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso seamlessly integrates with payment gateways, allowing you to collect payments prior to running the events.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your WP theme and display registrant information throughout other areas of your site.
- Spam Protection. Prevent the chance of spamming and bot software programs making bogus registrations on your site with reCAPTCHA option that authenticate human activity.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 comes with 3 comprehensive in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. Event Espresso 4 provides you with the tools to gain a better understanding of who your clients are and how they’ve done business with you.
- Waiting Lists. Latecomers can join a waiting list if your event has reached capacity. You can also specify that wait-list attendees pay for their spots if you plan to expand capacity for your event.
- Private Contact Comments. Keep observations about a contact on their profile and how you’ve interacted with them. Private notes allows you to keep a record of when event registrants contacted you, your internal comments, and how you have helped your customers.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events allow you to build an event page in your own time frame without publishing it to your website. You can work on your event until you are ready to take it live, or schedule your event pages to publish at a future date and time.
- Easy Event Management. Event Espresso puts you in complete control of every aspect of an event’s registration and ticketing, and also lets you automate the process with event management tools that include staff and venue management, customizable event designs, payment processing, list waiting, attendee limits, print-ready ticketing and more.
- Default Tickets. If you find yourself creating similar tickets for many of your events, you can set one of those tickets as your default ticket for the next event simply by ticking a checkbox.
- Register Multiple Participants. EE 4 allows one person or a group to pay for multiple tickets and different types of tickets simultaneously. You can control how many people can register in one booking 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 interact with an expert community of experienced event managers and plugin users. You can interact with other Event Espresso users through their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media pages on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Social Sharing. Event participants and your site visitors can tell others about your event using social media sharing buttons.
- Transaction Reports. Event reporting gives you data of the registrations and transactions, allowing you to measure the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and how much money you have collected.
Extra features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for basic users, and also robust and customizable for enterprise-level users and developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, Event Espresso 4 makes possible more complex enhancements and customizations to the plugin.
- Metabox Management & Reorganization. Event Espresso leverages the WP user interface, which brings the ability to reconfigure the user interface to match your workflow processes. Each control box can be collapsed, re-arranged or entirely removed from the workflow configuration.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value: According to the mission statement on their web 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 model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also includes over 40 additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes for including registrant data in confirmation emails and updates.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse the same questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Addons
As well as a comprehensive number of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow users to significantly enhance the functionality of managing an event.
Some of these add-ons include:
- EE4 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 the event does not have a featured image, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Management Add-on: The Recurring Events management add on enables you to put your events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years ahead. You can create as many future events as you need. Event Espresso will automatically open and close bookings for all recurring events.
- Events Calendar Table Template Addon: The Calendar Table template is a list template with a bold date and customizable “register now” button. The template can be customized to show an event thumbnail instead of the date.
- Social Media Buttons Add on: 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 Files Addon: The Custom Files add on lets you bypass certain aspects of the Event Espresso plugin.
- Seating Chart Add-on: The seating chart addon is 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 allows you to offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues right from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart add on lets you manage the environment 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 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 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.
- Events Table View Template Addon: The Events Table Template add-on provides event managers with an easy-to-use system that lets you 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 allows developers to design their own custom templates using one of the templates provided as a source template.
- EE4 Infusionsoft Integration Addon: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft integration all-in-one sales and marketing plugin addon, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture customer data, track bookings, and accept payments from your website.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software, including new addons.
To learn more about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, visit the plugin website:
User Testimonials
Below are a few of the testimonials that users have written about Event Espresso:
”Event Espresso is so easy to use yet feature rich and stable. It is a cornerstone of our site and our success.” Fraser Barner, Speaker’s Lab
”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
”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
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, trainer, conference planner, or event professional, there are simply countless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a registered user, search the forums for tips and practical suggestions to improve your event management and registration workflow and improve the experience of your attendees.
Support
Event Espresso works with with all WordPress plugins and WordPress themes that follow WP coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great user support, as many of its users attest:
”Thank you Seth for being so responsive and going above and beyond the call of duty with your app! I highly recommend Event Espresso for its functionality and for the stellar support. Seth has a deep knowledge and understanding of WordPress and has built a tool that is seamless to use for both organizer and attendee alike! After looking at a bunch of alternatives, Event Espresso far surpasses the other apps that are available.” Wendy Troupe, ICS North Pole Express
The Event Espresso software provides exceptional support including access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, premium 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 a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can rely on to run your events.
Event Espresso Pricing
Event Espresso is available in different editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you will want to consider purchasing one of the paid plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This license option allows 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. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License – This edition lets you run 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 Edition – This allows you to install Event Espresso on 5 domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The price of the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the plugin sells for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
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 Info
Event Espresso regularly adds 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.
Look up the software’s documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to your particular use-case, or to notify developers about problems and leave feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event registration and ticketing management software, used and trusted by thousands of users.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you intend to run an event that requires managing dates and venues (offline and online), registering participants, and reserving seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticketing Registration Plugin For WordPress
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