Do you currently run or plan to run events that need co-ordinating bookings, such as workshops, training classes, non-profit fundraisers, corporate functions, or even a big event like a regional festival, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Managing event bookings can be a complex process. You may need to manage event schedules, available dates and seating, attendee numbers, data collection, payments and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders and alerts, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to event participants.
There are a number of benefits to setting up an online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily duplicate recurring events, give event managers more control, improve client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be quite costly.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-based site, you can install a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event registration solution.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticketing Registration System
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin allows you to easily schedule your event and begin processing bookings in a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and process online event registrations)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich software that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
Customize event registration forms
You can employ several event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up selling tickets, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event participants, or integrating your event registration forms with an autoresponder system for ongoing updates.
View detailed information about event attendees
Note: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their software: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is considerably different than the older EE 3, as it is being redeveloped using a different structure to allow for future expansion. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually transition completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
More info:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just some of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current digital presence into a fully-featured and automated event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically doing away with the chore of processing registrations and signups manually.
Basically, you are facilitating attendees to register themselves.
Allowing your customers to do all of the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you spend more of your attention on planning a memorable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover shortly, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your attendees to experience.
Some additional benefits of the plugin include the following:
- Less Costs: The Event Espresso plugin provides you with an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd party provider. This is made possible by using a model where you purchase the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and buy add-ons when you need extra features.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new registrations outside normal business hours. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social and marketing add-ons (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with others who may be interested in attending.
- Green Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, your event booking process can remain entirely online, reducing typical paper waste from tasks associated with administration.
- Own Your Information. You control all the information you collect from your event participants.
Event Espresso Features
The Event Espresso plugin provides functionality to users via standard features (these come with the plugin) and additional features that customers can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many features to web site owners. Here are just a few:
- Fast and simple to install and use. Be up and running in minutes.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso allows you to configure as many different types of tickets as you need and specify prices, limits on ticket quantities, etc.
- Custom Confirmation Emails. Set up automated booking and payment notification email messages to communicate with event customers.
- Ticket Selector. Present a number of ticket options to prospects and let them purchase the ticket(s) that will best fit their needs.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your WP theme and reuse attendee details throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Prices. Create events fast with pre-configured default prices.
- In-App Documentation Systems. Event Espresso 4 comes with three detailed in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. EE 4 provides you with the tools to gain a better understanding of who your customers are and how they’ve done business with you.
- Waiting Lists. Prospective attendees can subscribe to a waiting list if your event is full. Additionally, you can make it a requirement waiting list attendees pre-pay if you plan to expand capacity for your event.
- Private Contact Commenting. Record observations about contacts on their profile and how you’ve helped your contacts. Private commenting lets you keep records of when event participants contacted you, your internal notes, and how you have assisted your customers.
- Draft Events. Draft events let you build an event page in your own time-frame without publishing it to your site. You can keep editing your event pages until you are ready to take things live, or schedule to publish your event pages at a future time and date.
- Your Organization Settings. Configure your organization’s profile to display throughout the plugin and your WordPress themes. The organization information include: company name, street address, city, state, country, zip/postal code, primary contact email address, phone, VAT/tax number, your logo, Facebook URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ URL, Instagram URL.
- Exportable Information. You can output all of your data collected from your event customers into Excel or CSV format for compiling advanced reports, planning new marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, and so on.
- Multiple Attendee Enrolments. Event Espresso 4 allows an individual or a group to book multiple participants at once. You decide how many people can enrol in one registration session by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Event Espresso Community. Event Espresso gives you access to a community of experienced event managers, developers, designers, internet marketers and business owners who also use the software. You can interact with other members of the Event Espresso community through their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential event customers who have not made payment for their registration with a standard but personalized invoice with one click of a button. Your invoices will address registered customers who have not paid their registration yet by name, display the balance owing, and include a link to the event information, a payment link and a link to download a PDF invoice.
- Accurate Event Attendee Manager. You have control of your participants’ date; who has registered, which event they have registered for and how much they have paid. With the attendee manager, you can get an overview of registered participants and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export a list of event attendees to Excel for additional uses, send custom payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your event participants on a person-by-person basis or collectively.
Extra features include:
- Hooks, Actions And Filters. These features allow web developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso plugin that are fully compatible with WordPress.
- Maintenance Mode. Pause registration capabilities for normal site traffic when website maintenance is required. You can still work on your event pages during maintenance mode.
- Autonomy, Flexibility And Value: According to the philosophy stated on their web 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 software has been built using a modular and effective model 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 40+ additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes that includes attendee data in confirmation emails and newsletters.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse a series of questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page in the registration process.
Add-Ons
As well as a comprehensive number of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow software users to significantly expand the capabilities of managing an event.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Addon: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display the scheduled events by location. 4 maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Management Add-on: The Recurring Events management addon lets you put events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months ahead. You can add as many future events as you need. 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 display the event thumbnail image instead of the date.
- Events Social Sharing Addon: 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 registration.
- 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 And Pro Add on Versions: This add on lets you involve staff in your organization to help manage your events and give new users permission to create events or regional managers permission to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WP users roles and give them different permissions with different privileges, allowing others to 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 WordPress dashboard and/or certain sections of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to allow users to control factors geographically for events and users, use the Roles and Permissions Pro add on.
- EE4 Event Ticketing & Bar Scanning Add on: The Ticketing add on adds the capacity to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add on gives you the ability to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing addon includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode types are included for managing check-in scans at venues. People can either print out their tickets or display them on their mobile devices. The mobile app can be used for checking in or checking out attendees and to validate tickets.
- Events Table View Template Addon: The Events Table Template add on provides you with an easy-to-use system that lets you 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 enables developers to design their own custom templates using one of the included templates as a source template.
- JSON API Add-on: The new Event Espresso JSON API addon allows other software applications, websites, mobile applications, etc… to access your Event Espresso content through an API (Application Programming Interface).
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software, including new add-ons.
For more details about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
User Testimonials
Below are just some of the testimonials that users have posted about Event Espresso:
”I can’t even imagine what I would want the plugin to do that it doesn’t already do. I’m really happy with the features.” Jim Harmer
“I just completed my first event using Event Espresso. I really believe without Event Espresso my event would not have been the success it was.” Cathy Earle, Women Only Weekend
”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, trainer, festival planner, or event management professional, there are simply endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered owner, spend a little time researching the support forum for inspiration and practical suggestions to streamline your event management and registration process and improve the experience of your event attendees.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with other WordPress plugins and WordPress themes that follow WP coding standards. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive user support, as many of its users confirm:
”By far, the customer service experience with Event Espresso has been the best of any WordPress Theme or Paid Plugin that I’ve used in the past two years!” Megan Murray, Boys & Girls Club of Lake Tahoe
The software provides exceptional support with access to support forums, comprehensive 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 a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can count on to organize and manage your events.
Product Pricing
Event Espresso is available in a number of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software features, however, you need to consider purchasing one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal License Edition – 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. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This edition enables you to run Event Espresso on 1 domain only. It includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This license option lets you install Event Espresso on five sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Current pricing for the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Presently, the plugin sells for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current price: Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticketing Registration Plugin For WordPress
Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this article was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin author when you visit the website.
Additional Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the plugin’s documentation pages for answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to a specific use-case, or to notify developers about problems and leave feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event registration and ticketing manager plugin, used and trusted by thousands of WordPress site owners.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you currently run any event that involves managing dates and venues, registering participants, or selling tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
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