Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that need managing bookings, such as seminars, community classes, non-profit fund raisers, networking functions, or even a large-scale event such as a rave party, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Managing event bookings is a complex and time-consuming process. You will probably need to co-ordinate scheduling, availability, participant numbers, data administration, payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders and alerts, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to participants.
There are lots of benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower expenses, help you easily replicate previous events, give event managers more control, improve user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event booking system can be very expensive.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-powered site, you can easily install a very inexpensive and professional web-based event registration solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily create your event and begin processing registrations in just minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and accept online event bookings)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed software that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can use various event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up selling tickets, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your participants, or integrating your event registration forms with an autoresponder system for ongoing follow-ups.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their software: EE 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is completely different than the older EE 3, as the plugin is being revamped using a different structure to accommodate future expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually migrate completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and advantages of using this plugin.
Go here to learn more:
Benefits
Here are just some of the many benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Automated Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current online presence into a fully-featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to attendee 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 increase your business productivity by practically doing away with the chore of processing registrations and sign-ups manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for participants to enrol by themselves.
Allowing your participants to do the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you focus more time on delivering a better event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn shortly, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management process that you want your customers to experience.
Some additional plugin benefits include the following:
- Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd party service provider. This is made possible through a model where you start with the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and buy add ons when you need extra features.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online event signups any time of day or night. In addition, Event Espresso social features and addons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event invite friends who may also be interested in attending.
- Green Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event signup process is kept entirely online, significantly reducing typical paper consumption from tasks related to administration.
- Own Your Information. You control all the information gathered from event participants.
Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to its users via built-in features (these come with the plugin) and optional features that customers can buy for an additional cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many built-in to website owners. Here are just some:
- Fast and simple to install and use. Ready to start accepting registrations in minutes.
- Custom Event Registration. Event Espresso lets you collect unique information using a custom event registration form on your web pages to create a unique experience for your users.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Attendees can easily find your events and add these to their schedule with the calendar.
- Tax Admin & Reporting Options. Event Espresso 4 provides a number of ways to administer taxes for an event and provide reports of tax fees to registrants when purchasing tickets. You can administer taxes globally or on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
- Intelligent Single Page Checkout. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is smart, fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically copy the primary attendee’s registration information for any additional participants.
- Spam Protection. Eliminate the likelihood of spammers and robots creating false registrations on your website with reCAPTCHA settings that confirm human activity.
- In-App Documentation Systems. 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 participants and check-in everyone who attends.
- Ticketless Events. You can create events without the requirement for registrants to book tickets. Use Event Espresso for all types of events, not just when tickets are needed.
- Private Contact Commenting. Keep notes about contacts on their profile and how you have assisted them. Private notes helps you keep records of when event attendees contacted you, your internal notes, and how you have helped them.
- Keyword Rich URLs. Keyword-rich Web links take advantage of your WordPress Permalinks configuration settings. “Pretty” urls with relevant keywords enhance the context of your pages and is favored by search engines, helping you bring more potential customers to your site.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your profile to be used throughout Event Espresso and your front-end templates. The organization information include: business name, street address, city, state, country, zip code, primary contact email address, telephone, VAT/tax number, business logo, Facebook profile URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ profile URL, Instagram URL.
- Default Tickets. If you find yourself creating identical tickets for many of your events, you can set one of those tickets as your default ticket for the next time you create an event simply by checking a box.
- Multiple Event Participant. EE 4 allows a single person or an organization to book multiple attendees at the same time. You can control how many attendees are able to enroll in a single session by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Registrant Profiles. You can manage your registrant’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their data organized and easily within reach.
- Social Sharing. Event registrants and your site visitors can help create a wider exposure for your event using social sharing buttons.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post types. You can also customize your templates to display event information in your own unique way.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows you to have more control and options over your events and how your information displays to your prospective event registrants.
- Metabox Management And Reorganization. Event Espresso leverages the WP user interface, which gives you the ability to reorder the user interface to suit your workflow process. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or deleted from your page.
