Do you currently run or plan to run events that need handling registrations, such as seminars, group classes, charity fund-raisers, networking functions, or even a large-scale event such as a food fair, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups can be a complex and time-consuming process. You will most likely be required to co-ordinate scheduling, date availability, participant numbers, data processing and storage, payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to event attendees.
There are a number of benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce costs, help you easily copy settings for similar events, give event managers more control, create a better customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that this can be quite expensive.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-based site, you can set up a very inexpensive and highly professional online event registration solution.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Manager
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily create multiple events and begin processing online registrations in just a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and receive online event bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
Customize registration forms
You can employ 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 attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media sites like Facebook.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their software: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is completely different than the older EE 3, as it is being revamped using a different structure to enable future growth. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually phase out EE 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and advantages of this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Benefits
Here are just some of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website or blog into a fully-featured event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically eliminating the need to process registrations manually.
Essentially, you are making it easier for participants to register on their own.
Letting your participants to do the data themselves frees you up from doing admin work and lets you direct more resources on organizing a better event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon discover, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and booking process that you want your attendees to experience.
Additional benefits and advantages include:
- Significantly Lower Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd party service. The cost is kept low by using a model where users pay for the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then purchase add-ons when you need added functionality.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept online event sign-ups 24 hrs a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features and add-ons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event share your information with their friends who may be interested in attending.
- Green & Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, the event booking process remains entirely in digital form, significantly reducing typical paper waste from tasks related to administration.
- All Data Belongs To You. You own all the information gathered from your event attendees.
Features
The Event Espresso software delivers functionality to end-users through built-in features (these come with the plugin) and optional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many features to web site owners. Here are just some of these:
- Quick and simple to install and set up. Be up and running in no time.
- Customized Event Registration Form. With Event Espresso you can gather specific data using a custom event registration form on your web site to create a tailored experience for your attendees.
- Event Calendar. Participants can easily find your upcoming events and add these to their schedule using the WordPress calendar.
- Ticket Selector. Present multiple ticket options to prospective registrants so they can choose the ticket(s) that best fits their needs.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration allows you to configure the display of Google Maps on your event listing and event details sections.
- Spam Protection. Eliminate the risk of spammers and bot software programs creating bogus registrations on your web site with reCAPTCHA features that provide human authentication.
- Mobile Registration & Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system enables you to validate tickets, speed up door registrations, set up multiple check-in “stations” and track all participants.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. Event Espresso 4 provides you with the tools to understand who your clients are and how they have done business with you.
- Ticketless Events. Promote events without making it necessary for participants to book tickets. Event Espresso can be used for all types of events, not only when tickets are for sale.
- Public Commenting. Add “social proof” by encouraging potential customers to ask questions about your event and past customers to post feedback that can help others consider whether or not to sign up. Moderation settings for public commenting are set up using the WP commenting section.
- Keyword-Rich Event Page URLs. Keyword rich URLs take advantage of your WordPress Permalinks configuration settings. “Pretty” web links with relevant keywords add to the context of your events and improves your search rankings, helping you get more potential customers to your events.
- Country-specific Settings. You can configure the country and currency settings to be used to run your events, such as currency name, currency signs, decimal characters and places, country codes, states or provinces, etc.
- Default Tickets. If you create similar tickets for your events, you can set one of those tickets as your default ticket for any new events simply by checking a box.
- Event Venue Manager. The venue manager in Event Espresso 4 allows details about a venue to appear throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front-end of your site to inform users of your event’s location. The venue profile displays many standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also includes venue details such as venue seating capacity, venue web address, phone number, venue address, Google map, etc. You can also list venue profiles in various areas in your WP theme as well as on a venue listing 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 specific venue.
- Automatic Plugin Updates. Event Espresso offers easy 1-click updates to make sure that you have the latest features and to keep your installation compatible with the latest version of WordPress.
