Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that require handling bookings, such as seminars, training classes, non-profit fund raisers, marketing functions, or even a big event such as a concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Managing event registrations is a complicated and time-consuming process. You may need to manage event schedules, dates, participant numbers, data collection and admin, payments and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to event registrants.
There are a number of benefits to setting up an automated online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily copy settings for repeat events, give event managers more control, improve customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that this can be quite expensive.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-based website or blog, you can easily set up a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event registration system.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Management Plugin
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily set up your event and begin accepting bookings in just minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and process online registrations)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed plugin that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize registration forms
You can employ a range of event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up ticket-selling, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your event participants, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing notifications.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is completely different than the older EE 3, as the platform is being rebuilt using a different structure to enable future expansion. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually retire EE 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and features of this plugin.
More info:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
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 Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website into an automated and fully featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to attendee limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Better 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 manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating attendees to complete the enrollment process by themselves.
Allowing your enrollees to do the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you spend more of your attention on planning a memorable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover shortly, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management process that you want your users to experience.
Additional plugin benefits include:
- Lower Costs: Event Espresso is an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own solution or using a third party service. This is made possible by using a model where users pay for the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and purchase add ons when you need added features.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept new event signups 24 hours a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features and addons (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event share your information with friends who may be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, your event booking process can be transacted wholly online, significantly reducing traditional paper waste from tasks related to admin and record-keeping.
- All Information Belongs To You. You control all the data gathered from event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to end-users through built-in features (these come with the software) and additional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many built-in to site owners. Here are just some:
- Fast and simple to install and use. Be up and running in minutes.
- Customized Event Registration. With Event Espresso you can collect specific data using a custom event registration form on your web site to plan a great experience for your users.
- Event Calendar. Registrants can easily see your upcoming events and add these to their schedule with a calendar.
- Ticket Selector. Present multiple ticket options to registrants so they can choose the ticket(s) that will best fit their needs.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration enables event managers to customize the display of Google Maps on the event listing and event details sections.
- Spam Protection. Eliminate the chance of spammers and bot software programs creating false registrations by using reCAPTCHA option that confirm human activity.
- Discount Codes. Set up promotion and multiple discount codes to encourage people to take action immediately, or simply make your events more attractive for others. This is also practical if you want to sell out events close to deadlines.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. Event Espresso 4 lets you gain a better understanding of who your clients are and how you have previously engaged with them. Your Contact Profile page stores updated records like the name, biography, contact information, event registration information, private comments, and more about each customer.
- Waiting Lists. Latecomers can join a waiting list if your event is full. Additionally, you can make it a requirement wait-listed registrants pre-pay if you plan to expand numbers for your event.
- Private Contact Comments. Record notes about users on their profile and how you have assisted them. Private notes enables you to keep records of when event participants contacted you, your internal comments, and how you have helped them.
- Keyword-Rich Page URLs. Keyword-rich event page Web links leverage your Permalinks configuration settings. Search engine friendly web links with relevant keywords enhance the context of your events and is favored by search engines, helping you bring more potential customers to your site.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your organization’s profile to be used throughout the plugin and your WP themes. Your organization fields include: business name, address, city, state, country, zip/postal code, email address, telephone number, tax number, logo, Facebook URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest profile URL, Google+ profile URL, Instagram URL.
- Exportable Information. You can export all the information gathered from your event attendees into Excel or CSV format for compiling reports, implementing new marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, and so on.
- WordPress Visual Editor. Event Espresso uses the standard WP WYSIWYG editor, so you can quickly and easily insert images and stylize your content without having to know HTML or CSS, just like any typical WordPress post or page.
- Attendee Profiles. Manage each customer’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their records organized and easily accessible.
- Team Member Management. Save time and stay organized by reusing staff profiles for multiple events or displaying profile information such as team member’s contact information, resume and photo using a shortcode in any event description.
- Accurate Participant Manager. You control your participants’ records; who has registered, for what event and what amount they paid. With the attendee manager, you can get a quick overview of registered attendees and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export a list of attendees to a CSV file for additional reports, send custom payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your registrants on a person-by-person basis or as a group.
Additional features include:
- Hooks, Actions & Filters. These features allow developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso application that are completely compatible with WordPress.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 lets you output a log file with debugging data that can be helpful for developers when potential application errors.
- 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 goals, the software has been built using a model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium version of Event Espresso also includes 40+ added features, including:
- Email shortcodes for including registrant data in emails and email newsletters.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing the same group of questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As well as a comprehensive range of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow users to significantly expand the functionality of managing an event.
Some of these add-ons include:
- EE4 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, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Manager Add on: The Recurring Events manager addon lets you put your events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years ahead. You can create as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in advance as you need. Event Espresso will automatically open and close registrations for all of your recurring events.
- Events Category Accordion Template Addon: The Category Accordion template displays event categories as a simple list. Clicking on a category name displays the events related to that category and closes previously open categories.
- Social Media Buttons Addon: The social media addon displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media addon comes free with all of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration addon lets you take advantage of the WordPress user system. With the WP User Integration add-on you can give your users a special incentive by offering member pricing and overriding event prices when your members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered users of the website can have access to your special events. Members can also add personal information into their profile page allowing them fast registration for events by auto-filling in the personal information on the event registration form. Your users can also view event history and make payment for events.
- Seating Chart Add on: The seating chart add on is for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is ideal for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart addon allows you to offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart addon lets you manage the environment for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to every seat.
- Event Ticketing & Bar Scanning Addon: The Ticketing add-on gives you the ability to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon gives you the capacity to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing addon includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for managing check-in scans at the venue door. Customers can either print out their tickets or display them on their mobile devices. The mobile app can be used for checking in or checking out registrants and to validate tickets.
- Events Table Template Addon: The Events Table Template add-on gives event managers an easy-to-use system that lets you edit the design 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 their own custom templates using one of the templates included as a source template.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp add on allows you to auto-register participants to a specified mailing list or group within your MailChimp account.
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 add-ons, check out the plugin here:
Customer Feedback
Here are some of the many testimonials that 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
”Event Espresso plugin still rocks. Saw you guys were up for the WP Honors too. Glad I paid for it! If you need event management on your WordPress site I recommend Event Espresso.” Patrick Allmond, Focus Consulting
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, teacher, workshop promoter, or event management consultant, there are just countless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, visit the user forum for inspiration and practical suggestions to streamline your event management and registration workflow or enhance the experience of your registrants.
Event Espresso Support
Event Espresso works with with most WP plugins and themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive support, as so many of its plugin clients attest:
“I’m really impressed with not only the application itself but the support. I have rarely seen such a responsive support staff than at EE. They rock…I highly recommend this plugin!” sock2me
The Event Espresso software provides robust support with access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, custom development 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 developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can count on to run and manage your events.
Plugin Cost
Event Espresso is available in various editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you need to consider downloading one of the paid plugin editions below:
- Personal Edition – This edition allows you to configure Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This license enables you to install Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License – This lets you configure Event Espresso on five sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Current pricing for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. When we last checked, the software retails for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest price: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Note: The pricing above was current at the time this review was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing 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 the software. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the plugin’s documentation tools for answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to your particular situation, or to report issues and leave feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event booking and ticketing manager plugin, used by thousands.
If you own a WordPress-powered web site and you intend to run events that require scheduling dates, times and venues, booking participants, or reserving seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Management Software
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