Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that need managing bookings, such as workshops, training courses, charity fund raisers, corporate conferences, or even a big event such as a school concert, 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 time-consuming process. You may have to manage scheduling, available dates and seating allocations, participant numbers, data entry, payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders and notifications, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to participants.
There are a number of benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce costs, help you easily replicate repeat events, give event managers more control, create a more enjoyable client experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event booking system can be expensive.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-powered digital presence, you can easily set up an inexpensive and highly professional web-based event booking system.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Management
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily create your event and start processing bookings in just minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and process online event bookings)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed application that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize event registration forms
You can use various event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up ticket-selling, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media and email marketing applications.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Note: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is considerably different than the older EE 3, as the plugin has been redeveloped using a different structure to accommodate future growth. The EE 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 read more about the benefits and features of this plugin.
To learn more about the plugin go here:
Benefits
Here are just some of the many benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current online presence 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 even seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by virtually doing away with the need to process registrations and sign-ups manually.
Basically, you are enabling event attendees to enroll by themselves.
Letting your attendees to do the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you invest more of your energy on planning a memorable event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover in a moment, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your participants to experience.
Additional plugin benefits include the following:
- Less Costs: The Event Espresso plugin provides you with a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd-party provider. The cost is kept low through a model where Event Espresso users start with the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and purchase add ons only when you need new functionality.
- Higher Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online event bookings 24 hrs a day. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing features (see below) let people interested in registering for your event invite friends who may be interested in attending.
- Green And Paperless Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, the event booking process remains wholly in digital form, eliminating typical paper waste from tasks related to administration.
- Own Your Data. You control all the data you obtain from your event attendees.
Features
The Event Espresso plugin provides functionality to its customers through built-in features (these are included with the software) and optional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many built-in to WP users. Here are just a few:
- Quick and easy to install and use. Be up and running in very little time.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso lets you set up multiple ticket types and specify prices, limits on ticket quantities, etc.
- Customizable Event Page Designs. Create the look and feel you want for your events and signup page using Event Espresso’s unlimited template options and components, plus HTML and CSS.
- Tax Administration. Event Espresso 4 gives you a number of options to administer taxes for your event and provide reports of tax fees to customers who purchase tickets. Event managers can configure taxes globally and on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
- Smart Single Page Checkout Process. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically copy the primary registrant’s information for any added registrants.
- Spam Protection. Reduce the chance of spamming and bot software programs creating bogus registrations with reCAPTCHA tools to provide human authentication.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 comes with three built-in in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. Event Espresso 4 provides you with the tools to gain a better understanding of who your clients are and how they have done business with you.
- Ticketless Events. You can list events without the requirement for registrants to get tickets. Use Event Espresso for any type of event, not just those that accept tickets.
- Public Commenting. Add social interactivity to your event page by allowing potential prospects to ask questions about your event and previous customers to post feedback that can help others consider whether or not to sign up. Moderation settings for public comments are configured via the WordPress default commenting admin area.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events allow you to develop an event page over time without publishing it to your site. You can keep working on your event until you are ready to take it live, or schedule to publish your event at a later date and time.
- Country-specific Settings. You can configure the country and currency settings to be used when promoting events, including currency, currency signs, decimal signs, characters and places, country codes, states or provinces, etc.
- Import Event Data. Event Espresso 4 provides a CSV-based importing feature that enables you to import a lot of event data all at one time. You can export, edit and upload details about events, datetimes, tickets, prices, registration questions, venues, terms, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Venue Profiles. The venue management feature in EE 4 allows details about a venue to display throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front end of your website to inform potential participants 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 reuse venue information such as venue seating capacity, venue site URL, phone number, physical, map, etc. You can also display venue profiles in various parts on your theme and on a venue listing page on your site where you can set up and publish venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have booked for a given venue.
- Automatic Upgrades. Event Espresso offers easy 1-click plugin updates to make sure that you have the latest features and to keep your software installation up-to-date with new versions of WordPress.
