Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that need co-ordinating bookings or registrations, such as workshops, group courses, non-profit fundraisers, marketing events, or even a big event like a festival, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Co-ordinating event bookings can be a complex process. You may have to co-ordinate scheduling, available dates and seating allocations, attendee numbers, data collection and admin, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to event participants.
There are many benefits to setting up an automated web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower expenses, help you easily duplicate repeat events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event registration system can be costly.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-powered website, you can set up an inexpensive and professional online event booking solution.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Manager System
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress lets you easily set up an event and begin receiving online registrations in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and process online event bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Customize registration forms
You can employ several event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your event participants, or integrating your event bookings with social media sites like Facebook.
Access detailed information about event attendees
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 impressively different than the older EE 3, as the platform has been rebuilt using a different structure to accommodate future expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually retire Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
Go here to learn more about the plugin:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just some of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website or blog into an automated and fully featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to attendee limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by virtually doing away with the chore of processing registrations and signups manually.
Essentially, you are enabling attendees to complete the enrollment process on their own.
Letting your participants to do all of the data entry frees up your time and lets you invest more resources on planning a more unique event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon discover, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and registration process that you want your users to experience.
Additional benefits include the following:
- Significantly Lower Costs: Event Espresso is a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own solution or using a third-party service provider. The cost is kept to a minimum by using a model where you pay for the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and purchase add ons when you need extra functionality.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept online event signups 24 hours a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social and marketing features (see below) let people interested in attending your event invite others who may also be interested in attending.
- Green Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, the event registration process remains entirely online, reducing traditional paper waste from tasks associated with admin and record-storage.
- All Data Belongs To You. You control all the information you collect from event participants.
Event Espresso Features
The Event Espresso software provides functionality to end-users through built-in features (these come with the plugin) and additional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many built-in to WordPress users. Here are just a few:
- Quick and easy to install and configure. Be up and running in minutes.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso lets you create multiple ticket types and set prices, limits on ticket quantities, and more.
- Customized Notification Emails. Configure automated registration and payment confirmation emails to communicate with your participants.
- Ticket Selector. Present several ticket options to registrants and let them purchase the ticket(s) that will best fit their needs.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your theme and reuse contact information throughout other areas of your site.
- Spam Protection. Eliminate the risk of spammers and robots creating bogus registrations by using reCAPTCHA features to provide human validation.
- In-App Documentation Systems. Event Espresso 4 comes with three comprehensive in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Event Check-In List. Generate an exportable list of attendees and check in those who attend.
- Admin Pre-approval. Control who can attend your events.
- RSS Feeds. Keep your users updated about your events, bring in more visitors and widen your content distribution with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events let you build your event over time without publishing it to your website. You can work on your event pages until you are ready to publish it live on your site, or schedule your event to publish at a later time and date.
- Complete Control Of Your Event Management. Event Espresso puts event managers in full control of every aspect of your event’s registration and ticketing processes, and also lets you automate the process with event management tools that include staff and venue manager, custom event designs, payment processing and handling, wait lists, limits on attendees, printable tickets and more.
- Exportable Information. You can output all the data collected from event customers into Excel or CSV format for compiling advanced reports, devising new marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, etc..
- Venue Manager. The venue manager in EE 4 allows details about a venue to be made available throughout the Event Espresso admin and the public areas of your site to inform users of your event’s location. The venue record displays many of the standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also displays venue information like venue seating capacity, venue web address, venue phone number, physical and/or virtual location, directions map, etc. You can also list all of your event venues in specific parts on your WordPress theme and on a venue listing page on your site where you can set up and reuse venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have listed for a given venue.
- Registrant Records. Manage your registrant’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their records organized and easily within reach.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential clients who have not made payment for their enrollment with a standard but personalized invoice with one click. Your invoices will reference registered attendees who have not paid their registration in full by name, display the balance owing, and include a link to the event details, a payment link and a link to download the invoice.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post type features such as custom fields, post meta data, taxonomies, etc. You can also customize the page templates to display event information in your own unique way.
Extra features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for basic users, and also extremely robust and customizable for enterprise-level users and web developers. The bottom line is that by using Object-oriented programming (OOP), Event Espresso 4 permits more complex extensions and customizations to the plugin.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registrations for regular site traffic when you need to make changes on your website. You can continue to work on your event pages during maintenance mode.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And Value: According to the philosophy stated 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 mission, the company operates on 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 includes 40+ additional features, including:
- Live-filtering when searching for events in 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 an amazing array of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow you to significantly expand the capabilities of events.
Some of these add-ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display all scheduled events by location. 4 maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Custom Template Add-on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes events with multiple datetimes into a dropdown list.
- Events Calendar Table Template Addon: The Calendar Table template is a list template with a bold date and customizable “register now” button. The template can be customized to show the event thumbnail image instead of the date.
- EE4 Events Social Sharing Add on: 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 booking.
- Custom Template Add-on: The Custom Template add on can display your event lists in a number of exciting and interesting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add-on Versions: This add on lets you include others in the event management process and give new users the capacity 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 events that other people create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain parts of your WordPress 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.
- EE4 Event Ticketing And Bar Scanning Add on: The Ticketing add-on gives you the capacity to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add on gives you the capacity to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing add on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for handling check-in scans at the venue door. Registrants can either print out their tickets or display them on their mobile devices. The barcode scanner can be used for checking in or checking out registrants and to validate tickets.
- Events Calendar Add on: This add-on uses the WordPress calendar to display events and categories of events via a nice graphical calendar.
- Infusionsoft Integration Addon: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and business marketing software add-on, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture event attendee 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:
User Feedback
Below are a few of the testimonials that customers have posted about Event Espresso:
”EventEspresso saves us money, saves our secretary 16-24 hours and looks so professionally done that people ask us how we do it; which we happily tell them, “Event Espresso, and be sure to get the ticketing add-on.”” David, House of Prayer
”You can tell that the Event Espresso team is really passionate about their work, and that they care and spend a lot of time helping people work with their plugin and use it with their events – it’s something every WordPress service should aim for.” Ryan Imel, WPCandy
”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, concert promoter, or event professional, there are just endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, search the user forum for inspiration and practical suggestions to improve your event management process and improve the experience of your participants.
Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with other WP plugins and WP themes that follow standard WordPress development guidelines. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent end-user support, as so many of its plugin end-users attest:
”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 software provides exceptional support that includes access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base 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.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts an established team of experienced WordPress developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can depend on to manage your events.
Event Espresso Cost
Event Espresso is available in a number of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software features, however, you should consider downloading one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal License Edition – This edition allows you to install Event Espresso on one site only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This license enables you to set up Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Edition – This license option allows you to run Event Espresso on five domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The price of the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, the plugin is selling for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing 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 Information
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the plugin’s documentation tools 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 all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event registration and ticketing manager software, used and trusted by thousands of companies.
If you own a WordPress site and you intend to run an event that requires scheduling dates, times and venues (offline and online), registering attendees, and/or reserving seating, then you will probably not find a better plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
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