Do you currently run or plan to run events that need handling bookings or registrations, such as seminars, training courses, not-for-profit fund raisers, marketing functions, or even a big event such as a show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Co-ordinating event registrations is a complicated and time-consuming process. You may need to co-ordinate scheduling, available dates and seating allocations, attendee numbers, data entry, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to participants.
There are lots 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 duplicate previously-run events, give you more control, create a better customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be very costly.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-based site, you can install a very inexpensive and highly professional online event booking solution.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress lets you easily schedule your event and start processing registrations in just a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and process online bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich plugin that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can employ multiple event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event participants, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing follow-ups.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Note: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is considerably different than the older Event Espresso 3, as it has been rebuilt using a different structure to enable future growth. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually phase out EE 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
Go here to learn more:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current website or blog into a fully-featured and automated event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to attendee limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by literally doing away with the need to process registrations manually.
Basically, you are enabling participants to complete the enrolment process by themselves.
Letting your customers to do all of the data entry frees you up from doing administration and lets you focus more of your attention on organizing a better event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn shortly, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your attendees to experience.
Additional benefits and advantages include:
- Reduced Costs: The Event Espresso plugin is a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options 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 purchase addons only if you need added features.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept new registrations any time of day or night. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing features (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event share your information with others who may also be interested.
- Green & Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, your event registration process can remain entirely in digital form, eliminating typical paper waste from tasks related to admin and record-keeping.
- Own Your Information. You control all the information gathered from your event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to its customers through built-in features (these come with the plugin) and optional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers a number of great features to WordPress users. Here are just a few:
- Fast and simple to install and set up. Be up and running in minutes.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In Event Espresso 4, events can have multiple dates and times (called datetimes), that these can be managed from a single event.
- Customizable Event & Registration Page Designs. Match your website’s look and feel for your events and signup page using Event Espresso’s limitless template options and components, as well as HTML or CSS.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso provides integration with several payment gateways, enabling you to collect money before running events.
- Intelligent 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 attendees.
- Default Prices. Create events quickly and easily by pre-configuring default prices.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 includes three built-in in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of booking event attendees when they show up, or sending in paper forms for manual processing later.
- Admin Pre-approval. Control who can participate in your events.
- RSS Event Feeds. Automatically update site visitors, bring in more visitors and reach a wider number of prospects with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Optimized For The Most Recent WordPress Version. The Event Espresso 4 user interface follows all WordPress guidelines to help you build visually enhanced event pages that are easier to use and mobile-friendly.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your profile to display throughout Event Espresso and your front-end templates. Organization data include: organization name, address, city, state, country, zip code, email address, telephone, tax number, logo, Facebook URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ profile URL, Instagram profile URL.
- Default Tickets. If you find yourself creating identical tickets for your events, you can easily set one of those tickets as your default ticket for your new events simply by checking a box.
- Venue Management. The venue manager in EE 4 allows information about venues to display 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 lets you add details such as venue seating capacity, venue web address, phone number, physical, directions map, etc. You can also display venues in various parts of your WP theme as well as on a venue archive page on your site where you can set up and publish venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a particular venue.
- Automatic Plugin Installation Upgrades. Event Espresso offers simple one-click software installation updates to make sure that you have the newest features and to keep your software installation up-to-date with the latest version of WordPress.
- Social Sharing. Event registrants and website visitors can spread the word about your event using social media sharing buttons.
- Event Reporting. Event reporting gives you data of all registrations and transactions, enabling you to analyze the performance of your events with the aggregate number of people who have registered and how much money has been collected.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows developers to have more control and options over the content of your event pages and how your information displays to your site visitors.
- Maintenance Mode. Pause registrations for regular site visitors whenever site maintenance is required. You can still work on your content during maintenance mode.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & Value: 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 company operates on a modular that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also includes 40+ additional features, including:
- Live-filtering when searching for events inside the Event Espresso admin.
- Default surcharge (similar to applying a service fee to all tickets).
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As well as a comprehensive range of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow users to significantly expand the functionality of events.
Some of these add-ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add-on: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display scheduled events by location. There are four maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Template Add-on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes many datetime events into a drop-down list.
- Events Date Range Template Add-on: The Date Range custom event list template lets your users to browse for events that take place in a certain date range.
- Social Coupons Integration Add on: If your web site uses Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can even specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- Custom Files Add on: The Custom Files add on allows you to override certain aspects of the Event Espresso plugin.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add-on Versions: This add on lets you involve others in your organization to help manage your events and give new users the ability 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 allow them different permissions with different privileges, so others can help you manage your events or events that others create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain sections of your WP dashboard and/or certain parts 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 addon.
- Multiple Event Registration Add on: The Multi-Event registration add-on gives potential attendees the ability to book 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 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.
- Events Calendar Addon: This WordPress events calendar displays events and event categories in an attractive graphical calendar.
- Infusionsoft Integration Add-on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and marketing software add-on, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture registrant data, track bookings, and accept payments from your website.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software, including new add-ons.
For more details about the newest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
Users – Testimonials
Here are some of the many testimonials that plugin users have posted about Event Espresso:
”My hope with this whole integration is to be able to show other school districts an affordable and easy solution to these registrations. I cannot believe how much money they are charged for less by other companies. This has the potential to save schools tens of thousands, which is huge right now.” Kelly, College Station Independent School District
”…it really does blow everything else that’s out there out of the water.” Chris Reynolds, Arcane Palette Creative Design
”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 motivational speaker, presenter, event planner, or event management professional, there are just endless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a registered user, search the forums for new ideas and practical ways to improve your event management and registration workflow and improve the experience of your event registrants.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with most WP plugins and themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive customer support, as many of its customers confirm:
”These guys are right on any problem or issue or even general questions. You can’t really put a value high enough on the kind of support these guys offer.” Mark Wigston, Muskoka Graphics
The Event Espresso plugin provides exceptional support with access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, custom development 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.
In addition, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can depend on to manage your events.
Plugin Price
Event Espresso is available in different plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin options, however, you need to consider downloading one of the ”Pro” plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This license option allows you to run Event Espresso on one domain only. It includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This lets you configure Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This lets you install Event Espresso on 5 domains. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (addons 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 specials being offered. Presently, the plugin retails for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Manager
Note: The pricing above was current at the time 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 Plugin Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the software’s documentation tools for answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to a particular situation, or to notify developers about bugs and give feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event booking and ticketing manager software, used and trusted by thousands of WordPress website owners.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you plan to run an event that requires scheduling dates, times and venues, enrolling participants, or reserving tickets, then you will probably not find a better solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso
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