Do you currently run or plan to run events that require managing bookings or registrations, such as seminars, community classes, charity fundraisers, networking functions, or even a large-scale event such as a concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Managing event bookings is a complex process. You may be required to manage scheduling, availability, participant numbers, data collection and storage, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and providing 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 expenses, help you easily duplicate previously-run events, give you more control, create a better customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be quite costly.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-based web site, you can easily set up a very inexpensive and professional online event registration solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP enables you to easily set up multiple events and start receiving online bookings in just minutes.
(Set up multiple events and accept online event bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed plugin 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 bookings and straight up selling tickets, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media sites like Facebook.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is completely different than the older EE 3, as the software is being redeveloped using a different structure to accommodate future growth. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually move completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
More info:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just a few 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 existing website or blog into an automated and fully featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by literally eliminating the chore of processing registrations manually.
Essentially, you are making it easier for event participants to enroll by themselves.
Allowing your participants to do all of the data themselves frees you up from doing admin work and lets you spend more of your time on planning a more enjoyable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon learn, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your clients to experience.
Additional benefits include the following:
- Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to developing your own system or using a third-party provider. This is made possible by using a model where Event Espresso users purchase the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then purchase add ons only when you need additional features.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online event sign-ups any time of day or night. In addition, Event Espresso social and marketing add-ons (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event invite friends who may also be interested.
- Paperless Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign up process can remain entirely in digital form, reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks associated with admin and record-storage.
- Own Your Information. You own all the information you acquire from your event participants.
Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to end-users through built-in features (these are included with the plugin) and additional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers a number of features to site owners. Here are just some:
- Fast and simple to install and implement. Ready to start accepting registrations in very little time.
- Custom Event Registration Form. Event Espresso lets you gather unique information using a custom event registration form on your site to prepare a unique experience for your customers.
- Customized Notification Emails. Easily set up customized automated registration and payment notification emails to communicate with your customers.
- Tax Administration Options. Event Espresso 4 provides a number of ways to manage taxes for an event and provide reports of tax fees to registrants when purchasing tickets. Event managers can administer taxes globally and on a per-ticket basis.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration enables you to configure the settings of Google Maps on the event listing and event details sections.
- Spam Protection. Prevent the chance of spamming and robots creating fake registrations by using reCAPTCHA tools that validate human activity.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 includes three comprehensive in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of registrants and confirm those who have attended.
- No Ticket Events. List events without the requirement for attendees to get tickets. Event Espresso can be used for any kind of event, not just when tickets are required.
- Public Commenting. Add social engagement to your events page by allowing potential customers to ask questions about your event and past attendees to post feedback that can help others decide whether or not to sign up. Moderation settings for commenting are set using the WP native commenting admin area.
- Optimized For The Most Up-To-Date WP Version. The EE 4 user interface follows the WordPress guidelines to help you build aesthetically enhanced event pages that are responsive and mobile-friendly.
- 15+ Languages. Event Espresso can be run in 15+ languages, and more translations are being added all the time.
- Default Tickets. If you find yourself creating similar tickets for your events, you can easily set one of those tickets as your default ticket for all new events simply by checking a box.
- Event Venue Profiles. The venue manager in Event Espresso 4 allows information about a venue to display throughout the Event Espresso admin and the public areas of your website to inform users of the location of your event. The venue profile has many standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also includes information like venue capacity, venue web address, venue phone number, physical, Google map, etc. You can also list venues throughout various locations on your WP theme as well as on a venue archive page on your website where you can set up and publish venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a particular venue.
- Automatic Updates. Event Espresso offers simple one-click software installation updating to ensure that you have the latest features and to keep your software installation compatible with new versions of WordPress.
- Staff Management. Save time and keep your business organized by reusing staff profiles for multiple events or displaying profile information such as team member’s contact information, resume and photo using a shortcode in an event description.
