Does your company currently run or plan to run events that need to accept bookings or registrations, such as seminars, community classes, non-profit fund-raisers, marketing conferences, or even a big event like a show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Managing event sign-ups can be a complex process. You have to co-ordinate calendar schedules, event dates, participant numbers, data entry, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to event 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 lower expenses, help you easily reproduce repeat events, give event managers more control, create a better customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be quite expensive.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-based website, you can download and install a very inexpensive and highly professional online event booking solution.
Presenting …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WP software lets you easily set up multiple events and start processing online registrations in just minutes.
(Set up multiple events and take online bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can employ several event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up ticket-selling, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media and email marketing software.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Please Note: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is completely different than the older EE 3, as the platform is being redeveloped using a different structure to enable future expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually phase out Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
Go here to learn more about the plugin:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
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 existing website or blog into a fully-featured and automated event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically doing away with the need to process registrations and bookings manually.
Essentially, you are making it easier for attendees to enroll by themselves.
Letting your enrollees to do all of the data entry frees up your time and lets you concentrate more resources on delivering a memorable event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will see in a moment, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management process that you want your clients to experience.
Additional benefits of the plugin include the following:
- Reduced Costs: Event Espresso provides you with a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to developing your own solution or using a 3rd party provider. The cost is kept to a minimum through a model where Event Espresso users start with the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and purchase optional add ons only when you need new features.
- More Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept online event bookings any time of day or night. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social features (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event invite others who may also be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign-up process can be conducted wholly in digital form, eliminating traditional paper consumption from tasks related to admin and record-keeping.
- Own Your Information. You control all the data acquired from event participants.
Plugin Features
The Event Espresso plugin provides functionality to its users via standard features (these come with the software) and additional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of great built-in to WP users. Here are just a few:
- Fast and simple to install and implement. Ready to start accepting registrations in minutes.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso allows you to create multiple ticket types and set different pricing options, number of tickets, etc.
- Custom Confirmation Emails. Configure automatic registration and payment notification email messages to communicate with event participants.
- Ticket Selector. Present multiple ticket options to prospects and let them choose the ticket(s) that will best fit their needs.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your WordPress theme and reuse events information throughout other areas of your site.
- Spam Protection. Reduce the likelihood of spamming and bot software programs creating bogus registrations by using reCAPTCHA option that provide human validation.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 provides 3 detailed in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. EE 4 provides you with the tools to gain a better understanding of who your customers are and how you have done past business with your customers. The Contact Profile section records the name, biography, contact details, event registration details, private comments, and more about each registrant.
- Administrative Pre-approval. Be selective about who can attend your events.
- Private Contact Commenting. Keep notes about users on their profile and how you have helped them. Private commenting enables you to keep records of when users contacted you, your internal comments, and how you’ve helped them.
- Works With The Most Up-To-Date WP Version. The EE 4 user interface follows the WordPress guidelines to help you create visually enhanced event pages that are responsive and mobile-friendly.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your profile to be deployed throughout the plugin and your front-end templates. Your organization data include: company name, address, city, state, country, zip/postal code, primary contact email address, phone number, tax number, your logo, Facebook profile URL, Twitter URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest profile URL, Google+ URL, Instagram URL.
- Upload Events. Event Espresso 4 provides an advanced importing capability that allows you to upload a lot of event data at once. You can export, edit and upload data for events, datetimes, tickets, pricing, custom registration questions, venue info, terminology, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Multiple Event Participant. Event Espresso 4 allows one person or a group to order multiple tickets and different types of tickets simultaneously. You control how many people are allowed to register in one session by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Event Espresso Community. Event Espresso gives you access to a community of experienced event managers, developers, web designers, online marketers and businesses who also use the software. You can network with other members of the Event Espresso community through their community chat room, support forums, job board, and social media pages on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Social Sharing. Event attendees and your site visitors can help spread the word about your events using social media sharing buttons.
- 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 events in your own unique way.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows you to have more control and options over the content of your event page and how the information displays to prospective event registrants.
- Control Box Management And Reorganization. Event Espresso lets you leverage the WP user interface, which brings the ability to reconfigure the user interface to match your workflow process. Each control box can be collapsed, re-arranged or entirely deleted from your workflow configuration.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And Value: 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 mission, the software has been built using a model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium version of Event Espresso also comes with 40+ added features, including:
- Duplicating events – streamlines the need to re-enter event information when creating new events.
- Default surcharge (the same as applying a service tax to tickets).
- Option to skip the confirmation page in the registration process.
Add ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow customers to further expand the functionality of your event management process.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Addon: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display the scheduled events by location. Four maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Custom Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes many datetime events into a dropdown list.
- Events Date Range Template Add-on: The Date Range custom event list template lets your users to search for events that take place within 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.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration addon lets you take advantage of the WP user system. With the WP User Integration addon you can give your users a special incentive by offering member pricing and overriding event pricing when members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered users of the site will have access to your special events. Members can also add personal data into their profile page allowing them fast registration for events by auto-filling in their personal information on the event registration form. Users can also view past events and pay for events.
- Seating Chart Add on: The seating chart addon is suitable 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 add on lets you offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart add on lets you manage the experience for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach single prices to each seat.
- Multi-Event Registration Addon: The Multiple Event registration add-on gives your potential attendees the ability to book 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 shopping 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.
- Events Table Template Addon: The Events Table Template add-on provides event managers with a simple and easy-to-use system that lets you 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 lets developers build custom templates using one of the included templates as a source template.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp addon lets you automatically register participants to a particular autoresponder list or group within your MailChimp account.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software, including new add ons.
For full details about the latest Event Espreso features and add-ons, visit the plugin website here:
Testimonials
Below are some of the many testimonials that satisfied users have posted about Event Espresso:
”Event Espresso is so easy to use yet feature rich and stable. It is a cornerstone of our site and our success.” Fraser Barner, Speaker’s Lab
”Event Espresso event management plugin for WordPress is really an awesome plugin.” Cheryl Smithem, Charleston PR & Design
”You guys have done an AWESOME job with this system…promise me to keep up the excellent work you guys are doing, for as long as you can… Respect!” Robert Jarnroth, Jarnroth Digital Productions
Useful Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, presenter, conference promoter, or event management consultant, there are simply countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered user, go through the user forum for new ideas and practical ways to streamline your event management workflow or enhance the experience of your event attendees.
Event Espresso Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with all WP plugins and WordPress themes that follow standard WP development rules. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive technical support, as so many of its satisfied plugin users confirm:
”By far, the customer service experience with Event Espresso has been the best of any WordPress Theme or Paid Plugin that I’ve used in the past two years!” Megan Murray, Boys & Girls Club of Lake Tahoe
The software provides exceptional support with access to a support forum, 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.
In addition, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can depend on to run and manage your events.
Software Pricing
Event Espresso is available in a range of editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin options, however, you need to consider downloading one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This edition lets you set up Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This lets you install Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This enables you to install Event Espresso on five sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The cost to purchase the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. When we last checked, the software retails for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Manager
Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this article was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin developer when you visit the site.
Additional Info
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the software’s documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to a specific use-case, or to notify developers about bugs and leave feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event registration and ticketing management software, used and trusted by thousands of users.
If you are a WordPress user and you intend to run events that require managing dates, times and venues (offline and online), registering attendees, and/or selling seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Ticket Registration Software
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