Do you currently run or plan to run events that need managing bookings, such as workshops, community classes, not-for-profit fund raisers, corporate conferences, or even a big event like a trade exhibit, 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 complex process. You will probably need to manage scheduling, availability, participant numbers, data processing and storage, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to event attendees.
There are lots of benefits to setting up an automated web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower expenses, help you easily reproduce similar events, give you more control, improve customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event registration system can be quite costly.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-powered website, you can download and install an inexpensive and highly professional online event registration system.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticket Registration Software For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress lets you easily create multiple events and start accepting bookings in just minutes.
(Set up multiple events and process online bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed software that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize registration forms
You can use a range of event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up selling tickets, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event participants, or integrating your event registration forms with social media and autoresponders.
View detailed information about event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is impressively different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the plugin has been rebuilt using a different structure to enable future growth and expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually transition completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
More info:
Benefits
Here are just some of the many benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing digital presence into an automated and feature-rich event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple price options 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 eliminating the chore of processing registrations and bookings manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating attendees to enroll themselves.
Allowing your clients to do the data entry frees up your time and lets you focus more of your attention on planning a more enjoyable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn in a moment, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and booking process that you want your participants to experience.
Some additional benefits of the plugin include the following:
- Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin is a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third-party provider. The cost is kept low through a model where Event Espresso users pay for the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then buy optional add-ons only when you need extra functionality.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept online event bookings 24/7. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing addons (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event share your information with friends who may also be interested in attending.
- Green Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, your event registration process can remain wholly in digital form, reducing traditional paper waste from tasks associated with administration.
- All Information Belongs To You. You own all the information collected from your event participants.
Features
The Event Espresso plugin delivers functionality to its users via standard features (these are included with the plugin) and optional features that you can buy for an added cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many unique built-in to WP users. Here are just a few of these:
- Fast and simple to install and use. Be up and running in no time.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In EE 4, events can have multiple dates and times (datetimes), that these can be managed from one single event.
- Customized Notification Emails. Set up automatic registration and payment notification emails to communicate with your clients.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso provides integration with several payment gateways, enabling you to collect payments before running events.
- Smart Single Page Checkout Process. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically copy the primary attendee’s registration information for any additional registrants.
- Default Price Types. Price types let event managers create new prices that adjust the default ticket pricing of the system-default ticket.
- In-App Documentation Systems. Event Espresso 4 provides 3 useful in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of registering event participants when they show up, or send in paper registration forms for manual processing later.
- Event Manager Pre-approval. Be selective about who can attend your events.
- Public Commenting. Add “social proof” by encouraging potential prospects to ask questions about your event and past customers to post feedback that can help others consider whether or not to sign up. Moderation settings for commenting are configured via the WordPress commenting system.
- Works With The Most Up-To-Date Version Of WP. The Event Espresso 4 user interface follows the WordPress guidelines to help you build aesthetically enhanced event pages that are easier to use and mobile-friendly.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your organization’s profile to display throughout the plugin and your front-end templates. The organization data include: company name, street address, city, state, country, zip code, email, phone, tax number, your logo, Facebook URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ URL, Instagram URL.
- Import Event Information. Event Espresso 4 provides a CSV-based importing capability that lets you easily import a lot of event data at once. You can export, edit and upload information about events, datetimes, tickets, pricing, registration questions, venue info, terminology, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Multiple Attendee Enrollments. Event Espresso 4 allows an individual or an organization to buy multiple tickets and different types of tickets at once. Event managers control how many people are allowed to register in a single registration session by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Attendee Profiles. You can manage your registrant’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their data organized.
- Staff Member Management. Save time and keep your information organized by reusing staff 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.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post types. You can also customize the templates to display event information in your own unique way.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows you to have more control and options over your content and how your information displays to your prospects.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. EE 4 allows you to generate a log file with debugging data which can be useful for web developers when troubleshooting.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And 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 as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also includes 40+ additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – eliminates the need to re-enter event information when creating new events.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing the same group of questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page in registration.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As well as a comprehensive range of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow end-users to further enhance the functionality of your event management system.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add-on: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display all upcoming events by location. There are four maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize the events with many datetimes into a dropdown list.
- Events Category Accordion Template Addon: The Category Accordion template shows categories as a simple list. Clicking a category name displays the events related to that category and closes previously open categories.
- Events Social Sharing Add on: This addon 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 registration.
- Custom Template Addon: The Custom Template add on is capable of displaying your events in a number of visually exciting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add on Editions: This add on lets you include staff in your organization to help manage your events and give new users the ability to create events or regional managers the capacity to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WordPress users roles and give them different permissions with different privileges, allowing staff to help you manage your events or events that other people create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain parts of your WP dashboard and/or certain areas of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to allow users to control factors geographically for events and users, use the Roles and Permissions Pro addon.
- Multiple Event Registration Addon: 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 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 event categories via a nice graphical calendar.
- Infusionsoft Integration Add-on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft integration all-in-one sales and business marketing software addon, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture registrant data, track enrollments, and accept payments from your website.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software, including new addons.
For full details about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
User Testimonials
Below are just some of the many great testimonials that plugin users have written about Event Espresso:
”Thanks to you and the rest of the team for Event Espresso – Every time I get a signup for an event, I think about how much time EE saves me – and signups happen while I’m out on the water teaching kayaking, not answering the phone. :-)” Tue Brems Olesen, OnAdventure
”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
”Hello. I wanted to say that I’ve purchased Event Espresso twice now for two different organizations and have had great success with the purchases. Outside of photography, I also build small websites with WordPress as the CMS. I built two websites for two different martial arts organizations who host yearly seminars and tournaments. The plug in has provided a way for attendees to sign up online from both Canada and the United States with ease, and also allowed the organizations to easily manage payments, attendee lists, and many other aspects of the events. Thanks to Seth for creating such a great plug in, and for your constant support!” James Zedd, James Zedd Photography
Plugin Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, presenter, seminar promoter, or event management consultant, there are simply endless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered user, go through the forums for new ideas and practical suggestions to improve your event management process or improve the experience of your event registrants.
Support
Event Espresso works with with all WP plugins and WordPress themes that follow WP coding standards. If you find that you need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great end-user support, as many of its clients 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 incredible support with access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, one-on-one 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 web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can count on to run your events.
Event Espresso Pricing
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software functionality, however, you will want to consider purchasing one of the paid plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This license option allows you to run Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This edition enables you to install Event Espresso on 1 site only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This allows you to configure Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The cost to purchase the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Presently, the software sells for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this article was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin author when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the plugin’s documentation tools for answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to your specific situation, or to notify developers about bugs and give feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event registration and ticketing manager software, used and trusted by thousands of WP website owners.
If you own a WordPress-powered site and you currently run events that require managing dates, times and venues (offline and online), booking attendees, and/or booking seating, then you will probably not find a better plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso
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