Do you currently run or plan to run events that need co-ordinating bookings, such as workshops, group classes, charity fund-raisers, networking conferences, or even a big event such as a music concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups can be a complex process. You may be required to co-ordinate scheduling, date availability, attendee numbers, data processing, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders and alerts, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and issuing tickets to participants.
There are many advantages to setting up an automated online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower expenses, help you easily duplicate repeat events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that this can be costly.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-based web site, you can easily set up an inexpensive and highly professional online event registration system.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticket Registration Plugin For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily set up multiple events and begin receiving registrations literally in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and take online event bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Customize registration forms
You can employ a number of event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up selling tickets, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with an autoresponder system for ongoing updates.
View detailed information about event attendees
Note: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their software: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is impressively different than the older EE 3, as it is being redeveloped using a different structure to allow for future expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. 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 this plugin.
Go here to learn more about the plugin:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your site:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website into a fully-featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by practically eliminating the need to process registrations and sign-ups manually.
Basically, you are facilitating event attendees to perform the enrollment process on their own.
Letting your enrollees to do the data entry frees you up from doing admin work and lets you spend more of your energy on creating a more unique event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn in a moment, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management process that you want your customers to experience.
Some additional benefits and advantages include the following:
- Reduced Costs: Event Espresso is an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third party service provider. The cost is kept to a minimum by using a model where you purchase the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then purchase add ons only if you need extra functionality.
- Higher Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online event signups any time of day or night. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing add-ons (see below) let people interested in attending your event invite their friends who may be interested.
- Paperless Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event registration process can remain entirely in digital form, reducing traditional paper waste from tasks related to admin and record-keeping.
- All Information Belongs To You. You own all the data collected from event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
The Event Espresso software provides functionality to end-users via standard features (these are included with the plugin) and additional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many features to web site owners. Here are just some of these:
- Fast and easy to install and implement. Be up and running in minutes.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In Event Espresso 4, events can have many dates and times (datetimes), and these can be managed from a single event.
- Customizable Event Designs. Create the look and feel you want for your events and registrations page using Event Espresso’s template options and components, and HTML and CSS.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso provides integration with payment gateways, allowing you to collect registration fees prior to running events.
- Smart Single Page Checkout Process. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is smart, fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically duplicate the primary attendee’s registration details for any additional registrants.
- Default Prices. Set up events quickly by pre-configuring default ticket pricing.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 comes with three comprehensive in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of event registrants and confirm those who have attended.
- Waiting Lists. Interested persons can join a waiting list if your event has reached maximum capacity. You can also make it a requirement waiting list attendees pay for their spots if you plan to expand capacity for the event.
- Private Notes On Contacts. Record comments about a contact on their profile. Private commenting allows you to keep records of when event registrants contacted you, your internal observations, and how you’ve assisted them.
- SEO Friendly Page URLs. Keyword-rich event page Web links leverage your WP Permalinks configuration settings. Search engine friendly permalinks that use relevant keywords add to the context of your content and improves your search rankings, helping you drive a more targeted audience to your website.
- Country Settings. You can configure the country and currency settings to be used throughout Event Espresso, such as currency, currency signs, decimal characters and places, country codes, regions, and so on.
- Default Tickets. If you create similar tickets for your events, you can set up as your default ticket for your new events simply by ticking a checkbox.
- WYSIWYG Editor. Event Espresso uses the built-in WordPress Visual editor, allowing you to quickly and easily insert images and write and edit your content without knowing HTML or CSS, just like any other WP post.
- Registrant Profiles. You can manage your registrant’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their data organized.
- Staff Management. Save time and keep your business organized by reusing team member profiles for multiple events or displaying their profile using a shortcode in an event description.
- Accurate Participant Manager. You have control of your customers’ records; who has enrolled, for what event and how much 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 event attendees to Excel for additional uses, send customized payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your attendees individually or as a group.
Additional features include:
- Hooks, Actions And Filters. These features allow you to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso software that are 100% compatible with WordPress.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. EE 4 lets you create a log file with debugging data that can be helpful for developers when diagnosing errors.
- Autonomy, Flexibility 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 mission, the company operates on 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 provides you with over 40 added features, including:
- Live-filtering when you search for events inside the Event Espresso admin.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse a common set of questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Addons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow you to further expand the functionality of your event management process.
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 an event does not have a featured image available, a default image will be used.
- Recurring Events Management Add-on: The Recurring Events manager add-on lets you put events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years ahead. You can schedule as many events in advance as you need. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close registrations for all of these recurring events.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add-on: The Category Accordion template shows categories in a simple list. Clicking a category name shows the events associated with that category and closes previously open categories.
- Social Coupons Integration Add-on: If your website is featured on Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can also specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- Custom Template Add-on: The Custom Template add-on is capable of displaying your events in a range of visually exciting ways.
- Seating Chart Add on: The seating chart add on is suitable 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 addon lets you offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues directly from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart add on lets you control the environment for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach single prices to each seat.
- Multi-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 addon, 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 Calendar Add on: This WordPress events calendar displays events and categories of events using a nice graphical calendar.
- JSON API Addon: The Event Espresso JSON API add-on lets other software applications, online tools, mobile apps, etc… to access your Event Espresso data through an API (Application Programming Interface).
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software, including new add-ons.
For more information about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
Customer Feedback
Here are some of the many testimonials that satisfied customers have written about Event Espresso:
”My clients have used Event Espresso for Transportation (Cadet Bus for leave), Parties (tailgates and brewery tours), and Horse-back riding lessons and camps. What a terrific plug-in and fantastic support from Seth!” Nina, Blue Iris Web Design
”You can tell that the Event Espresso team is really passionate about their work, and that they care and spend a lot of time helping people work with their plugin and use it with their events – it’s something every WordPress service should aim for.” Ryan Imel, WPCandy
”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
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, teacher, conference planner, or event management consultant, there are simply countless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a registered owner, spend a little time visiting the support forum for inspiration and practical ways to improve your event management process and enhance the experience of your event attendees.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with other WP plugins and WordPress themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent user support, as so many of its satisfied plugin users confirm:
”No complaints here. Satisfied customer. You can teach us all few things about customer service. Thanks!” Charles
Event Espresso provides comprehensive support that includes access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, one-on-one 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.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely software you can rely on to organize and manage your events.
Event Espresso Pricing
Event Espresso is available in different editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you need to consider purchasing one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This lets you install Event Espresso on one domain only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License – This edition allows you to set up Event Espresso on one domain only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This allows you to run Event Espresso on 5 sites. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The cost of purchasing the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. When we last checked, the plugin is selling for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current price: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this review was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin author when you visit the site.
Additional Plugin Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the plugin’s online documentation pages for answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to a specific use-case, or to report problems and give feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product information pages.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event registration and ticketing manager software, used and trusted by thousands of WP site owners.
If you own a WordPress-powered web site and you intend to run events that involve scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), enrolling participants, and reserving tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better WP plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso
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