- Autonomy, Flexibility And Value: According to the philosophy stated on their web site, Event Espresso’s goal 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 version of Event Espresso also provides you with 40+ additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes for including attendee data in emails and newsletters.
- Default surcharge (the same as adding a service fee to every ticket).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Add ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow plugin users to significantly expand the functionality of events.
Some of these addons 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 available, a default image will be used instead.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Template Add-on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes events with many datetimes into a dropdown list.
- 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 also be customized to display the event thumbnail instead of a date.
- Social Coupons Integration Add on: If your web site is featured on Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can even specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- Custom Template Addon: The Custom Template add on can display your event lists in a variety of exciting and interesting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Addon Versions: This add-on lets you include other users in the event management process and give new users the capacity to create events or regional managers the capacity to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WordPress users roles and assign them different permissions with different capabilities, so your staff can help you manage your events or events that others create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain parts of your WP dashboard and/or certain sections of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to create geographic regions for other people to manage events, use the Roles and Permissions Pro addon.
- Multi-Event Registration Add-on: The Multi-Event registration add-on 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 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.
- EE4 Events Table Template Add-on: The Events Table Template add-on gives you an easy-to-use system that allows you to 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 allows developers to build custom templates using one of the included templates as a base template.
- Infusionsoft Integration Add on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and marketing plugin add on, you can completely automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture customer data, track bookings, and accept payments from your website.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software, including new addons.
To learn more about the newest Event Espreso features and add ons, visit the plugin website here:
Customer Feedback
Here are just some of the many testimonials that satisfied customers have posted about Event Espresso:
”Tri-South, Inc is using Event Espresso to manage the course catalog, event ticketing, and class registration. [As their developer] I have customized a few items to make the site and plugin a seamless integration. The client is very pleased!” Jenifer Design
”I recently downloaded it to add to a nonprofit site for a Boy Scout troop and the features work wonderfully with what we wanted to accomplish for the site. It allows us to set up calendar, events, and even take payments for trips. At first, I thought that it would be overkill for such a small site, but now I see the possibilities and will definitely be offering Event Espresso to my clients that need an event organization system for their web sites.” Lucy Conn, Troop 462
”Hello. I wanted to say that I’ve purchased Event Espresso twice now for two different organizations and have had great success with the purchases. Outside of photography, I also build small websites with WordPress as the CMS. I built two websites for two different martial arts organizations who host yearly seminars and tournaments. The plug in has provided a way for attendees to sign up online from both Canada and the United States with ease, and also allowed the organizations to easily manage payments, attendee lists, and many other aspects of the events. Thanks to Seth for creating such a great plug in, and for your constant support!” James Zedd, James Zedd Photography
Useful Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, teacher, seminar promoter, or event management professional, there are simply endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered user, search the user forum for inspiration and practical suggestions to streamline your event management process and improve the experience of your customers.
Support
Event Espresso works with with all WordPress plugins and themes that follow standard WP development guidelines. If you do need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive user support, as many of its users confirm:
”By far, the customer service experience with Event Espresso has been the best of any WordPress Theme or Paid Plugin that I’ve used in the past two years!” Megan Murray, Boys & Girls Club of Lake Tahoe
Event Espresso provides amazing support with access to support forums, 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.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can count on to organize and manage your events.
Event Espresso Cost
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software features, however, you may want to consider purchasing one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This enables you to install Event Espresso on 1 site only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This lets you install Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Edition – This allows you to configure Event Espresso on five domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 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. Currently, the plugin is selling for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticketing Registration Software For WordPress
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 author when you visit the website.
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 to find answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to a particular use-case, or to notify developers about errors and leave feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event booking and ticketing management software, used by thousands of WP users.
If you are a WordPress user and you intend to run any event that requires scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), booking attendees, or reserving tickets, 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 – Event Management And Ticketing Registration Software For WordPress
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