- Staff Manager. Save time and stay organized by reusing team member profiles for multiple events or displaying their profile using a shortcode in any event description.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post types. You can also customize the templates to display events in your own unique way.
Extra features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for general WP users, and also extremely robust and customizable for higher end users and developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, Event Espresso 4 makes possible more complex developments and customizations to the software.
- Metabox Management & Organization. Event Espresso leverages the WP user interface, which gives you the ability to reorganize the user interface to suit your workflow. Each control box can be collapsed, re-arranged or removed from your workflow configuration.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value: According to the mission statement on their website, 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 goals, the software has been built using a model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium version of Event Espresso also provides you with over 40 added features, including:
- Live-filtering when you search for events in the Event Espresso admin.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing a common set of questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page in the registration process.
Addons
In addition to a very large range of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow end-users to further enhance the capabilities of the event management system.
Some of these add ons include:
- EE4 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, a default image will be used instead.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Template Add-on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes events with many datetimes into a dropdown list.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add-on: The Category Accordion template displays categories in a simple list. Clicking the category name displays the events related to that category and closes previously open categories.
- Social Coupons Integration Add-on: If your site uses 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 Add-on: The Custom Template add on is capable of displaying your event lists in a range of visually exciting ways.
- Seating Chart Add on: The seating chart addon is for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is ideal for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart addon lets you promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues right from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart add-on lets you control the experience for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to every seat.
- Multiple Event Registration Add-on: The Multi-Event registration addon gives your potential attendees 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.
- EE4 Events Table Template Add-on: The Events Table Template add on provides you with a simple and 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 build custom templates using one of the templates included as a source template.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp addon allows you to auto-register attendees to a specified mailing list or group within your MailChimp account.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin, including new addons.
For more details about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, visit the plugin website:
Testimonials
Below are some of the many testimonials that satisfied users have posted about Event Espresso:
”My clients have used Event Espresso for Transportation (Cadet Bus for leave), Parties (tailgates and brewery tours), and Horse-back riding lessons and camps. What a terrific plug-in and fantastic support from Seth!” Nina, Blue Iris Web Design
”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
”Thank you, we just did 2 sell out seminars of 50 attendees in 48 hours using Event Espresso and it was awesome. My wife was able to pick up on the processing backend with ease. You have done a great job on getting this system together – very simple, clear and well laid out With powerful functionality. I am so glad I dumped the old booking application we had and gave Event Espresso a go. Just wanted to say thanks, and thanks for the very patient, friendly and speedy assistance in helping me to get it all set up at the start. Many thanks to you and your team. A grateful customer.” Nicholas de Castella, Emotional Intelligence Trainings
Useful Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, trainer, conference promoter, or event professional, there are just endless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a registered user, go through the forums for inspiration and practical suggestions to streamline your event management workflow or improve the experience of your customers.
Product Support
Event Espresso is compatible with most WordPress plugins and WP themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great user support, as many of its satisfied plugin end-users confirm:
”Thank you Seth for being so responsive and going above and beyond the call of duty with your app! I highly recommend Event Espresso for its functionality and for the stellar support. Seth has a deep knowledge and understanding of WordPress and has built a tool that is seamless to use for both organizer and attendee alike! After looking at a bunch of alternatives, Event Espresso far surpasses the other apps that are available.” Wendy Troupe, ICS North Pole Express
Event Espresso provides great support including access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, priority 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 an established team of experienced WordPress web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can depend on to run your events.
Plugin Cost
Event Espresso is available in a range of editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin features, however, you will want to consider purchasing one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This enables you to configure Event Espresso on one site only. It includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License – This enables you to run Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This edition allows you to install Event Espresso on five domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Current pricing for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Presently, the plugin is selling for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Management
Note: The above reflects the pricing when 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.
Look up the software’s online documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to a particular situation, or to report issues and share 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 WP event booking and ticketing management plugin, used by thousands of event managers.
If you are a WordPress user and you plan to run events that involve managing dates and venues (offline and online), registering participants, and booking tickets, 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
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