Does your company currently run or plan to run events that require co-ordinating bookings, such as workshops, group classes, charity fundraisers, corporate functions, or even a big event such as a show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event bookings can be a time-consuming process. You may need to manage calendar schedules, dates, participant numbers, data entry, payments and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to event attendees.
There are a number of advantages to setting up an automated online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower costs, help you easily reproduce repeat events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that this can be expensive.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-based digital presence, you can install an inexpensive and professional web-based event booking solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily set up an event and start accepting online bookings in a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and receive online event bookings)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can employ various event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up ticket sales, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event attendees, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing follow-ups.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Note: Currently, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is fundamentally different than the older EE 3, as the platform has been redeveloped 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 retire Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
Go here to learn more about the plugin:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current digital presence into a fully-featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using a web-based 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 signups manually.
Essentially, you are enabling event attendees to perform the registration themselves.
Allowing your enrollees to do all of the data entry frees you up from doing admin work and lets you focus more of your attention on creating a better event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will see in a moment, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management process that you want your customers to experience.
Some additional plugin benefits include:
- Significantly Lower Costs: Event Espresso is an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own system or using a third-party service provider. The cost is kept low through a model where Event Espresso users pay for the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then purchase add-ons when you need extra features.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online bookings any time of day or night. In addition, Event Espresso social and marketing features (see below) let people interested in registering for your event share your information with others who may also be interested.
- Green & Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, the event booking process can be kept wholly in digital form, eliminating typical paper waste from tasks associated with enrollment.
- All Information Belongs To You. You own all the data you collect from your event attendees.
Features
The Event Espresso plugin delivers functionality to users via standard features (these come with the software) and optional features that you can buy for an added cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many features to WP users. Here are just a few of these:
- Fast and easy to install and configure. Ready to start using in no time.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso lets you set up as many types of tickets as you want and set separate pricing options, number of tickets, etc.
- Event Calendar. Attendees can easily see your events and add these to their schedule using a calendar.
- Tax Administration. Event Espresso 4 provides a number of ways to manage taxes for your event and provide reports of tax fees to registrants when purchasing tickets. You can administer taxes globally and on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your theme and reuse registrant information throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Prices. Set up events quickly and easily by pre-configuring default pricing.
- Promotional Codes. Offer promotional and discount codes to incentivize people to take action now, or make your offerings more appealing for others. Also useful for helping to sell-out events close to deadlines.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of booking event participants at the door, or sending in paper-based registration forms for manual processing later.
- Admin Pre-approval. Be selective about who can register for your events.
- Private Comments On Contacts. Record notes about users on their profile. Private commenting enables you to keep a record of when users contacted you, your internal comments, and how you’ve interacted with your contacts.
- Keyword Rich URLs. Keyword rich event page Web links take advantage of your WP site’s Permalinks configuration settings. SEO-friendly urls with topic-relevant keywords enhance the context of your events and is favored by search engines, helping you get a more targeted audience to your website.
- Country-specific Settings. You can configure the country and currency settings that will be used throughout Event Espresso, including currency, currency signs, decimal characters and places, country codes, regions, etc.
- Default Tickets. If you find yourself creating identical tickets for many of your events, you can easily set one of those tickets as your default ticket for your new events simply by ticking a checkbox.
- Event Venue Manager. The venue manager in EE 4 lets details about venues to display throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front-end of your site to inform attendees of your event’s location. The venue record displays many of the standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also includes venue information like venue seating capacity, venue website, venue phone number, physical, Google map, etc. You can also list all of your event venues throughout various parts in your WP theme as well as on a venue archive page on your website where you can set up and reuse venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have listed for a particular venue.
- Event Espresso Community. Event Espresso lets you network with a community of experienced event managers, software programmers, designers, digital marketers and businesses who also use the software. You can interact with other Event Espresso users via their community chat room, support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Staff Management. Save time and keep your information organized by reusing staff profiles for multiple events or displaying their profile using a shortcode in any event description.
- Attendee Reporting. Quick-view event reports provides you with information of all of your registrations and transactions, enabling you to measure the performance of your events with the aggregate number of people who have registered and amount of revenue has been collected.
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 site visitors.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. EE 4 allows you to create a log file with debugging data which can be useful for developers when potential software problems.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value For Money: According to the mission statement on their site, Event Espresso’s aim is to “empower business and organization leaders with the event registration, ticketing and management tools that maximize the success of events.” To achieve their objectives, the company operates on a modular that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium version of Event Espresso also includes over 40 added features, including:
- Email shortcodes that includes customer data in emails and newsletters.
- Default surcharge (the same as applying a service tax to tickets).
- Default payment status.
Add-Ons
As well as an amazing range of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow customers to significantly enhance the capabilities of events.
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 available, a default image will be used instead.
- Recurring Events Management Add-on: The Recurring Events management addon lets you put your events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years ahead. You can schedule as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in the future as you like. Event Espresso will automatically open and close bookings for all recurring events.
- 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 be customized to show the event thumbnail image instead of the date.
- Events Social Sharing Add on: Add 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 booking.
- Custom Template Add-on: The Custom Template add on is capable of displaying your events in a number of visually exciting ways.
- Seating Chart Addon: The seating chart add on is for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart addon allows you to promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues right from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart addon lets you manage the environment for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach single pricing to every seat.
- Multiple Event Registration Add on: The Multiple Event registration addon gives potential attendees 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 Add-on: The Events Table Template addon provides event managers with an 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 developers design custom templates using one of the templates provided as a base template.
- EE4 Infusionsoft Integration Addon: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and marketing plugin add-on, you can easily 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: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software, including new addons.
For complete details about the newest Event Espreso features and add ons, visit the plugin website:
Customer Feedback
Here are just some of the many testimonials that plugin users 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
”This really is a hell of a plugin. For me, it’s probably the final nail in the coffin for Joomla, as WP can now pretty much do EVERYTHING Joomla does, but better. Love the simplicity of this plugin!” Sam, Web Contempo
”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 gym owner, presenter, concert promoter, or event management professional, there are just countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, go through the support forum for inspiration and practical suggestions to improve your event management and registration process and enhance the experience of your event registrants.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with most WP plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress development rules. If you find that you need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive end-user support, as so many of its clients attest:
”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
The plugin provides incredible support including access to a support forum, comprehensive 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.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can rely on to manage your events.
Event Espresso Pricing
Event Espresso is available in various editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin features, however, you may want to consider purchasing one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This license option enables you to configure Event Espresso on one site only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This lets you install Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License – This lets you set up Event Espresso on five sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The cost to purchase the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Presently, the plugin is being retailed for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this review was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin author when you visit the website.
Additional Plugin Info
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 pages to find answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to your specific use-case, or to notify developers about problems and leave feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event registration and ticketing management plugin, used and trusted by thousands of WP website owners.
If you are a WordPress user and you plan to run an event that involves scheduling dates, times and venues, registering participants, and/or booking seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticketing Registration System For WordPress
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