Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that need co-ordinating bookings, such as workshops, group classes, charity fundraisers, marketing events, or even a large-scale event like a show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Co-ordinating event registrations can be a complex process. You may be required to co-ordinate scheduling, date availability, attendee numbers, data processing and storage, payments and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to participants.
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 reduce expenses, help you easily reproduce recurring events, give event managers more control, improve customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be quite expensive.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-based web site, you can download and install an inexpensive and highly professional web-based event booking system.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticketing Registration System For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress software lets you easily set up multiple events and begin processing bookings in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and receive online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can employ several event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your participants, or integrating your event bookings with social media and email marketing systems.
View detailed information about event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is completely different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the plugin is being redeveloped using a different structure to accommodate future expansion. The EE 4 plugin software 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 read more about the benefits and advantages of using the plugin.
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Benefits
Here are just some of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current digital presence into a fully-featured event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple pricing 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 practically doing away with the chore of processing registrations and bookings manually.
Basically, you are enabling participants to complete the enrolment process by themselves.
Letting your clients to do the data entry frees up your time and lets you spend more of your energy on planning a memorable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn shortly, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and registration process that you want your participants to experience.
Additional benefits include:
- Less Costs: The Event Espresso plugin provides you with a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third party provider. The cost is kept to a minimum by using a model where users pay for the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then purchase addons only when you need new features.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept online event bookings 24 hours a day. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing add-ons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event share your information with friends who may be interested in attending.
- Green & Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign up process is conducted entirely online, reducing traditional paper waste from tasks associated with administration.
- Own Your Information. You own all the data you acquire from event attendees.
Plugin Features
The Event Espresso plugin delivers functionality to its customers through standard features (these are included with the software) and optional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many great built-in to WordPress users. Here are just some of these:
- Quick and easy to install and implement. Be up and running in minutes.
- Customized Event Registration Form. Event Espresso lets you gather unique information using custom event registration forms on your site to prepare a tailored experience for your event participants.
- Event Calendar. Participants can easily find your upcoming events and add these to their schedule using the calendar.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso provides integration with payment gateways, allowing you to collect payments before running events.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration allows you to customize the display settings of Google Maps on your event listing and event details pages.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow you to create new prices that adjust the base ticket pricing for the default ticket.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 comes with 3 built-in in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. EE 4 lets you know who your customers are and how they have done business with you.
- No-Ticket Events. List events without making it necessary for participants to get tickets. Use Event Espresso for any form of event, not just when tickets are required.
- Private Notes On Contacts. Keep comments about a contact on their profile. Private notes lets you keep records of when users contacted you, your internal observations, and how you have helped your contacts.
- Works With The Most Recent WP Version. The EE 4 user interface follows all WordPress guidelines to help you build highly aesthetic event pages that are responsive and mobile-friendly.
- Country Settings. Event managers can configure the country and currency settings that will be used for your events, including currency name, currency signs, decimal characters and places, country codes, states or provinces, and so on.
- Default Tickets. If you find yourself creating identical 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.
- Register Multiple Attendees. EE 4 allows one person or people to purchase multiple tickets and different types of tickets at the same time. You specify how many people can enroll in a single registration by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Automatic Software Upgrades. Event Espresso offers easy 1-click plugin installation updates to ensure that you have the latest features and to keep your plugin installation working with new versions of WordPress.
- Social Sharing. Event registrants and your website visitors can help spread the word about your event using social media share buttons.
- Event Reports. Event reports gives you data of the registrations and transactions, enabling you to analyze the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and amount of revenue you have collected.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows you to have more control and options over your content and how the information displays to site visitors.
- Metabox Management & Reorganization. Event Espresso leverages the WP user interface, which gives you the ability to reorder the user interface to suit your workflow. Each control box can be collapsed, re-arranged or entirely deleted from your workflow configuration.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & 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 model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also provides you with 40+ added features, including:
- Duplicating events – eliminates the need to re-enter event data when creating new events.
- Default surcharge (the same as applying a service fee to tickets).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Addons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow customers to further expand the capabilities of events.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Addon: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display upcoming events by location. 4 maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Management Addon: The Recurring Events management add-on allows you to put events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years ahead. You can create as many future events as you like. Event Espresso will automatically open and close registrations for all recurring events.
- Events Date Range Template Addon: The Date Range custom event list template enables your users to browse for events that occur within a certain date range.
- 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 any of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- Custom Template Add on: The Custom Template add-on is capable of displaying your events in a number of exciting and interesting ways.
- 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 addon allows you to offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart addon lets you control the environment for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to each seat.
- Event Ticketing And Bar Scanning Add-on: The Ticketing add on adds the capacity to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon adds the ability to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing add on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for managing check-in scans at the door. Registrants can either print out their tickets or display them on their mobile devices. The barcode scanner can be used for checking in or checking out registrants and to validate tickets.
- Events Table View Template Add-on: The Events Table Template addon provides event managers with a simple and 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 web developers design their own custom templates using one of the included templates as a source template.
- JSON API Add-on: The new Event Espresso JSON API addon enables other software applications, websites, mobile apps, 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 add ons.
For more details about the latest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
Users – Feedback
Here are a few of the testimonials that satisfied users have written about Event Espresso:
”Event Espresso is one of the nicest Event Managers (WP Plugin) I have come across.” Joe Distefano, Citizen Joe
”When you can get a company to expend more money switching systems just to use your plugin…you’ve really accomplished something.” David, House of Prayer
”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
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, presenter, seminar promoter, or event consultant, there are simply unlimited possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a registered user, go through the forums for useful ideas and practical ways to streamline your event management workflow or improve the experience of your customers.
Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with all WP plugins and WordPress themes that follow WP coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent user support, as many of its customers attest:
”These guys are right on any problem or issue or even general questions. You can’t really put a value high enough on the kind of support these guys offer.” Mark Wigston, Muskoka Graphics
The Event Espresso software provides amazing support with access to support forums, 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.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts an established team of experienced web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can depend on to organize and manage your events.
Plugin Cost
Event Espresso is available in different editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin features, however, you need to consider purchasing one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This option lets you configure Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This lets you set up Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This allows you to set up Event Espresso on five domains. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Price details for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, the plugin is being retailed for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing when this review was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin developer when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Info
Event Espresso regularly adds 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.
Use the plugin’s online documentation pages for answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to your specific use-case, or to report bugs and leave feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product website.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WP event booking and ticketing manager plugin, used by thousands of WordPress site owners.
If you are a WordPress user and you plan to run events that require scheduling dates, times and venues, enrolling attendees, and/or selling tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticket Registration Software
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