Do you currently run or plan to run events that need to accept registrations, such as workshops, training classes, non-profit fund-raisers, networking events, or even a large-scale event such as a show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Co-ordinating event bookings is a complicated and time-consuming process. You have to manage scheduling, date availability, attendee numbers, data administration, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to attendees.
There are a number of benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily replicate repeat events, give you more control, improve user experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be quite costly.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-powered website or blog, you can install an inexpensive and professional web-based event registration system.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Manager System
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily set up your event and begin accepting online bookings in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and receive online bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed software that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can employ a number of event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up ticket sales, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event participants, or integrating your event registration forms with social media and email marketing solutions.
View detailed information about event attendees
Note: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is considerably different than the older EE 3, as the platform has been revamped using a different structure to enable future growth and expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually transition completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
More info:
Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current web site into a fully-featured and automated event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to attendee limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by practically eliminating the need to process registrations and signups manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating event participants to enrol on their own.
Letting your attendees to do the data themselves frees up your time and lets you focus more of your resources on creating a more unique event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will see in a moment, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management and registration process that you want your customers to experience.
Some additional plugin benefits include the following:
- Significantly Lower Costs: Event Espresso is an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd-party service. This is made possible through a model where users pay for the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and purchase optional add-ons only if you need new functionality.
- More Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept new event signups outside normal business hours. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing features and add ons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event invite friends who may also be interested in attending.
- Green Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign-up process can remain wholly online, eliminating traditional paper waste from tasks related to admin and record-keeping.
- Own Your Data. You own all the information collected from event participants.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to users through built-in features (these are included with the software) and additional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many built-in to website owners. Here are just some of these:
- Fast and easy to install and use. Ready to use in minutes.
- Custom Event Registration. With Event Espresso you can gather specific information using custom event registration forms on your website to plan a tailored experience for your attendees.
- Customizable Event Designs. Customize your events and bookings page using Event Espresso’s unlimited template options and parts, and HTML or CSS.
- Ticket Selector. Present multiple ticket options to prospects so they can purchase the ticket(s) that best fits their needs.
- Intelligent Single Page Checkout Process. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is smart, fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically duplicate the primary registrant’s information for any additional attendees.
- Default Prices. Set up events fast with pre-configured default ticket prices.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 provides 3 useful in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of participants and check in everyone who attends.
- No Ticket Events. You can promote events without the requirement for participants to select tickets. Event Espresso can be used for all kinds of events, not only those that need tickets.
- RSS Feeds. Keep your website readers up-to-date about your events, bring in more visitors and widen your content reach with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events let you build your event page at your own pace without publishing it to your site. You can work on your events until you are ready to publish it to your site, or schedule to publish your event pages at a later date and time.
- Easy Event Management. Event Espresso puts you in full control of every aspect of your event’s registration and ticketing processes, and 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, limits on attendees, printable ticketing and more.
- Exportable Information. You can export all of your information gathered from event participants into Excel or CSV format for producing advanced reports, implementing marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, and so on.
- Multiple Attendee Enrolments. Event Espresso 4 allows one person or a group to buy multiple tickets and different types of tickets at the same time. You decide how many attendees are able to register in a single session by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Automatic Updates. Event Espresso provides simple one-click plugin upgrades to ensure that you have the newest features and to keep your plugin installation up-to-date with the latest version of WordPress.
- Social Sharing. Event attendees and your website visitors can tell others about your events using social media sharing buttons.
- Event Reporting. Event reports provides you with information of all the registrations and transactions, allowing you to track the performance of your events with the aggregate number of people who have registered and amount of revenue you have collected.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows developers to have more control and options over the content of your event page and how the information displays to visitors.
- Metabox Management And Reorganization. Event Espresso leverages the WordPress user interface, which gives you the ability to organize the user interface to suit your workflow process. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or entirely removed from your page.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & Value For Money: According to the mission statement on their site, 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 company operates on a modular and effective model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium version of Event Espresso also includes 40+ additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes that includes customer data in emails and newsletters.
- Default surcharge (the same as applying a service tax to all tickets).
- Default payment status.
Add-Ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow end-users to significantly enhance the capabilities of events.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display upcoming events by location. There are four maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Manager Add on: The Recurring Events manager addon allows you to put events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months … even years in advance. You can schedule as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in advance as you want. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close bookings for all of your recurring events.
- Events Date Range Template Add-on: The Date Range custom event list template lets your users to browse for events that occur within a certain date range.
- Social Media Buttons Add-on: The social media add-on displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media add-on comes free with any of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- Custom Template Add on: The Custom Template add on is capable of displaying your event lists in a variety of exciting and interesting ways.
- 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 the capacity to create events or regional managers the ability to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WP users roles and allow them different permissions with different privileges, so others can help you manage your events or the events that others create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain sections of your WP dashboard and/or certain parts 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 addon.
- Multi-Event Registration Add on: The Multiple 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 addon, attendees can register for several events at once and even add additional attendees to any of the same events in the same checkout process.
- Events Calendar Addon: This WordPress events calendar displays events and categories of events in a nice graphical calendar.
- Infusionsoft Integration Add-on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft integration all-in-one sales and business marketing plugin add-on, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture registrant data, track registrations, and accept payments from your website.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software, including new addons.
To learn more about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
Customers – Testimonials
Here are a few of the testimonials that satisfied plugin 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
”Your plugin rocks! Seriously, saved me hours on the phone setting up attendance manually. Kudos. :)” William, Petruzzo Photography
”I’m using it on multiple sites and enjoying it. It’s simple and as others have stated… fast service and real help.” Arlen Nagata
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, presenter, show planner, or event management professional, there are simply countless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered owner, go through the forums for tips and practical ways to streamline your event management workflow or enhance the experience of your customers.
Support
Event Espresso works with with other WordPress plugins and themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great support, as many of its satisfied customers confirm:
”Your plugin saved our client nearly $9000 in development costs because it handled the majority of the functionality we were looking for at a much lower cost. EventEspresso’s staff have been very responsive to our needs when we have them (which has been rare, because the plugin is so well coded). Great job on a great plugin!” Brandon P., Experience Farm
The Event Espresso software provides incredible support that includes access to support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, one-on-one 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 web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can depend on to organize and manage your events.
Product Cost
Event Espresso is available in different editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software features, however, you should consider using one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This lets you set up Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This enables you to configure Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This edition lets you set up Event Espresso on 5 sites. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 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. Presently, the plugin is selling for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing when this review was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin seller when you visit the site.
Additional Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding 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.
Look up the software’s documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to a particular use-case, or to notify developers about problems and give feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product information pages.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WP event registration and ticketing manager software, used and trusted by thousands.
If you own a WordPress web site and you plan to run an event that involves managing dates and venues, enrolling attendees, or selling seating, then you will probably not find a better plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Manager Software
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