Do you currently run or plan to run events that require co-ordinating bookings or registrations, such as workshops, group courses, non-profit fund raisers, marketing events, or even a large-scale event such as a music concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Managing event bookings can be a complicated and time-consuming process. You will most likely need to co-ordinate calendar schedules, dates, participant numbers, data entry, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to event participants.
There are many advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce costs, help you easily reproduce recurring events, give you more control, improve customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that this can be very expensive.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-based site, you can download and install an inexpensive and highly professional web-based event booking solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin lets you easily create your event and start accepting online registrations in just a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and process online registrations)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Customize your event registration forms
You can use various event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up ticket-selling, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your event attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media and email marketing systems.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is significantly different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the platform has been redeveloped using a different structure to allow for future growth and expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually migrate completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Benefits
Here are just some of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your site:
Automated 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 website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by virtually doing away with the chore of processing registrations and bookings manually.
Basically, you are enabling attendees to enrol by themselves.
Letting your participants to do the data themselves frees up your time and lets you concentrate more of your energy on delivering a more enjoyable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon see, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your clients to experience.
Some additional benefits include:
- Lower Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own software or using a 3rd party service provider. The cost is kept low by using a model where you purchase the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and buy add ons only if you need additional functionality.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept online event registrations any time of day or night. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features and add ons (see below) let people interested in registering for your event invite others who may also be interested in attending.
- Green And Paperless Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign up process remains entirely in digital form, significantly reducing typical paper waste from tasks associated with administration.
- All Data Belongs To You. You control all the information you obtain from event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to users via built-in features (these are included with the software) and optional features that users can buy for an added cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many great built-in to WP users. Here are just some of these:
- Fast and easy to install and set up. Be up and running in minutes.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso allows you to create as many kinds of tickets as you want and specify different prices, number of tickets, and more.
- Custom Notification Emails. Configure automatic registration and payment notification email messages to communicate with event participants.
- Ticket Selector. Present a number of ticket options to prospects so they can choose the ticket(s) that will best fit their needs.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration enables you to configure the display settings of Google Maps on your event listing and event details pages.
- Spam Protection. Prevent the risk of spamming and bot software programs making bogus registrations by using reCAPTCHA tools to confirm human activity.
- In-App Documentation Systems. Event Espresso 4 includes 3 detailed in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. Event Espresso 4 provides you with the tools to understand who your clients are and how they’ve done business with you.
- Waiting Lists. Prospective participants can subscribe to a waiting list if your event has reached the maximum number of participants. Additionally, you can make it a requirement waiting list attendees pay for their spots if you plan to expand numbers for your event.
- RSS Feeds. Provide automatic updates to your website readers, drive quality traffic and reach a wider number of prospects with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Search Engine Friendly Event Page Web Links. Keyword-rich event page URLs leverage your Permalinks configuration settings. Search engine friendly web links that use relevant keywords enhance the context of your content and is favored by search engines, helping you drive more traffic to your website.
- Complete Control Of Your Event Management. Event Espresso puts you in full control of every aspect of an event’s registration and ticketing processes, and also allows you to automate the process with event management tools that include staff and venue management, custom event page designs, payment processing and handling, wait lists, attendee limits, print-ready tickets and more.
- Upload Events. EE 4 provides a CSV-based importing feature that lets you upload bulk event data all at one time. You can export, edit and upload details about events, datetimes, tickets, pricing, custom registration questions, venue info, terminology, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Venue Profiles. The venue manager feature in EE 4 lets details about a venue to be published throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front end of your website to inform registrants of your event’s location. The venue profile displays many of the standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also includes venue details such as venue capacity, venue site URL, phone number, venue address, location map, etc. You can also display venue profiles on various areas in your theme as well as on a venue listing page on your website where you can set up and publish venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a specific venue.
- One-Click Plugin Updating. Event Espresso provides easy 1-click updates to make sure that you have the newest features and to keep your installation working with the latest version of WordPress.
- Team Member Manager. Save time and keep your business 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.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post type features such as custom fields, post meta data, taxonomies, etc. You can even customize your templates to display events in your own custom way.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows web-based software developers to have more control and options over the content of your event pages and how your information displays to visitors.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registration capabilities for regular website visitors whenever you need to make changes on your site. You can continue to work on the back-end of your site during maintenance mode.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And Value: According to the mission statement on their website, Event Espresso’s objective 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 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 provides you with 40+ additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – eliminates the work of re-entering event details when adding new events.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing the same group of questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page in registration.
Addons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow customers to significantly expand the functionality of managing an event.
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, a default image will be used instead.
- Recurring Events Management Add on: The Recurring Events management add-on allows you to put your events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months ahead. You can create as many future events as you need. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close registrations for all of your recurring events.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add on: The Category Accordion template displays the categories in a simple list. Clicking on a category name displays the events related to that category and closes any previously open categories.
- Social Media Buttons Add on: The social media add-on displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media add-on is included free with all of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- Custom Files Addon: The Custom Files add-on provides PHP files that allow you to bypass certain aspects of the plugin.
- Seating Chart Addon: The seating chart addon is suitable 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 site. The Seating Chart addon lets you control the experience for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach single pricing to every seat.
- Event Ticketing Addon: The Ticketing add on adds the ability to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add-on adds the capacity to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing add on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for handling check-in scans at venues. People 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 Calendar Add-on: This WordPress events calendar displays events and event categories via a nice graphical calendar.
- EE4 Infusionsoft Integration Add on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and business marketing software add on, you can completely automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture event attendee data, track enrollments, and accept payments from your Event Espresso powered website.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin, including new addons.
To learn more about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, visit the plugin website here:
Testimonials
Below are just some of the many great testimonials that satisfied customers have posted about Event Espresso:
”Thanks to you and the rest of the team for Event Espresso – Every time I get a signup for an event, I think about how much time EE saves me – and signups happen while I’m out on the water teaching kayaking, not answering the phone. :-)” Tue Brems Olesen, OnAdventure
”Event Espresso event management plugin for WordPress is really an awesome plugin.” Cheryl Smithem, Charleston PR & Design
”I’m so excited to fire Eventbrite! Event Espresso has an amazing WP plugin for event management. We’re testing it now & are very impressed! In a nutshell Event Espresso saves us money & does everything Eventbrite did before. :)” Dustin Nay
Useful Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, trainer, conference planner, or event professional, there are just endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, visit the forums for inspiration and practical ways to improve your event management workflow or improve the experience of your event customers.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso works with with all WordPress plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress development guidelines. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive end-user support, as many of its satisfied plugin customers confirm:
“I’m really impressed with not only the application itself but the support. I have rarely seen such a responsive support staff than at EE. They rock…I highly recommend this plugin!” sock2me
Event Espresso provides comprehensive 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 a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely software you can depend on to manage your events.
Event Espresso Pricing
Event Espresso is available in a number of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software options, however, you may want to consider purchasing one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This enables you to set up Event Espresso on 1 domain only. It includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This license option allows you to set up Event Espresso on one domain only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This allows you to run Event Espresso on 5 sites. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Pricing for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the plugin is being retailed for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing when this review was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin seller when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional 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.
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 specific situation, or to report problems and give feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WP event registration and ticketing manager software, used by thousands of users.
If you own a WordPress site and you intend to run events that require managing dates, times and venues, enrolling participants, or selling seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Manager System
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