Do you currently run or plan to run events that require registrations, such as seminars, training courses, non-profit fund raisers, social functions, or even a big event like a food fair, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Managing event bookings can be a complex process. You will most likely be required to co-ordinate scheduling, available dates and spaces, registration numbers, data processing, payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and providing tickets to attendees.
There are a number of benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower costs, help you easily reproduce similar events, give event managers more control, improve customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be expensive.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-based website or blog, you can install a very inexpensive and highly professional online event booking solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticket Registration Software For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily set up multiple events and begin accepting bookings in just a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and receive online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed plugin that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize registration forms
You can employ multiple event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your event participants, or integrating your event bookings with social media and email marketing software.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is fundamentally different than the older EE 3, as the software is being revamped using a different structure to accommodate future growth. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually transition completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
For more details go here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just some of the many benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your site:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current digital presence into a fully-featured and automated event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by literally doing away with the chore of processing registrations manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating event attendees to perform the registration themselves.
Letting your participants to do the data entry frees up your time and lets you focus more resources on planning a memorable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover in a moment, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and booking process that you want your participants to experience.
Additional plugin benefits include the following:
- Less Costs: The Event Espresso plugin provides you with a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own system or using a third 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 requirements of most users) and then purchase addons when you need new features.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new event registrations 24 hours a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing features (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with friends who may be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, your event registration process can remain entirely online, reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks related to enrollment.
- All Information Belongs To You. You own all the information you obtain from your event participants.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to end-users through built-in features (these come with the plugin) and additional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of great features to website owners. Here are just some of these:
- Fast and easy to install and configure. Be up and running in minutes.
- Custom Event Registration. With Event Espresso you can collect unique information using custom event registration forms on your site to plan a unique experience for your event participants.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Registrants can easily find your upcoming events and add these to their schedule with a WordPress calendar.
- Tax Admin And Reporting Options. Event Espresso 4 provides a number of ways to manage taxes for your event and report tax fees to customers when purchasing tickets. You can configure taxes globally and on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
- 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 spamming and bot software programs making fake registrations on your site with reCAPTCHA settings to confirm human activity.
- Discount And Promotional Codes. Offer promotion and discount codes to encourage people to take action without hesitation, or simply make your offerings more affordable for others. This is also practical if you want to sell-out events close to timelines.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. Event Espresso 4 lets you gain a better understanding of who your customers are and how they have done business with you.
- Admin Pre-approval. Control who can and cannot register for your events.
- Public Commenting. Add social a new level of interaction to your events by allowing potential prospects to ask questions about your event and past participants to post comments that can help others choose whether or not to sign up. Moderation settings for public commenting are configured via the WordPress default commenting section.
- Draft Events. Draft events let you develop an event page over multiple sessions without displaying it live on your website. You can keep developing your event until you are ready to publish it live on your website, or schedule your event pages to publish at a future time and date.
- Multi-Language Plugin. Event Espresso is being translated into more than 15 languages, and more translations are being added all the time.
- Exportable Information. You can export all the information gathered from event customers into Excel or CSV format for compiling advanced reports, implementing marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, and so on.
- Multiple Attendee Enrolments. EE 4 allows an individual or people to enroll multiple participants at once. Event managers decide how many people can enrol 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 engage with a community of experienced event managers, developers, designers, marketers and businesses who also use the software. You can interact with other members of the Event Espresso community using their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential event participants who have not paid yet for their registration with a standard but personalized PDF invoice with just one click of a button. Your invoices will address registered customers who have not paid their registration yet by name, give them the amount owing, and include a link to the event information, a payment link and a url where they can download a PDF invoice.
- Categorize Events. If you have multiple types of events like free and paid, conference speakers and mastermind sessions, different kinds of courses, etc. you can categorize them to make it easier for your participants to locate what they’re looking for. You can display all the events in a category on an event category page, make events searchable by category, and colour-code events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make these easier to find, as well as suggesting new events in the categories that appeal to your existing customers.
Extra features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for general WP users, and also extremely robust and customizable for higher end users and developers. The bottom line is that by using Object-oriented programming (OOP), Event Espresso 4 allows for more complex extensions and customizations to the application.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registrations for regular site visitors whenever site maintenance is required. You can continue to work on your event pages during maintenance mode.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & 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:
- Duplicating events – eliminates the need to re-enter event information when adding new events.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse the same questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow customers to significantly enhance the capabilities of the event management process.
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, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Manager Add-on: The Recurring Events manager add-on enables you to put your events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years in advance. You can create as many events in advance as you like. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close registrations for all of your recurring events.
- Events Category Accordion Template Addon: The Category Accordion template displays event categories in a simple list. Clicking the category name displays the events related to that category and closes previously open categories.
- Events Social Sharing Add-on: This add-on adds social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that allows your attendees to share a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after registration.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration add-on allows you to take full advantage of the WordPress user system. With the WP User Integration add-on you can give users a special incentive by offering member prices and overriding event pricing when your members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered users of the site will have access to these special events. Members can also store personal data into their profile page allowing them to quickly register for events by auto-filling in the personal information on the event booking form. Your users can also look up previous events and make payment for new events.
- Seating Chart Add on: The seating chart addon 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 add on lets you promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues right from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart addon lets you control the experience for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach single prices to every seat.
- Multiple Event Registration Add on: The Multi-Event registration add-on gives 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 you with an easy-to-use system that lets you edit 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 enables developers to build custom templates using one of the templates included as a source template.
- JSON API Addon: The Event Espresso JSON API addon lets other software applications, websites, mobile applications, etc… to access your Event Espresso details through an API (Application Programming Interface).
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin, including new addons.
To learn more about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, visit the plugin website here:
User Testimonials
Below are just some of the many great testimonials that satisfied customers have written 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
”I searched long and hard to find something that would serve my needs. This is, by far, the most complete and comprehensive solution I have found.” Bill Hepper, We Teach Live
”I can’t even imagine what I would want the plugin to do that it doesn’t already do. I’m really happy with the features.” Jim Harmer, Improve Photography
Useful Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, presenter, festival promoter, or event management consultant, there are just countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a registered owner, search the support forum for tips and practical ways to streamline your event management and registration workflow or enhance the experience of your event customers.
Event Espresso Support
Event Espresso works with with all WP plugins and themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you find that you need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive user support, as so many of its clients attest:
”No complaints here. Satisfied customer. You can teach us all few things about customer service. Thanks!” Charles
Event Espresso provides exceptional support that includes access to a support forum, comprehensive 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 developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can rely on to run your events.
Plugin Price
Event Espresso is available in different editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software options, however, you need to consider purchasing one of the premium plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This edition lets you run Event Espresso on one site only. It includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This enables you to set up Event Espresso on one domain only. It includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License – This enables you to configure Event Espresso on five domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The cost to purchase the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Presently, the plugin retails for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Please Note: The pricing above was current at the time this review was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin seller when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the software’s online documentation pages for answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to your specific use-case, or to notify developers about issues 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 leading WP event booking and ticketing management software, used and trusted by thousands of WordPress users.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you intend to run an event that involves managing dates and venues, booking participants, and/or selling seating, then you will probably not find a better solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso
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