Do you currently run or plan to run events that need co-ordinating bookings or registrations, such as workshops, group classes, non-profit fund raisers, marketing functions, or even a big event such as a festival, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Managing event bookings is a complex process. You may need to manage scheduling, availability, participant numbers, data collection and admin, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and issuing tickets to participants.
There are a number of advantages to setting up an online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce costs, help you easily reproduce previous events, give event managers more control, create a better client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event booking system can be expensive.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-based web site, you can install a very inexpensive and professional online event booking solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – Event Manager And Registration System For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin enables you to easily set up your event and start processing online bookings literally in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and accept online registrations with Event Espresso)
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 employ several event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your event attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media and email marketing systems.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is impressively different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the plugin is being redeveloped using a different structure to allow for future expansion. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually transition completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and advantages of using the plugin.
More info:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just some of the many benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website or blog into a fully-featured and automated event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to attendee limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically eliminating the need to process registrations and bookings manually.
Essentially, you are making it easier for participants to enroll by themselves.
Allowing your clients to do all of the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you focus more energy on delivering a better event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will see shortly, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your attendees to experience.
Some additional plugin benefits include the following:
- Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own solution or using a third-party provider. The cost is kept to a minimum by using a model where users start with the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then purchase addons when you need new functionality.
- Higher Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new bookings outside normal business hours. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features and add-ons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event invite their friends who may also be interested.
- Green Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign-up process can remain entirely in digital form, significantly reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks associated with enrollment.
- All Data Belongs To You. You own all the information you acquire from your event participants.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to its customers via built-in features (these are included with the plugin) and optional features that you can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many built-in to web site owners. Here are just a few of these:
- Fast and easy to install and configure. Ready to start using in minutes.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso lets you create multiple ticket types and set separate prices, limits on ticket quantities, etc.
- Customized Notification Emails. Easily set up custom automatic registration and payment notification email messages to communicate with your participants.
- Ticket Selector. Present multiple ticket options to prospects and let them purchase the ticket(s) that best fits their needs.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration enables event managers to configure the look and control settings of Google Maps on the event listing and event details pages.
- Spam Protection. Eliminate the chance of spamming and robots making false registrations on your site by using reCAPTCHA tools that provide human authentication.
- Mobile Registration And Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system enables you to validate tickets, speed up door registrations, create multiple check-in “stations” and track your participants.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of booking event attendees when they show up, or send in paper-based registration forms for manual processing later.
- Waiting Lists. Interested persons can join a waiting list if your event is full. Additionally, you can make it a requirement wait-list registrants pre-pay if you plan to add more capacity for your event.
- Private Contact Notes. Keep comments about a contact on their profile. Private notes helps you keep a record of when users contacted you, your internal observations, and how you’ve assisted them.
- Works With The Most Up-To-Date Version Of WP. The EE 4 user interface follows all WordPress guidelines to help you create visually enhanced event pages that are responsive and mobile-friendly.
- Your Organization Settings. Configure your organization’s profile to display throughout the software and your WP themes. Your organization data include: organization name, street address, city, state, country, zip code, email address, telephone number, tax number, business logo, Facebook URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ profile URL, Instagram URL.
- Default Tickets. If you create similar tickets for many of your events, you can automatically set one of those tickets as your default ticket for the next event simply by checking a box.
- Multiple Event Attendee. EE 4 allows one person or people to purchase multiple tickets and different ticket types at once. You control how many attendees can register in a single booking session by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Automatic Plugin Upgrading. Event Espresso offers easy one-click updates to make sure that you have the newest features and to keep your installation up-to-date with new versions of WordPress.
- Staff Management. Save time and stay organized by reusing team member profiles for multiple events or displaying profile information such as team member’s contact information, resume and photo using a shortcode in your event description.
- Categorize Events. If you have several different event types such as free and paid, workshops and breakout sessions, different types of courses, etc. you can categorize them to make it easier for event registrants to locate what they’re searching for. You can list all events in a category on an event category page, make events searchable by category, and color-code events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make them easier to find, as well as suggesting new events in the categories that interest your existing customers.
Additional features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for non-technical users, and also extremely robust and customizable for enterprise-level users and web developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, Event Espresso 4 enables more complex enhancements and customizations to the software.
- Metabox Management & Reorganization. Event Espresso lets you leverage the WP user interface, which brings the ability to organize the user interface to match your workflow processes. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or removed from your page.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & Value: According to the philosophy stated on their web site, Event Espresso’s aim 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 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 includes over 40 additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes that includes attendee data in emails and updates.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing the same questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Addons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow you to significantly expand the capabilities of events.
Some of these addons 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, a default image will be used.
- Recurring Events Management Add-on: The Recurring Events manager add on allows you to put events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months ahead. You can create as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in advance as you want. 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 categories as a simple list. Clicking the category name displays all events related to that category and closes any previously open categories.
- Social Media Buttons Addon: The social media addon displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media add-on comes free with all of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration add-on allows you to 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 prices 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 will have access to your special events. Members can also add personal information into their profile page allowing them to quickly register for events by auto-filling in their personal information on the event booking form. Your users can also look up previous events and pay for events.
- Seating Chart Addon: The seating chart addon 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 add-on lets you offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart add-on lets you control the environment for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach single prices to every seat.
- Multi-Event Registration Add-on: The Multiple Event registration addon gives potential attendees the ability to book 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 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.
- Events Calendar Addon: This WordPress events calendar displays events and categories of events in a nice graphical calendar.
- Infusionsoft Integration Add-on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft integration all-in-one sales and business marketing software add on, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture event attendee data, track registrations, and accept payments from your website.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software, including new addons.
For more details about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, visit the plugin website:
User Feedback
Below are some of the many testimonials that satisfied customers have posted about Event Espresso:
“It is a very, very slick plugin. It’s one of those plugins where you install it, change a couple of settings, and boom you’re selling tickets.” Brad Williams, WebDevStudios
”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
”You guys have done an AWESOME job with this system…promise me to keep up the excellent work you guys are doing, for as long as you can… Respect!” Robert Jarnroth, Jarnroth Digital Productions
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, presenter, show promoter, or event professional, there are simply endless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a licensed user, visit the user forum for useful ideas and practical suggestions to improve your event management process and improve the experience of your participants.
Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with all WordPress plugins and WP 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 so many of its end-users confirm:
”Thank you Seth for being so responsive and going above and beyond the call of duty with your app! I highly recommend Event Espresso for its functionality and for the stellar support. Seth has a deep knowledge and understanding of WordPress and has built a tool that is seamless to use for both organizer and attendee alike! After looking at a bunch of alternatives, Event Espresso far surpasses the other apps that are available.” Wendy Troupe, ICS North Pole Express
The plugin provides great support that includes access to a support forum, comprehensive 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 web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely software you can rely on to run and manage your events.
Plugin Price
Event Espresso is available in different editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin features, however, you may want to consider using one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal Edition – This license enables you to configure Event Espresso on one domain only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This allows you to install Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This edition lets you install Event Espresso on five domains. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Pricing details of the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. When we last checked, the software retails for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Manager
Please Note: The pricing above was current at the time this review was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin developer when you visit the website.
Additional Plugin Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the plugin’s online documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to a particular use-case, or to notify developers about errors and share feedback.
For detailed installation and support 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 and trusted by thousands of users.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you intend to run events that involve managing dates and venues, booking participants, and reserving seating, then you will probably not find a better software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticketing Registration System For WordPress
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