Do you currently run or plan to run events that need handling bookings, such as seminars, group classes, charity fund-raisers, corporate conferences, or even a big event like an arts & crafts, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Managing event registrations can be a complex and time-consuming process. You will most likely need to manage event schedules, available dates and spaces, participant numbers, data processing, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations, reminders and notifications, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and issuing tickets to attendees.
There are lots of advantages to setting up an online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower expenses, help you easily reproduce similar events, give you more control, improve client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event booking system can be quite expensive.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-powered website, you can install an inexpensive and highly professional online event registration solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress software allows you to easily schedule multiple events and start accepting registrations in just minutes.
(Set up multiple events and accept online bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can use various event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media and email marketing tools.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is fundamentally different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the plugin has been rebuilt using a different structure to enable future expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually transition completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Benefits
Here are just some of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Automated Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current online presence into an automated and fully featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by virtually doing away with the need to process registrations manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for participants to perform the registration on their own.
Letting your participants to do all of the data themselves frees up your time and lets you invest more of your attention on delivering a better event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover in a moment, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and registration process that you want your users to experience.
Additional benefits of the plugin include:
- Significantly Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin is a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own solution or using a third party service. The cost is kept low through a model where Event Espresso users pay for the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then buy add-ons only if you need additional features.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept online signups 24 hrs a day. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features and add ons (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with friends who may be interested.
- Green & Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, your event signup process can be kept wholly online, significantly reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks associated with admin and record-storage.
- Own Your Information. You control all the information you obtain from event participants.
Event Espresso Features
The Event Espresso plugin delivers functionality to its customers via standard features (these come with the plugin) and optional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers a number of features to WordPress users. Here are just some of these:
- Quick and easy to install and configure. Be up and running in no time.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso allows you to set up as many different types of tickets as you need and specify prices, ticket quantity limits, and more.
- Event Calendar. Participants can easily see your upcoming events and add these to their schedule with the calendar.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso integrates with payment gateways, allowing you to collect payments before running the events.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your WordPress theme and display contact information throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types let you create new prices that adjust the base ticket price for your system-default ticket.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system lets you validate tickets, speed up door registrations, set up multiple check-in “stations” and track attendees.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of event registrants and check in those who have attended.
- No-Ticket Events. List events without the requirement for participants to select tickets. Event Espresso can be used for any kind of event, not just those that accept tickets.
- Private Notes On Contacts. Keep notes about a contact on their profile. Private commenting lets you keep a record of when users contacted you, your internal notes, and how you have helped them.
- Optimized For The Latest WordPress Version. The EE 4 user interface follows the WordPress guidelines to help you create visually attractive event pages that are responsive and mobile-friendly.
- Country-specific Settings. Event managers can configure the country and currency settings that will be used throughout Event Espresso, including currency name, currency symbols, decimal characters and places, country codes, states or provinces, and so on.
- Exportable Information. You can export all of your data gathered from your event attendees into Excel or CSV format for compiling advanced reports, devising marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, etc..
- Register Multiple Event Attendees. EE 4 allows an individual or people to buy multiple tickets and different types of tickets at once. Event managers control how many attendees are allowed to register in one registration by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Registrant Records. Manage your customer’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their information organized.
- Staff Manager. Save time and stay organized by reusing staff member 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.
- Categorize Events. If you have multiple types of events like free and paid, workshops and mastermind sessions, different kinds of exercise classes, etc. you can categorize them to help your attendees to locate what they’re looking for. You can list all the events in a category on a custom event category page, make events searchable by category, and colour-code your events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make them easier to find, as well as suggesting new events in the categories that appeal to your existing customers.
Additional features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for most WP users, and also extremely robust and customizable for higher end users and web developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, EE 4 enables more complex enhancements and customizations to the plugin.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. EE 4 lets you output a log file with debugging data that can be helpful for web developers who are potential problems.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & 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 modular and highly efficient model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also comes with 40+ additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes for including customer data in emails and newsletters.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse a group of questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow plugin users to further enhance the functionality of managing your event.
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 the event does not have a featured image, a default image will be used.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Custom Template Addon: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes many datetime events into a drop-down 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 the date.
- EE4 Events Social Sharing Addon: This add on adds social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that lets your registrants to share a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after registration.
- Custom Template Add-on: The Custom Template add-on is capable of displaying your events in a variety of visually exciting 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 lets you offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart add-on lets you control the environment for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to each seat.
- Multi-Event Registration Addon: The Multiple Event registration add-on 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 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 Addon: The Events Table Template addon provides event managers with an easy-to-use system that lets you 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 allows developers to design custom templates using one of the templates included as a source template.
- MailChimp Integration Addon: The MailChimp addon allows you to automatically register attendees to a specified autoresponder list or group within MailChimp.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin, including new addons.
For full details about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website:
Testimonials
Here are some of the many testimonials that plugin 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
”Probably the best event management plugin available.” Materia Inspiration Centre
”I can’t even imagine what I would want the plugin to do that it doesn’t already do. I’m really happy with the features.” Jim Harmer, Improve Photography
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, teacher, seminar planner, or event management professional, there are just unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed user, go through the support forum for new ideas and practical ways to streamline your event management process or improve the experience of your attendees.
Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with all WP plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress coding guidelines. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great support, as so many of its satisfied clients confirm:
”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
Event Espresso provides robust support with access to support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase 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 an established team of experienced WordPress developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can rely on to run and manage your events.
Plugin Price
Event Espresso is available in different editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you may want to consider purchasing one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal License Edition – This license enables you to install Event Espresso on one domain only. It includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This allows you to configure Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Edition – This edition allows you to install Event Espresso on 5 domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Price details for the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the plugin retails for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticket Registration Software For WordPress
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 website.
Event Espresso – Additional Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the software’s online documentation pages for answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to your particular use-case, or to report problems and leave feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product site.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event booking and ticketing management plugin, used by thousands of event promoters.
If you are a WordPress user and you intend to run events that involve scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), registering attendees, and selling tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticket Registration Plugin For WordPress
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