Do you currently run or plan to run events that require bookings, such as seminars, training courses, charity fundraisers, marketing events, or even a big event such as a trade show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Co-ordinating event bookings can be a time-consuming process. You will probably have to manage calendar schedules, date availability, participant numbers, data processing, payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and issuing tickets to event participants.
There are a number of 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 reproduce previous events, give event managers more control, improve client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be expensive.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-based digital presence, you can set up a very inexpensive and professional online event registration solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress software lets you easily set up an event and start accepting bookings in just minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and take online event bookings)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can employ a range of event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up ticket sales, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your participants, or integrating your event bookings with social media sites like Facebook.
View detailed information about event attendees
Note: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is significantly different than the older EE 3, as it is being rebuilt using a different structure to allow for future expansion. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually phase out Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
For more details go here:
Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your site:
Automated Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website or blog into a fully-featured and automated event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using a web-based 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 bookings manually.
Basically, you are facilitating event participants to complete the sign-up process themselves.
Letting your clients to do all of the data themselves frees you up from doing admin work and lets you invest more resources on organizing a more enjoyable event.
Full 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 customers to experience.
Some additional benefits of the plugin include:
- Significantly Lower Costs: Event Espresso provides you with a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own system or using a third-party provider. This is made possible through a model where you buy the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then buy add-ons when you need added features.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new signups outside normal business hours. In addition, Event Espresso social 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.
- Paperless Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign-up process can remain wholly online, reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks related to enrollment.
- All Data Belongs To You. You own all the information you acquire from event participants.
Plugin Features
The Event Espresso software provides functionality to end-users via standard features (these are included with the plugin) and additional features that customers can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many built-in to WP users. Here are just some:
- Quick and simple to install and set up. Be up and running in minutes.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso allows you to create multiple ticket types and set separate prices, maximum number of tickets, and more.
- Event Calendar. Participants can easily find your events and add these to their schedule with a WordPress calendar.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso provides integration with several payment gateways, enabling you to collect money prior to running events.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration allows you to customize the settings of Google Maps on the event listing and event details pages.
- Default Prices. Create events fast by pre-configuring system-default ticket pricing.
- In-App Documentation Systems. Event Espresso 4 provides 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 understand who your customers are and how they have done business with you.
- Waiting Lists. Latecomers can subscribe to a waiting list if your event is full. Additionally, you can make it a requirement wait-listed registrants pre-pay if you plan to expand capacity for the event.
- Public Commenting. Add “social proof” by encouraging potential attendees to interact with you online via commenting and past participants to post feedback that can help others consider whether or not to register. Moderation settings for public commenting are configured via the WordPress native commenting settings.
- Draft Events. Draft events allow you to build an event over time without displaying it live on your website. You can keep editing your event until you are ready to take it live, or schedule your event pages to publish at a later date and time.
- Country-specific Settings. Event managers can configure the country and currency settings that will be used throughout Event Espresso, such as currency, currency symbols, decimal characters and places, country codes, states or provinces, and so on.
- Default Tickets. If you create identical tickets for most of your events, you can easily set up as your default ticket for the next event simply by checking a box.
- Multiple Attendee Bookings. Event Espresso 4 allows an individual or a group to order multiple tickets and different types of tickets simultaneously. You control how many people are able to enrol in one booking session by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Registrant Profiles. You can manage each attendee’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their records organized and easily accessible.
- Social Sharing. Event participants and your website visitors can help publicize your events using social media share buttons.
- Transaction Reporting. Quick-view event reporting gives you information of the registrations and transactions, enabling you to measure the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and how much money you’ve collected.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows developers to have more control and options over the content of your event pages and how the information displays to prospective customers.
- Metabox Management And Organization. Event Espresso lets you leverage the WordPress user interface, which gives you the ability to reorder the user interface to suit your workflow. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or entirely removed from the page.
- Flexibility, Autonomy 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 goals, the software has been built using a modular that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also includes 40+ added features, including:
- Duplicating events – eliminates the need to re-enter event information when creating new events.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse a group of questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As well as a very large range of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow users to further enhance the capabilities of managing an event.
Some of these add-ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Addon: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display all upcoming events by location. 4 maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Manager Add-on: The Recurring Events manager add on lets you put events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months … even years in advance. You can schedule as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in advance as you need. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close bookings for all 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 also be customized to show an event thumbnail image instead of the date.
- EE4 Events Social Sharing Add on: This addon adds social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that allows your registrants to share a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after booking.
- Custom Template Addon: The Custom Template add on lets you display your event lists in a number of exciting and interesting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add-on Editions: This add-on lets you include others in your organization to help manage your events and give new users the ability to create events or regional managers the ability to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WordPress users roles and allow them different permissions with different privileges, allowing others to help you manage your events or the events that other people create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain parts 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.
- Event Ticketing Add on: The Ticketing add on adds the ability to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add-on gives you the ability to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing addon includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode types are included for handling check-in scans at the door. Customers can either print out their tickets or display them on their mobile devices. The mobile app can be used for checking in or checking out registrants and to validate tickets.
- EE4 Events Table Template Add on: The Events Table Template add-on gives you a simple and easy-to-use system that allows you to change 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 enables web developers to build their own custom templates using one of the templates provided as a source template.
- Infusionsoft Integration Add on: 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 customer data, track bookings, and accept payments from your web site.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add-ons.
For complete details about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
User Feedback
Below are some of the testimonials that users have written 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
”I have been using Event Espresso to run my festival and have been very happy with how it has worked out. They have provided tremendous support and their iPhone app is amazing and easy to use. I suggest using it for your event.” Alex Grant, Byron Spirit Festival
”Loving the functions and support from Event Espresso. One of the best plugins I’ve ever bought!” Nathan
Useful Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, teacher, show promoter, or event professional, there are just endless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered user, spend a little time researching the user forum for new ideas and practical suggestions to improve your event management process or improve the experience of your attendees.
Product Support
Event Espresso works with with most WP plugins and WordPress themes that follow standard WP development guidelines. If you find that you need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great support, as so many of its end-users attest:
”It’s magical. Support is amazing, plugin is simple to use, a 3 year old could use the iPhone app…it all is very impressive and professional.” David, House of Prayer
Event Espresso provides great support that includes access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, premium 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.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely software you can count on to run your events.
Software Price
Event Espresso is available in a number of editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin options, however, you should consider using one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This allows you to run Event Espresso on 1 site only. It includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This allows you to run Event Espresso on one domain only. It includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License – This lets you configure Event Espresso on five domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Pricing for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. When we last checked, the software sells for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticket Registration Software For WordPress
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 developer when you visit the website.
Additional Plugin Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the software’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 your particular situation, or to notify developers about errors and share feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event registration and ticketing management plugin, used and trusted by thousands of WordPress site owners.
If you own a WordPress web site and you intend to run events that involve scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), registering participants, or reserving tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Ticketing Registration Plugin
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