Do you currently run or plan to run events that need to accept bookings or registrations, such as seminars, training classes, charity fundraisers, corporate events, or even a big event like 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 and time-consuming process. You will probably have to manage event schedules, available dates and seating, registration numbers, data collection and admin, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and issuing tickets to event participants.
There are a number of benefits to setting up an automated online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily copy settings for recurring events, give event managers more control, create a more enjoyable client experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that this can be very expensive.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-based website or blog, you can download and install a very inexpensive and professional web-based event booking system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticketing Registration System For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP allows you to easily set up an event and begin receiving online bookings literally in minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and receive online event registrations)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can use various event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event participants, or integrating your event bookings with social media and autoresponders.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their software: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is completely different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the platform has been revamped using a different structure to accommodate future growth. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually move completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
Go here to learn more:
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:
Automated Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website or blog into a feature-rich and professional 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 an online 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 registration on their own.
Letting your participants to do all of the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you focus more resources on creating a memorable event.
Full 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 participants to experience.
Some additional plugin benefits include:
- Less Costs: Event Espresso provides you with an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own software or using a third party service provider. This is made possible by using a model where users buy the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and buy addons only when you need additional features.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online registrations 24 hours a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social features (see below) let people interested in registering for your event invite other people they know who may also be interested in attending.
- Green & Paperless Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, your event signup process remains wholly in digital form, reducing typical paper consumption from tasks associated with enrollment.
- Own Your Information. You own all the data you acquire from event attendees.
Features
The Event Espresso software delivers functionality to end-users through built-in features (these come with the plugin) and additional features that users can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many features to web site owners. Here are just some of these:
- Fast and easy to install and implement. Be up and running in minutes.
- Custom Event Registration. With Event Espresso you can gather specific data using custom event registration forms on your web site to plan a unique experience for your clients.
- Customizable Event Designs. Match your site’s look and feel for your events and signup page using Event Espresso’s template options and elements, and HTML and CSS.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso seamlessly integrates with payment gateways, allowing you to collect registration fees prior to running your events.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your theme and display venue information throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow you to create new prices that adjust the base ticket pricing for your system-default ticket.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system lets you authenticate tickets, speed up in-venue registrations, create various check-in “stations” and track all participants.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of event attendees and check-in those who attend.
- No-Ticket Events. You can promote events without the requirement for registrants to get tickets. Event Espresso can be used for all kinds of events, not only when tickets are required.
- Public Commenting. Add social engagement to your events pages by encouraging potential customers to ask questions about your event and past attendees to post feedback that can help others decide whether or not to register. Moderation settings for comments are configured via the WP commenting section.
- Keyword-Rich Event Page URLs. Keyword rich Web links take advantage of your Permalinks configuration settings. Search engine friendly web links that use relevant keywords add to the context of your content and improves your search rankings, helping you bring a more targeted audience to your website.
- Country-specific Settings. You can configure the country and currency settings to be used to promote your events, such as currency, currency symbols, decimal signs, characters and places, country codes, regions, and so on.
- Exportable Data. You can export all of your information gathered from event attendees into Excel or CSV format for producing advanced reports, planning marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, etc..
- Venue Management. The venue management feature in EE 4 lets details about venues to display throughout the Event Espresso admin and the public areas of your site to inform users of the location of your event. The venue record has many standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also displays information like venue seating capacity, venue site URL, telephone number, physical and/or virtual location, map, etc. You can also list all of your venues on various areas in your theme and on a venue archive page on your site where you can set up and reuse venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a specific venue.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso lets you interact with a community of experienced event managers, software programmers, web designers, marketers and business owners who also use the plugin. You can engage with other members of the Event Espresso community through their community chat room, support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Social Sharing. Event participants and site visitors can help increase exposure for your events using social media share buttons.
- Event Reports. 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 registrations and amount of revenue you’ve collected.
Additional features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for general users, and also robust and customizable for enterprise-level users and web-based software developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, EE 4 allows for more complex extensions and customizations to the plugin.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registration capabilities for normal website traffic when website maintenance is required. You can still work on the back-end of your site during maintenance mode.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And Value: 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 software has been built using a model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium version of Event Espresso also includes over 40 additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes for including participant data in notification emails and updates.
- Default surcharge (the same as applying a service tax to tickets).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Add-Ons
In addition to an amazing range of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow plugin users to further enhance the capabilities of managing your event.
Some of these add-ons 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 an event does not have a featured image available, a default image will be used instead.
- Recurring Events Management Add-on: The Recurring Events manager addon enables you to put your events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months in advance. You can schedule as many future events as you like. Event Espresso will automatically open and close registrations for all of your 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 instead of the date.
- Social Coupons Integration Addon: If your website is featured on Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can even specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration add-on allows you to take full advantage of the WP user system. With the WP User Integration addon you can give users a special incentive by offering member prices and overriding event prices when your members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered site users will have access to your special events. Members can also enter personal information into their profile page allowing them fast registration for events by auto-filling in the personal information on the event booking form. Your users can also look up previous events and make payment for events.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add-on Editions: This add on lets you involve staff in the event management process 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 WP users roles and give 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 parts of your WP dashboard and/or certain sections 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 Add on: The Multi-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 shopping cart. With the Multiple 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.
- EE4 Events Calendar Addon: This WordPress events calendar displays events and categories of events using an attractive graphical calendar.
- JSON API Add-on: The Event Espresso JSON API addon gives permission for other applications, web tools, mobile apps, etc… to access your Event Espresso information through an Application Programming Interface (API).
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software, including new addons.
For complete details about the latest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
User Feedback
Below are some of the testimonials that plugin users have written 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
”Event Espresso event management plugin for WordPress is really an awesome plugin.” Cheryl Smithem, Charleston PR & Design
“Love the plugin, we only use it once a year for a race we have in February. This saved us tons of time in data entry. In addition, we had more runners register than any other year. We attribute that to the ease of registering online. Thanks for your work.” Ed, Friends of Oscar Scherer Park
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, teacher, conference planner, or event management consultant, there are just unlimited possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a licensed user, spend a little time researching the user forum for tips and practical ways to improve your event management and registration workflow or improve the experience of your customers.
Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with all WP plugins and themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent support, as so many of its satisfied plugin clients confirm:
“I’m really impressed with not only the application itself but the support. I have rarely seen such a responsive support staff than at EE. They rock…I highly recommend this plugin!” sock2me
The plugin provides exceptional support that includes access to support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, premium support and even a monthly VIP member pass giving 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 organize and manage your events.
Plugin Price
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 software functionality, however, you need to consider purchasing one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This enables you to install Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This edition allows you to run Event Espresso on 1 site only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This option allows you to install Event Espresso on 5 domains. It includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Pricing details of the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. 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 Espresso
Note: The pricing above was current at the time this review was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin author when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Info
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.
Use the software’s online documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to a particular situation, or to notify developers about bugs and share feedback.
For all 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 registration and ticketing manager software, used and trusted by thousands of people.
If you own a WordPress-powered website and you plan to run events that require managing dates, times and venues, registering attendees, and/or reserving seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management
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