Do you currently run or plan to run events that require co-ordinating bookings, such as seminars, group classes, not-for-profit fund raisers, corporate functions, or even a big event like a music show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Co-ordinating event registrations is a complex process. You will probably need to manage calendar schedules, event dates, participant numbers, data entry, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to event registrants.
There are lots of benefits to setting up an automated online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower costs, help you easily reproduce repeat events, give you more control, improve customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be expensive.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-based digital presence, you can set up an inexpensive and highly professional web-based event booking system.
Presenting …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily set up multiple events and begin accepting bookings in just a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and accept online bookings)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can use multiple event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up selling tickets, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your attendees, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing follow-ups.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Note: Currently, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their software: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is fundamentally different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the software is being redeveloped using a different structure to accommodate future growth. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually migrate completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
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
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing digital presence into a fully-featured and automated event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to attendee limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by virtually eliminating the need to process registrations and bookings manually.
Essentially, you are enabling attendees to enrol on their own.
Letting your enrollees to do all of the data entry frees you up from doing administration and lets you spend more time on creating a more unique event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will see in a moment, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your clients to experience.
Additional benefits include the following:
- Reduced Costs: Event Espresso is a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third party service. This is made possible by using a model where Event Espresso users start with the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then buy add ons only if you need extra functionality.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new event bookings 24/7. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social features (see below) let people interested in attending your event invite others who may also be interested.
- Green & Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, your event signup process remains wholly in digital form, eliminating typical paper consumption from tasks associated with administration.
- Own Your Data. You control all the information you collect from your event participants.
Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to end-users via standard features (these are included with the plugin) and additional features that you can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many features to WordPress users. Here are just a few:
- Quick and simple to install and set up. Be up and running in minutes.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In EE 4, events can have many dates and times (called datetimes), which these can be managed from a single event.
- Custom Confirmation Emails. Set up automated registration and payment confirmation email messages to communicate with your participants.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso seamlessly integrates with leading payment gateways, enabling you to collect payments before running the events.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your theme and reuse venue data throughout other areas of your site.
- Spam Protection. Reduce the risk of spammers and bot software programs creating bogus registrations by using reCAPTCHA settings that confirm human activity.
- Mobile Registration & Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system allows you to authenticate tickets, speed up in-venue registrations, set up multiple check-in “stations” and track attendees.
- Event Check-In List. Generate an exportable list of event attendees and confirm everyone who attends.
- Event Manager Pre-approval. Control who can attend your events.
- RSS Event Feeds. Provide automatic updates to your website visitors, bring in more visitors and reach a wider number of prospects with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Keyword-Rich URLs. Keyword-rich event page URLs leverage your WordPress Permalinks configuration settings. SEO-friendly urls that have topic-relevant keywords add to the context of your pages and is favored by search engines, helping you bring a more targeted audience to your website.
- Multi-Language Plugin. Event Espresso is being translated into over 15 languages, and more languages are being added all the time.
- Exportable Data. You can output all the information gathered from your event attendees into Excel or CSV format for compiling reports, implementing marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, etc..
- Register Multiple Attendees. EE 4 allows an individual or an organization to enroll multiple attendees at the same time. Event managers specify how many attendees are able to enroll in one registration by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Attendee Records. Manage your registrant’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their records organized and easily within reach.
- Social Sharing. Event participants and your site visitors can help promote your events using social media sharing buttons.
- Accurate Participant Management. You control your customers’ records; who has registered, which event they have registered for and what amount they have paid. With the attendee manager, you can get a quick overview of registered participants and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export a list of attendees to a CSV file for additional reports, send customizable payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your event registrants on a person-by-person basis or as a group.
Extra features include:
- Hooks, Actions And Filters. These allow developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso application that are compatible with the WordPress software platform.
- Metabox Management & Organization. Event Espresso lets you leverage the WordPress user interface, which brings the ability to reorder the user interface to match your workflow process. Each control box can be collapsed, re-arranged or completely removed from the page.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And Value For Money: According to the philosophy stated on their website, 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 company operates on a modular and efficient model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also provides you with 40+ added features, including:
- Live-filtering when searching for events within the Event Espresso admin.
- Default surcharge (similar to adding a service fee to every ticket).
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As well as a very large array of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow end-users to significantly expand the capabilities of events.
Some of these add-ons 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, a default image will be used.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Template Addon: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize the events with many datetimes into a dropdown list.
- Events Date Range Template Add-on: The Date Range custom event list template allows your users to browse for events that take place in a certain date range.
- Social Media Buttons Add on: The social media add-on displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media add-on is included free with any of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- Custom Template Add on: The Custom Template add-on is capable of displaying your event lists in a number of visually exciting ways.
- Seating Chart Addon: The seating chart add on is for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is perfect for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart addon lets you offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues right from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart add on lets you control the experience for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach single pricing to each seat.
- Multi-Event Registration Addon: The Multi-Event registration add-on gives potential customers 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 Multiple 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 Table View Template Add-on: The Events Table Template addon gives event managers an easy-to-use system that allows you to change the look and feel 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 design custom templates using one of the templates included as a source template.
- MailChimp Integration Add on: The MailChimp add on allows you to automatically register participants to a particular mailing autoresponder list or group within your MailChimp account.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add ons.
For more information about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
User Feedback
Below are some of the many testimonials that satisfied plugin users have posted about Event Espresso:
”Event Espresso is one of the nicest Event Managers (WP Plugin) I have come across.” Joe Distefano, Citizen Joe
”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
”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 a gym owner, teacher, conference planner, or event consultant, there are simply unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a registered user, spend a little time visiting the support forum for tips and practical ways to streamline your event management and registration workflow and enhance the experience of your event customers.
Event Espresso Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with other 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 support, as so many of its satisfied plugin users attest:
”It’s magical. Support is amazing, plugin is simple to use, a 3 year old could use the iPhone app…it all is very impressive and professional.” David, House of Prayer
Event Espresso provides amazing support that includes access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base 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.
Additionally, 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 and manage your events.
Plugin Pricing
Event Espresso is available in different editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software options, however, you need to consider using one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This option enables you to run Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License – This allows you to configure Event Espresso on one domain only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Edition – This enables you to run Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 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. Currently, the plugin is selling for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing: Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticketing Registration Software For WordPress
Note: The pricing above was current at the time this review was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin developer when you visit the site.
Additional Information
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.
Look up the software’s online documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to a particular use-case, or to report bugs and share feedback.
For all installation and support 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 management software, used and trusted by thousands of event promoters.
If you own a WordPress-powered site and you plan to run an event that involves scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), booking attendees, or booking tickets, 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
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