- Social Sharing. Event participants and website visitors can tell others about your event using social sharing buttons.
- Event Reports. Event reporting provides you with data of all registrations and transactions, enabling you to track the performance of your events with the aggregate number of people who have registered and how much money has been collected.
Additional features include:
- Hooks, Actions & Filters. These features allow developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso plugin that are completely compatible with WordPress.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 allows you to output a log file with debugging data that can be helpful for web developers who are diagnosing problems.
- Autonomy, Flexibility And Value For Money: 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 objectives, the company operates on a model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also includes over 40 added features, including:
- Live-filtering when you search for events in the Event Espresso admin.
- Default surcharge (the same as adding a service tax to tickets).
- Option to skip the confirmation page during registration.
Addons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow plugin users to significantly enhance the capabilities of managing your event.
Some of these add-ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display your upcoming events by location. There are 4 maps 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 Date Range Template Add-on: The Date Range custom event list template enables your users to browse for events that occur in a certain date range.
- Social Coupons Integration Add on: If your web site is featured on Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can also specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- Custom Files Add on: The Custom Files addon lets you bypass certain aspects of the Event Espresso plugin.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add-on Versions: This add-on lets you involve your staff in your organization to help manage your events and give new users permission 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 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 sections of your WordPress 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 add on.
- Event Ticketing & Bar Scanning Addon: The Ticketing add on adds 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. People 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 Table Template Add on: The Events Table Template add-on provides event managers with an easy-to-use system that allows you to modify the look and feel of your event lists. It comes with a simple table template with category filters, table search, table paging and more. It also lets web developers build their own custom templates using one of the included templates as a base template.
- JSON API Add-on: The new Event Espresso JSON API addon lets other software applications, online tools, mobile apps, etc… to access your Event Espresso information through an API (Application Programming Interface).
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software, including new addons.
For complete details about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website here:
Customer Feedback
Here are some of the many great testimonials that satisfied customers have posted about Event Espresso:
”Congratulations on an absolutely fantastic plugin. I’m really impressed with its functionality and add on features and will definitely upgrade my client’s production site to the premium version (when ready for launch) to incorporate all the features. As I have told another client “this plugin is the cat’s meow”.” Pete Mansel
”Customizing an Event Registration plugin for WordPress by @EventEspresso. Love the pro version. Highly Recommended!” Joshua Garity
”Hello. I wanted to say that I’ve purchased Event Espresso twice now for two different organizations and have had great success with the purchases. Outside of photography, I also build small websites with WordPress as the CMS. I built two websites for two different martial arts organizations who host yearly seminars and tournaments. The plug in has provided a way for attendees to sign up online from both Canada and the United States with ease, and also allowed the organizations to easily manage payments, attendee lists, and many other aspects of the events. Thanks to Seth for creating such a great plug in, and for your constant support!” James Zedd, James Zedd Photography
Plugin Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, presenter, workshop promoter, or event management professional, there are just endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed user, search the forums for useful ideas and practical suggestions to improve your event management process or improve the experience of your event registrants.
Support
Event Espresso works with with all WP plugins and WP themes that follow standard WordPress coding guidelines. If you find that you need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great customer support, as so many of its plugin clients 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
Event Espresso provides incredible support including access to support forums, in-depth 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.
In addition, Event Espresso boasts an established team of experienced web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can depend on to organize and manage your events.
Event Espresso Price
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software functionality, however, you should consider using one of the premium plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This allows you to set up Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License – This enables you to install Event Espresso on one site only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This allows you to run Event Espresso on five domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons 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 specials being offered. When we last checked, the software retails for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticket Registration Plugin For WordPress
Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this review was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin developer when you visit the site.
Additional Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the plugin’s online documentation pages for answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to your specific situation, or to notify developers about errors and give feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product web site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event registration and ticketing manager plugin, used and trusted by thousands of people.
If you own a WordPress-powered web site and you intend to run any event that involves scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), enrolling participants, or reserving tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticket Registration Plugin
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