Does your business currently run or plan to run events that need managing registrations, such as workshops, group classes, charity fundraisers, networking functions, or even a large-scale event such as a regional festival, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Managing event bookings can be a complicated and time-consuming process. You may have to manage calendar schedules, available dates and spaces, registration numbers, data collection and storage, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to event registrants.
There are lots of advantages to setting up an automated web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce costs, help you easily duplicate previous events, give event managers more control, improve customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be expensive.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-powered website, you can install an inexpensive and professional web-based event booking solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticketing Registration System
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress lets you easily schedule your event and begin processing online registrations in just minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and take online event registrations)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed application that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
Customize registration forms
You can employ a number of event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your participants, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing notifications.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Note: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is completely different than the older EE 3, as it has been rebuilt using a different structure to allow for future growth and expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually move completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Plugin 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 current digital presence into a fully-featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple pricing levels 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 eliminating the chore of processing registrations manually.
Basically, you are enabling attendees to register themselves.
Allowing your participants to do the data entry frees you up from doing administration and lets you invest more of your energy on creating a memorable event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn in a moment, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and booking process that you want your clients to experience.
Some additional benefits of the plugin include the following:
- Less Costs: Event Espresso is a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to building your own software or using a 3rd-party service provider. The cost is kept to a minimum by using a model where users buy the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and purchase add ons when you need extra functionality.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online bookings any time of day or night. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing add-ons (see below) let people interested in registering for your event invite friends who may be interested.
- Paperless Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, your event booking process is performed entirely in digital form, eliminating typical paper waste from tasks associated with admin and record-storage.
- All Data Belongs To You. You own all the information acquired from your event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
The Event Espresso software delivers functionality to users through built-in features (these come with the plugin) and additional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many great features to WordPress users. Here are just a few of these:
- Fast and simple to install and implement. Be up and running in no time.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso allows you to set up multiple ticket types and specify unique pricing options, ticket quantity limits, and more.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Registrants can easily see your events and add these to their schedule with a calendar.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso integrates with payment gateways, allowing you to collect money prior to running events.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration allows event managers to customize the settings of Google Maps on the event listing and event details pages.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow you to create new prices that adjust the base ticket price for the default ticket.
- Mobile Registration And Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system enables you to authenticate tickets, speed up in-venue registrations, create multiple check-in “stations” and track participants.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. Event Espresso 4 provides you with the tools to understand who your clients are and how you have done business with your clients. Your Contact Profile page stores updated records such as the name, biography, contact details, event registration information, private comments, etc. about each registrant.
- No Ticket Events. List events without the requirement for attendees to book tickets. Use Event Espresso for any kind of event, not just when tickets are needed.
- Public Commenting. Add social a new level of interaction to your event pages by encouraging potential customers to interact with you online via commenting and previous attendees to post reviews that can help others consider whether or not to sign up. Moderation settings for comments are specified using the WordPress native commenting section.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events let you develop an event over time without displaying it live on your site. You can continue editing your event pages until you are ready to publish it on your website, or schedule to publish your event at a later time and date.
- Multi-Language Plugin. Event Espresso can be set up in over 15 languages, with more translations planned.
- Exportable Data. You can export all of your data collected from your event customers into Excel or CSV format for producing advanced reports, implementing new marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, and so on.
- Event Venue Management. The venue manager in Event Espresso 4 lets details about venues to appear throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front end of your website to inform attendees of your event’s location. The venue profile has many standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also includes venue information like venue seating capacity, venue website, venue phone number, physical, map, etc. You can also list all of your event venues on specific locations of your WP theme and 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.
- Event Espresso Community. Event Espresso lets you engage with a community of experienced event managers, programmers, designers, internet marketers and businesses who also use the software. You can network with other members of the Event Espresso community using their community chat room, support forums, job board, and social media pages on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Team Member Management. Save time and stay organized by reusing staff member profiles for multiple events or displaying their profile using a shortcode in an event description.
- Accurate Participant Management. You have control of your participants’ records; who has enrolled, which event they have booked and how much they have paid. With the attendee manager, you can get an overview of registered participants and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export a list of event attendees to an Excel spreadsheet for additional uses, send customized payment reminders and receipts and send messages to your customers on a person-by-person basis or collectively.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows you to have more control and options over your content and how your information displays to your visitors.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 lets you output a log file with debugging data which can be helpful for web developers when troubleshooting.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And Value For Money: 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 objectives, the company operates on a model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also includes over 40 added features, including:
- Live-filtering when you search for events within the Event Espresso admin.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse a common set of questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page during the registration process.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow software users to significantly enhance the functionality of the event management process.
Some of these add-ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Addon: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display all scheduled events by location. 4 maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Management Add-on: The Recurring Events management addon lets you put your events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months in advance. You can add as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in the future as you need. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close bookings for all of these 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 be customized to display an event thumbnail instead of a date.
- 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.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration add-on allows you to take advantage of the WordPress user system. With the WP User Integration addon you can give your users a special incentive by offering member prices and overriding event pricing when members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered site users will have access to your special events. Members can also enter personal data into their profile page allowing them to quickly register for events by auto-filling in the personal information on the event registration form. Users can also look up event history and pay for events.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add-on Editions: This add on lets you include other users in your organization to help manage your events and give new users permission to create events or regional managers permission to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WordPress users roles and assign them different permissions with different capabilities, allowing staff to help you manage your events or the events that others create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain sections of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain areas 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.
- Multi-Event Registration Addon: The Multi-Event registration add-on gives your potential customers the ability to register for 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 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.
- EE4 Events Table Template Addon: The Events Table Template add on provides you with an 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 web developers design their own custom templates using one of the included templates as a source template.
- JSON API Add on: The new Event Espresso JSON API add-on lets other applications, web tools, mobile apps, etc… to access your Event Espresso details through an Application Programming Interface (API).
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin, including new add-ons.
For full details about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, visit the plugin website here:
User Feedback
Below are just some of the many great testimonials that satisfied users have posted about Event Espresso:
“It is a very, very slick plugin. It’s one of those plugins where you install it, change a couple of settings, and boom you’re selling tickets.” Brad Williams, WebDevStudios
”This really is a hell of a plugin. For me, it’s probably the final nail in the coffin for Joomla, as WP can now pretty much do EVERYTHING Joomla does, but better. Love the simplicity of this plugin!” Sam, Web Contempo
”I’m so excited to fire Eventbrite! Event Espresso has an amazing WP plugin for event management. We’re testing it now & are very impressed! In a nutshell Event Espresso saves us money & does everything Eventbrite did before. :)” Dustin Nay
Useful Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, teacher, event planner, or event management professional, there are just countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, spend a little time visiting the forums for tips and practical ways to streamline your event management and registration process and improve the experience of your attendees.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with most WordPress plugins and WP themes that follow standard WP development rules. If you find that you need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive customer support, as many of its satisfied customers 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 plugin provides robust support that includes access to support forums, comprehensive 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 web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can depend on to manage your events.
Product Pricing
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you need to consider purchasing one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This edition lets you install Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This license option allows you to configure Event Espresso on one site only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This option allows you to run Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The cost of purchasing the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. When we last checked, the plugin sells for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Management
Note: The pricing above was current at the time this article was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the site.
Additional Information
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the software’s documentation pages 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 report issues and leave feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event booking and ticketing management plugin, used by thousands of people.
If you own a WordPress-powered site and you plan to run an event that requires scheduling dates, times and venues, enrolling participants, and/or reserving seating, then you will probably not find a better solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Manager
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