Do you currently run or plan to run events that require handling bookings, such as seminars, training classes, non-profit fund raisers, networking functions, or even a large-scale event like an art exhibition, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Co-ordinating event registrations is a complex process. You will most likely have to co-ordinate scheduling, dates, attendee numbers, data collection, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders and notifications, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to event registrants.
There are a number of advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily duplicate repeat events, give event managers more control, create a better client experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event booking system can be expensive.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-based site, you can easily install a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event booking solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily set up your event and begin receiving bookings in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and receive online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich software that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
Customize your event registration forms
You can use various event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up ticket-selling, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your event participants, or integrating your event registration forms with social media sites like Facebook.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Important: Currently, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is impressively different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the plugin has been revamped using a different structure to enable future expansion. The EE 4 plugin platform 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.
Learn more here:
Benefits
Here are just some of the many benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing web site into an automated and fully featured event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by practically doing away with the need to process registrations manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for participants to perform the enrolment process themselves.
Letting your clients to do the data entry frees you up from doing admin work and lets you focus more energy on planning a memorable event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon discover, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management process that you want your users to experience.
Some additional plugin benefits include:
- Lower Costs: Event Espresso provides you with a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd party provider. The cost is kept to a minimum by using a model where users buy the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and purchase optional add-ons only if you need additional features.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new event signups outside traditional business hours. In addition, Event Espresso social and marketing features and add ons (see below) let people interested in attending your event invite friends who may also be interested.
- Green And Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign up process can remain entirely online, reducing typical paper waste from tasks associated with admin and record-storage.
- Own Your Data. You own all the information you acquire from event participants.
Event Espresso Features
The Event Espresso software provides functionality to users through standard features (these come with the software) and optional features that you can buy for an added cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many features to WP users. Here are just a few:
- Quick and simple to install and use. Ready to use in minutes.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In Event Espresso 4, events can have many dates and times (datetimes), that these can be managed from one single event.
- Custom Notification Email Message. Easily configure automatic booking and payment confirmation emails to communicate with event attendees.
- Tax Administration. Event Espresso 4 gives you a number of ways to handle taxes for an event and report tax fee components to customers when purchasing tickets. Event managers can administer taxes globally and on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
- Smart Single Page Checkout. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically duplicate the primary attendee’s registration information for any added registrants.
- Spam Protection. Reduce the chance of spamming and robots making bogus registrations on your web site with reCAPTCHA option to validate human activity.
- In-App Documentation Systems. Event Espresso 4 comes with 3 detailed in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. Event Espresso 4 lets you understand who your clients are and how you have done past business with your clients. The Contact Profile section records the name, biography, contact information, event registration history, comments, and more about each attendee.
- Admin Pre-approval. Control who can participate in your events.
- Public Commenting. Add “social proof” by encouraging potential attendees to ask questions about your event and past attendees to post comments that can help others decide whether or not to sign up. Moderation settings for comments are configured via the WP native commenting settings.
- Works With The Most Recent WP Version. The EE 4 user interface follows the WordPress guidelines to help you create visually enhanced event pages that are responsive and mobile-friendly.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your organization’s profile to display throughout Event Espresso and your front-end templates. Your organization data include: business name, street address, city, state, country, zip code, email address, telephone, VAT/tax number, your logo, Facebook URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ URL, Instagram profile URL.
- Default Tickets. If you create identical tickets for your events, you can automatically set one of those tickets as your default ticket for your new events simply by checking a box.
- Visual Editor. Event Espresso uses the built-in WordPress Visual editor, so you can quickly and easily add photos and stylize your content without having to know HTML or CSS, just like any WP post.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso lets you network with a community of experienced event managers, programmers, designers, marketers and businesses who also use the plugin. You can engage with other Event Espresso users through their community chat room, support forums, job board, and social media pages on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Staff Member Manager. Save time and stay organized by reusing staff profiles for multiple events or displaying their profile using a shortcode in any event description.
- Event Reporting. Quick-view event reporting gives you information of all of your registrations and transactions, allowing you to measure the performance of your events with the aggregate number of people who have registered and amount of revenue has been collected.
Additional features include:
- Hooks, Actions And Filters. These features allow developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso application that are compatible with WordPress.
- Maintenance Mode. Pause registration capabilities for regular website visitors whenever website maintenance is required. You can still work on your content during maintenance mode.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value For Money: 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 goals, the software has been built using a modular that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium version of Event Espresso also comes with over 40 added features, including:
- Duplicating events – limits the need to re-enter event information when creating new events.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse commonly asked questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page during the registration process.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow users to further enhance the capabilities of events.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add-on: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display all scheduled events by location. There are 4 maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Custom Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize the events with multiple datetimes into a dropdown list.
- Events Date Range Template Addon: The Date Range custom event list template lets your users to browse for events that take place within a certain date range.
- Social Coupons Integration Addon: If your website 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 Addon: The Custom Template add-on lets you display your event lists in a range of exciting and interesting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Addon Versions: This add-on lets you include other users in your organization to help manage your events and give new users the ability to create events or regional managers the capacity to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WordPress users roles and allow them different permissions with different privileges, allowing staff to help you manage your events or the events that other people create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain areas of your WordPress 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.
- Multiple Event Registration Addon: The Multi-Event registration add-on gives your 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 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 Addon: This WordPress events calendar displays events and event categories in a nice 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 completely automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture event attendee data, track bookings, and accept payments from your website.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software, including new add-ons.
For more details about the newest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
Customers – Feedback
Here are some of the many testimonials that satisfied users have written 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
”When you can get a company to expend more money switching systems just to use your plugin…you’ve really accomplished something.” David, House of Prayer
”Event Espresso plugin still rocks. Saw you guys were up for the WP Honors too. Glad I paid for it! If you need event management on your WordPress site I recommend Event Espresso.” Patrick Allmond, Focus Consulting
Plugin Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, trainer, seminar promoter, or event management consultant, there are just endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a licensed user, spend a little time going through the user forum for tips and practical ways to improve your event management and registration workflow or enhance the experience of your event participants.
Product Support
Event Espresso is compatible with other WordPress plugins and WP themes that follow WP coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive customer support, as so many of its customers confirm:
”No complaints here. Satisfied customer. You can teach us all few things about customer service. Thanks!” Charles
The Event Espresso plugin provides comprehensive support including access to support forums, in-depth 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 web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can count on to run your events.
Software Cost
Event Espresso is available in a number of editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin features, however, you will want to consider using one of the premium plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This edition allows you to configure Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This lets you run Event Espresso on one site only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This edition allows you to install Event Espresso on five sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Pricing details of the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. When we last checked, the plugin is selling for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Manager
Note: The pricing above was current when this review was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin author when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Information
Event Espresso regularly adds 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.
Search the plugin’s documentation pages for answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to your particular situation, or to notify developers about problems and give 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 software, used by thousands of WordPress site owners.
If you are a WordPress user and you intend to run any event that requires managing dates and venues, booking participants, or booking tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Ticketing Registration Software
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