Do you currently run or plan to run events that need handling bookings or registrations, such as seminars, training courses, not-for-profit fund raisers, networking events, or even a large-scale event like a music concert, 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 time-consuming process. You will probably have to manage scheduling, availability, registration numbers, data administration, payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering 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 costs, help you easily replicate similar events, give event managers more control, create a better user experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event booking system can be quite costly.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-based web site, you can easily install an inexpensive and professional web-based event booking system.
Presenting …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily set up an event and begin receiving online registrations in just minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and process online event registrations)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich software that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can use several event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your event participants, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing follow-ups.
View detailed information about event attendees
Note: Currently, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is significantly different than the older EE 3, as the software has been rebuilt using a different structure to enable future growth. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually move completely to Event Espresso 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 website:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing web site into a feature-rich and professional 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.
Higher Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by literally doing away with the need to process registrations and bookings manually.
Essentially, you are making it easier for participants to enroll on their own.
Letting your attendees to do the data entry frees you up from doing administration and lets you direct more of your resources on organizing a memorable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon see, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and booking process that you want your participants to experience.
Additional benefits and advantages include the following:
- Reduced Costs: The Event Espresso plugin provides you with a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd-party provider. This is made possible through a model where you purchase the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then buy add ons when you need extra features.
- Higher Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new signups 24 hours a day. In addition, Event Espresso social and marketing features and add-ons (see below) let people interested in attending your event invite friends who may be interested.
- Green And Paperless Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event signup process can be conducted wholly online, reducing traditional paper waste from tasks associated with admin and record-keeping.
- All Data Belongs To You. You control all the information you obtain from event participants.
Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to its users through standard features (these are included with the software) and optional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many built-in to site owners. Here are just some:
- Quick and simple to install and set up. Be up and running in no time.
- Customized Event Registration Form. With Event Espresso you can collect specific data using custom event registration forms on your web site to plan a unique experience for your clients.
- Customized Confirmation Email Message. Easily set up customized automatic registration and payment notification emails to communicate with your participants.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso integrates with several payment gateways, allowing you to collect booking payments before running events.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration enables you to customize the display of Google Maps on your event listing and event details sections.
- Spam Protection. Eliminate the risk of spammers and bots making fake registrations on your web site with reCAPTCHA settings that authenticate human activity.
- In-App Documentation Systems. Event Espresso 4 includes 3 built-in in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Event Check-In List. Generate an exportable list of participants and confirm everyone who attends.
- Waiting Lists. Prospective attendees can subscribe to a waiting list if your event has reached maximum capacity. Additionally, you can specify that wait-list members pre-pay if you plan to expand capacity for your event.
- XML RSS Feeds. Automatically update users, drive quality traffic and reach a wider audience with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Draft Events. Draft events let you build your event over multiple work sessions without displaying it live on your site. You can keep developing your event pages until you are ready to publish it on your website, or schedule to publish your event pages at a future date and time.
- Country Settings. You can configure the country and currency settings that will be used for your events, including currency, currency signs, decimal characters and places, country codes, states or provinces, etc.
- Exportable Data. You can export all of your data gathered from your event attendees into Excel or CSV format for compiling advanced reports, devising new marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, etc..
- Event Venue Manager. The venue manager in Event Espresso 4 allows details about a venue to appear throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front-end of your website to inform users of the location of your event. The venue record has many standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also lets you reuse venue details such as venue seating capacity, venue site URL, phone number, venue address, map, etc. You can also list venue profiles in various locations of your WP theme and on a venue listing page on your website where you can set up and publish venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have listed for a particular venue.
- Attendee Profiles. You can manage each attendee’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their records organized and easily within reach.
- Staff Manager. Save time and keep your data organized by reusing staff member profiles for multiple events or displaying their profile using a shortcode in an event description.
- Transaction Reports. Quick-view event reports provides you with information of all of your registrations and transactions, enabling you to track the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and how much money has been collected.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows web-based software developers to have more control and options over your events and how your information displays to your site visitors.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 lets you output a log file with debugging data which can be helpful for developers who are diagnosing software problems.
- Autonomy, Flexibility 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 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 over 40 added features, including:
- Email shortcodes for including registrant data in confirmation emails and newsletters.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse a common set of questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Addons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow end-users to significantly enhance the capabilities of managing your event.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add-on: 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 Drop-down Template Addon: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes many datetime events 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 show the event thumbnail image instead of the date.
- Social Coupons Integration Addon: If your website uses Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can even specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- Custom Files Add-on: The Custom Files add-on allows you to bypass certain aspects of the plugin.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add-on Versions: This add-on lets you involve other users in the event management process and give new users permission to create events or regional managers the ability 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 staff to help you manage your events or the 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 areas 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 add on.
- 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 registrants 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 Calendar Add-on: This WordPress events calendar displays events and event categories in a nice graphical calendar.
- Infusionsoft Integration Add-on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and marketing software add on, you can completely automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture customer data, track registrations, and accept payments from your Event Espresso powered website.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin, including new addons.
For full details about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website:
Testimonials
Below are a few of the many testimonials that users have posted about Event Espresso:
”I want to commend you on a fabulous product which is just the right price for a small non-profit. People are happy with the registration process, as are we! …Thank you SO much for a great product.” Sandra Forero Bush, World Trade Center Tacoma
”I have been using Event Espresso to run my festival and have been very happy with how it has worked out. They have provided tremendous support and their iPhone app is amazing and easy to use. I suggest using it for your event.” Alex Grant, Byron Spirit Festival
”I am in love with your product, I work with many educational institutions that hold classes/events and I will definitely recommend this to all of them, the only time I have seen a system this comprehensive and sophisticated is when an organization I worked with paid a programmer nearly $8,000 for a custom solution, and yet still there are features in your registration system that his didn’t have. Thank you so much for your help and patience.” Abdullah J.
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, teacher, show planner, or event management professional, there are just countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed user, spend a little time going through the user forum for inspiration and practical ways to streamline your event management and registration process and enhance the experience of your customers.
Product Support
Event Espresso works with with other WordPress plugins and themes that follow WP coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent support, as many of its plugin clients confirm:
”It’s magical. Support is amazing, plugin is simple to use, a 3 year old could use the iPhone app…it all is very impressive and professional.” David, House of Prayer
Event Espresso provides incredible support with access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, premium 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 web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can rely on to run your events.
Plugin Pricing
Event Espresso is available in a number of editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you will want to consider purchasing one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal Edition – This license option enables you to install Event Espresso on one site only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This license option lets you run Event Espresso on 1 site only. It includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This license lets you set up Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The price of the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Presently, the software sells for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management
Note: The pricing above was current when this review was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin developer when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Information
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the software’s documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to your particular situation, or to report bugs and give 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 preferred WordPress event registration and ticketing manager software, used and trusted by thousands of users.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you currently run an event that involves scheduling dates and venues, booking participants, or selling tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso
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