- Accurate Participant Manager. You have control of your customers’ date; who has enrolled, for what event and how much they paid. With the attendee manager, you can get a quick overview of registered attendees and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export an event attendee list to an Excel spreadsheet for additional reports, send custom payment reminders and receipts and send messages to your clients individually or collectively.
Extra 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 your prospective customers.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registration capabilities for normal website traffic when site maintenance is required. You can continue to work on the back-end of your site during maintenance mode.
- 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 mission, the company operates on a modular 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 over 40 additional features, including:
- Live-filtering when you search for events within the Event Espresso admin.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing the same questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page during the registration process.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
In addition to a comprehensive number of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow end-users to further enhance the capabilities of events.
Some of these addons include:
- EE4 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, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Custom Template Add-on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes the events with many datetimes into a drop-down list.
- Events Category Accordion Template Addon: The Category Accordion template displays categories as a simple list. Clicking the category name shows all events associated with that category and closes any previously open categories.
- Social Coupons Integration Add on: If your site is featured on Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can also specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- Custom Template Add on: The Custom Template add-on is capable of displaying your events in a number 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 add-on allows you to promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues right from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart add on lets you manage the experience for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach single pricing to each seat.
- EE4 Event Ticketing Addon: The Ticketing add on gives you the capacity to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add on adds the ability to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing addon includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode types are included for handling check-in scans at venues. Attendees 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.
- EE4 Events Calendar Add-on: This add-on uses the WordPress calendar to display events and event categories using an attractive graphical calendar.
- EE4 Infusionsoft Integration Addon: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and marketing software add-on, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture event attendee data, track registrations, and accept payments from your website.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software, including new add-ons.
For full details about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
Testimonials
Below are just some of the many great testimonials that satisfied users have written about Event Espresso:
”Broadcasting my support for Event Espresso will be a pleasure. I recently helped the Webmaster at a sister church configure your event manager for their site, so I can say with confidence and from experience, that Event Espresso is the best Event Manager plugin ever!” Philip Simpson, The Charlotte Church
”Over the next 5-6 years we should be able to claim that we saved the company over $100,000 – Thanks Event Espresso!” David Waterman, KT Benefits & InkItDigital.com
”Thank you, we just did 2 sell out seminars of 50 attendees in 48 hours using Event Espresso and it was awesome. My wife was able to pick up on the processing backend with ease. You have done a great job on getting this system together – very simple, clear and well laid out With powerful functionality. I am so glad I dumped the old booking application we had and gave Event Espresso a go. Just wanted to say thanks, and thanks for the very patient, friendly and speedy assistance in helping me to get it all set up at the start. Many thanks to you and your team. A grateful customer.” Nicholas de Castella, Emotional Intelligence Trainings
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, presenter, festival planner, or event professional, there are just countless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered owner, go through the user forum for new ideas and practical ways to streamline your event management and registration workflow and enhance the experience of your event customers.
Support
Event Espresso works with with all WordPress plugins and WP themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you do need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great customer support, as so many of its satisfied end-users attest:
”Thank you Seth for being so responsive and going above and beyond the call of duty with your app! I highly recommend Event Espresso for its functionality and for the stellar support. Seth has a deep knowledge and understanding of WordPress and has built a tool that is seamless to use for both organizer and attendee alike! After looking at a bunch of alternatives, Event Espresso far surpasses the other apps that are available.” Wendy Troupe, ICS North Pole Express
The Event Espresso software provides amazing support with access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, priority 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 WordPress web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can rely on to run your events.
Software Price
Event Espresso is available in a number of editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software options, however, you should consider using one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This lets you set up Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This license lets you install Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License – This enables you to configure Event Espresso on 5 domains. It includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Price details for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, the plugin sells for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing: Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticket Registration Software For WordPress
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this review was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin developer when you visit the website.
Additional Plugin 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 setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to a specific situation, or to notify developers about bugs and leave feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product website.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WP event registration and ticketing management plugin, used and trusted by thousands of users.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you currently run any event that requires managing dates and venues (offline and online), booking participants, and booking tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Manager
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