Does your company currently run or plan to run events that require bookings or registrations, such as workshops, group courses, charity fundraisers, social conferences, or even a big event like a show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Managing event bookings is a time-consuming process. You will most likely be required to manage scheduling, event dates, registration numbers, data administration, collecting payments and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders and alerts, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to event 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 expenses, help you easily duplicate repeat events, give event managers more control, improve customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that this can be quite costly.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-based website or blog, you can set up a very inexpensive and highly professional online event booking solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Manager
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily schedule your event and begin accepting bookings in a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and take online event registrations)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed application that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can use various event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up ticket sales, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media sites like Facebook.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is fundamentally different than the older EE 3, as the plugin has been rebuilt using a different structure to allow for future growth and expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually phase out EE 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and features of using the plugin.
Go here to learn more about the plugin:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just some of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Automated Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current website into an automated and feature-rich event management website … 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 a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by literally eliminating the chore of processing registrations and signups manually.
Basically, you are facilitating attendees to register themselves.
Letting your attendees to do all of the data themselves frees up your time and lets you invest more time on planning a better event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn shortly, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and registration process that you want your customers to experience.
Additional benefits include the following:
- Less Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you an 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 users buy the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and buy add ons when you need new functionality.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new event sign-ups outside traditional business hours. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features and addons (see below) let people interested in registering for your event invite friends who may also be interested.
- Green Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, your event booking process can remain wholly online, significantly reducing typical paper consumption from tasks associated with admin and record-keeping.
- Own Your Information. You control all the information you acquire from event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to end-users through standard features (these come with the plugin) and additional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many built-in to web site owners. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and easy to install and use. Ready to use in minutes.
- Customized Event Registration Forms. With Event Espresso you can collect specific data using custom event registration forms on your website to prepare a great experience for your clients.
- Event Calendar. Registrants can easily find your upcoming events and add these to their schedule using the WordPress calendar.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso seamlessly integrates with payment gateways, enabling you to collect registration fees prior to running events.
- Intelligent Single Page Checkout. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically duplicate the primary attendee’s registration details for any added attendees.
- Default Price Types. Price types let event managers create new prices that adjust the base ticket pricing of your default ticket.
- Discount And Promotional Codes. Provide promotion and multiple discount codes to incentivize people to make a purchasing decision immediately, or simply make your offerings more appealing for others. This is also practical for helping to sell out events close to deadlines.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. Event Espresso 4 provides you with the tools to understand who your clients are and how they’ve done business with you.
- Waiting Lists. Interested persons can subscribe to a waiting list if your event has reached the limit of attendees. Additionally, you can specify that wait-list members pay for their spots if you plan to expand capacity for your event.
- Public Commenting. Add social a new level of social sharing to your event page by encouraging potential registrants to ask questions about your event and past customers to post reviews that can help others choose whether or not to register. Moderation settings for public comments are set in the WordPress native commenting admin area.
- Draft Events. Draft events enable you to build an event page in your own time-frame without publishing it to your site. You can continue editing your event pages until you are ready to go live, or schedule your event to publish at a later time and date.
- Multi-Language Plugin. Event Espresso is is available in 15+ languages, and more translations are being added all the time.
- Exportable Data. You can export all the data collected from your event participants into Excel or CSV format for compiling reports, devising new marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, and so on.
- Event Venue Manager. The venue management feature in EE 4 allows information about a venue to appear throughout the Event Espresso admin and the public areas of your site to inform registrants of your event’s location. The venue profile has many standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also lets you add information like venue capacity, venue website, venue phone number, venue location details, map, etc. You can also list venues throughout different parts in your WP theme and on a venue archive page on your site where you can set up and publish venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a given venue.
- Registrant Profiles. Manage your registrant’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their records organized and easily within reach.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential participants who have not fully paid for their registration with a standard but personalized PDF invoice with one click of a button. Your invoices will address registered customers who have not paid their registration in full by name, display the balance owing, and include links to the event, a payment url and a url to download the invoice.
- Event Reporting. Quick-view event reporting provides you with information of your registrations and transactions, enabling you to track the performance of your events with the aggregate number of people who have registered and amount of revenue you’ve collected.
Extra features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for basic WP users, and also robust and customizable for higher end users and developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, Event Espresso 4 enables more complex extensions and customizations to the plugin.
- Metabox Management & Organization. Event Espresso leverages the WordPress user interface, which brings the ability to reconfigure the user interface to suit your workflow. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or entirely deleted from your workflow configuration.
- 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 software has been built using a modular and highly effective model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also includes over 40 additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – streamlines the work of re-entering event information when creating new events.
- Default surcharge (the same as applying a service tax to every ticket).
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow you to further expand the functionality of events.
Some of these add-ons include:
- Events Grid Template Addon: 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, a default image will be used instead.
- Recurring Events Manager Add on: The Recurring Events management addon lets you put events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years ahead. You can schedule as many events in the future as you need. Event Espresso will automatically open and close registrations for all recurring events.
- Events Calendar Table Template Add on: The Calendar Table template is a list template with a bold date and customizable “register now” button. The template can be customized to show the event thumbnail instead of a date.
- Events Social Sharing Add-on: This add on adds social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that lets your attendees to share a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after booking.
- Custom Template Add-on: The Custom Template add on lets you display your event lists in a range of visually exciting ways.
- Seating Chart Add on: The seating chart addon is great 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 site. The Seating Chart add on lets you control the environment for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to every seat.
- Multi-Event Registration Add-on: The Multiple 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 Template Add on: The Events Table Template addon gives event managers 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 lets developers design custom templates using one of the included templates as a source template.
- JSON API Add-on: The new Event Espresso JSON API add-on lets other applications, online tools, mobile applications, etc… to access your Event Espresso content through an Application Programming Interface (API).
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin, including new add-ons.
For more information about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
User Testimonials
Here are just some of the many great testimonials that users have posted 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
”Just bought an Event Espresso license for an upcoming conference website we are working on. The custom registration forms functionality rocks!” Eric Sopp, Inside Design
Plugin Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, teacher, seminar promoter, or event consultant, there are simply unlimited possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a licensed user, go through the forums for useful ideas and practical ways to streamline your event management and registration workflow or enhance the experience of your event registrants.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso is compatible with other WP plugins and themes that follow WP coding standards. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent end-user support, as many of its satisfied customers attest:
”Your plugin saved our client nearly $9000 in development costs because it handled the majority of the functionality we were looking for at a much lower cost. EventEspresso’s staff have been very responsive to our needs when we have them (which has been rare, because the plugin is so well coded). Great job on a great plugin!” Brandon P., Experience Farm
The plugin provides exceptional support that includes access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, priority 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 a well-staffed team of experienced web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can depend on to run your events.
Product License Pricing
Event Espresso is available in a range of editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software options, however, you should consider downloading one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This lets you configure Event Espresso on one site only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This enables you to configure Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License – This lets you configure Event Espresso on five domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The price of the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, the plugin is being retailed for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticket Registration Plugin For WordPress
Note: The pricing above was current when this article was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the site.
Additional Info
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.
Search the plugin’s online documentation pages for answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to your specific use-case, or to report issues and share feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product website.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event booking and ticketing management software, used and trusted by thousands of WP website owners.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you plan to run events that require managing dates, times and venues (offline and online), registering participants, and/or booking tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Manager Plugin
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