Does your company currently run or plan to run events that need to accept registrations, such as seminars, group classes, non-profit fund raisers, networking functions, or even a big event like a show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups is a time-consuming process. You will probably have to manage event schedules, dates, attendee numbers, data processing, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to event attendees.
There are a number of advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower costs, help you easily duplicate repeat events, give you more control, improve customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be very expensive.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-based digital presence, you can download and install an inexpensive and professional web-based event booking system.
Introducing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily set up an event and begin accepting online bookings in just minutes.
(Set up multiple events and accept online bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed plugin that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can use a number of event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up selling tickets, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media sites like Facebook.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is considerably different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the plugin has been redeveloped using a different structure to allow for future growth. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually phase out Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
Go here to learn more:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just some of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current website or blog into a 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 even seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically doing away with the need to process registrations and bookings manually.
Basically, you are enabling attendees to register by themselves.
Allowing your customers to do all of the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you concentrate more time on delivering a more enjoyable event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon learn, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management and registration process that you want your clients to experience.
Additional benefits include the following:
- Less Costs: The Event Espresso plugin provides you with an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd-party service provider. This is made possible by using a model where Event Espresso users start with the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then purchase addons only when you need additional functionality.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new registrations outside normal business hours. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social features (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with friends who may also be interested.
- Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign-up process is kept wholly in digital form, reducing typical paper consumption from tasks associated with enrollment.
- Own Your Data. You control all the data obtained from your event participants.
Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to its customers through standard features (these are included with the plugin) and optional features that customers can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of built-in to website owners. Here are just some of these:
- Quick and easy to install and implement. Be up and running in no time.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In EE 4, events can have many dates and times (datetimes), which these can be managed from a single event.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Participants can easily see your upcoming events and add these to their schedule with the calendar.
- Tax Administration Options. Event Espresso 4 gives you several options to administer taxes for your event and provide reports of tax fee components to registrants when purchasing tickets. You can administer taxes globally and on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your WP theme and display events data throughout other areas of your site.
- Spam Protection. Eliminate the likelihood of spammers and bot software programs creating bogus registrations by using reCAPTCHA features that authenticate human activity.
- In-App Documentation Systems. Event Espresso 4 includes 3 comprehensive in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. EE 4 provides you with the tools to gain a better understanding of who your customers are and how you have previously done business with them. Your Contact Profile section stores the name, biography, contact information, event registration history, private comments, etc. about each registrant.
- Waiting Lists. Interested persons can join a waiting list if your event has reached capacity. You can also specify that waiting list members pre-pay if you plan to expand capacity for your event.
- Event RSS Feeds. Provide automatic updates to your site visitors, drive quality traffic and reach a wider number of prospects with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Draft Events. Draft events let you build your event page at your own leisure without displaying it live on your site. You can keep working on your events until you are ready to publish it to your website, or schedule your event pages to publish at a later time and date.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your profile to display throughout the plugin and your WordPress themes. Your organization fields include: organization name, address, city, state, country, zip code, email address, phone, VAT/tax number, logo, Facebook profile URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ profile URL, Instagram profile URL.
- Default Tickets. If you find yourself creating identical tickets for most of your events, you can automatically set one of those tickets as your default ticket for any new events simply by ticking a checkbox.
- Venue Manager. The venue manager in Event Espresso 4 allows details about venues to be made available throughout the Event Espresso admin and the public areas of your website to inform users of your event’s location. The venue record has many standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also includes details such as venue seating capacity, venue site URL, telephone number, venue location details, maps, etc. You can also display venues in specific areas of your theme as well as on a venue listing page on your site where you can set up and publish venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have booked for a given venue.
- 1-Click Updating. Event Espresso provides simple one-click plugin installation upgrading to make sure that you have the latest features and to keep your software installation compatible with the latest version of WordPress.
- Social Sharing. Event attendees and your website visitors can spread the word about your events using social share buttons.
- Categorize Events. If you have several different types of events such as free and paid, workshops and breakout sessions, different types of exercise classes, etc. you can categorize them to help event participants to locate what they’re searching for. You can display all the events in a category on a custom 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 other events in the categories that interest your existing customers.
Extra features include:
- Hooks, Actions & Filters. These allow you to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso software that are fully compatible with the WordPress software platform.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. EE 4 lets you output a log file with debugging data which can be useful for web developers when troubleshooting.
- 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 company operates on a modular and highly efficient model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also comes with 40+ additional features, including:
- Live-filtering when you search for events in the Event Espresso admin.
- Default surcharge (similar to applying a service tax to tickets).
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
In addition to a very large array of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow customers to further enhance the capabilities of events.
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 the event does not have a featured image available, a default image will be used.
- Recurring Events Management Addon: The Recurring Events management addon lets you put events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months … even years ahead. You can add as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in advance as you like. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close registrations for all recurring events.
- Events Date Range Template Add-on: The Date Range custom event list template lets your users to browse for events that occur in a certain date range.
- Social Coupons Integration Add-on: If your website 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 is capable of displaying your events in a number of exciting and interesting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Addon Versions: This add on lets you involve other users in your organization to help manage your events and give new users the ability to create events or regional managers permission to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WordPress users roles and give them different permissions with different capabilities, allowing others to help you manage your events or events that other people create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain areas 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 addon gives potential customers 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 cart. With the Multiple 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 Table View Template Addon: The Events Table Template add-on provides event managers with an easy-to-use system that allows you to modify the design of your event lists. It comes with a simple table template with category filters, table search, table paging and more. It also lets developers design their own custom templates using one of the included templates as a base template.
- 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 registrant data, track bookings, and accept payments from your Event Espresso powered 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 latest Event Espreso features and add-ons, visit the plugin website here:
Testimonials
Below are just some of the many great testimonials that satisfied plugin users 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
”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
”Event Espresso is very nice and functional plugin. Set it up is not very easy for a beginner like me, but you have one of the best support team in your side. They answer all questions in a timely manor. I didn’t know anything about setting up the plugins, Thanks to Event Espresso Support team that now I can find my way around this plugin. Event Espresso helps our company to manage the workshops, keep track of our students, manage the emails, and much more. We upgrade from personal License to Business license in just two weeks of using Personal license. I strongly recommend the Business license.” Ted Karlsalr, Omnilargess
Useful Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, trainer, seminar promoter, or event management consultant, there are just unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a registered user, spend a little time visiting the forums for inspiration and practical suggestions to improve your event management and registration workflow or enhance the experience of your event registrants.
Support
Event Espresso works with with all WP plugins and WP themes that follow WP coding standards. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great support, as many of its plugin end-users confirm:
”Your plugin saved our client nearly $9000 in development costs because it handled the majority of the functionality we were looking for at a much lower cost. EventEspresso’s staff have been very responsive to our needs when we have them (which has been rare, because the plugin is so well coded). Great job on a great plugin!” Brandon P., Experience Farm
The software provides robust support that includes access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, premium 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.
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 a solution you can count on to organize and manage your events.
Software Pricing
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin options, however, you should consider using one of the ”Pro” plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This edition lets you run Event Espresso on one domain only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This license lets you configure Event Espresso on one site only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This edition enables you to configure Event Espresso on five sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The cost to purchase the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Presently, the software is being retailed for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticket Registration Software For WordPress
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this article was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Plugin Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the software’s online documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to your 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.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the leading WP event booking and ticketing manager plugin, used by thousands of people.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you intend to run events that involve scheduling dates and venues, booking attendees, or booking tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better software for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Management Software
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