Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that require handling bookings or registrations, such as seminars, community courses, not-for-profit fundraisers, networking functions, or even a big event like an arts & crafts, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Managing event sign-ups is a complex process. You may need to manage event schedules, available dates and spaces, registration numbers, data processing and storage, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations, reminders and alerts, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to event attendees.
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 copy settings for similar events, give you more control, improve user experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event registration system can be costly.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-based digital presence, you can easily set up a very inexpensive and professional web-based event booking solution.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticket Registration Plugin For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress plugin allows you to easily create multiple events and start accepting bookings in just a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and accept online bookings)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed software that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize event registration forms
You can employ a number of event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up ticket sales, 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.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Note: Currently, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is fundamentally different than the older EE 3, as the software is being rebuilt using a different structure to enable future growth. 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 Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and advantages of using this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing web site into a fully-featured and automated event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by practically eliminating the chore of processing registrations manually.
Essentially, you are making it easier for participants to perform the registration by themselves.
Letting your attendees to do the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you focus more resources on creating a more unique event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon discover, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and registration process that you want your customers to experience.
Additional benefits and advantages include:
- Reduced Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd party service. The cost is kept to a minimum through a model where users purchase the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and purchase add-ons only when you need extra features.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept online sign-ups 24 hours a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social and marketing features and add-ons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event invite others who may be interested in attending.
- Green Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign up process can remain wholly in digital form, eliminating typical paper waste from tasks associated with admin and record-storage.
- Own Your Information. You own all the information collected from event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
The Event Espresso plugin provides functionality to end-users through built-in features (these are included with the plugin) and additional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers a number of built-in to WordPress users. Here are just a few of these:
- Fast and simple to install and implement. Ready to use in minutes.
- Custom Event Registration Form. With Event Espresso you can collect specific information using a custom event registration form on your web site to prepare a customized experience for your clients.
- Custom Confirmation Emails. Set up automated booking and payment confirmation emails to communicate with event registrants.
- Ticket Selector. Present a number of ticket options to prospects so they can choose the ticket(s) that best suits their needs.
- Intelligent Single Page Checkout Process. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is smart, fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically duplicate the primary registrant’s details for any added attendees.
- Default Prices. Create events quickly by pre-configuring default pricing.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 includes 3 detailed in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. Event Espresso 4 lets you gain a better understanding of who your customers are and how they’ve done business with you.
- Event Manager Pre-approval. Be selective about who can participate in your events.
- Private Notes On Contacts. Keep notes about contacts on their profile. Private notes allows you to keep records of when users contacted you, your internal comments, and how you have interacted with your contacts.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events let you build an event at your own leisure without displaying it live on your website. You can work on your event pages until you are ready to take it live, or schedule your event page to publish at a later date and time.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your organization’s profile to display throughout Event Espresso and your front-end templates. Organization fields include: organization name, address, city, state, country, zip code, email, telephone, VAT/tax number, logo, Facebook profile URL, Twitter URL, LinkedIn URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ URL, Instagram URL.
- Upload Event Information. EE 4 provides an advanced importing capability that allows you to quickly import bulk event data all at one time. You can export, edit and upload details about events, datetimes, ticketing details, pricing, registration questions, venue info, terms, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Register Multiple Attendees. Event Espresso 4 allows a single person or a group to purchase multiple tickets and different types of tickets at once. Event managers decide how many people can register in a single registration by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Automatic Upgrades. Event Espresso provides easy one-click upgrades to make sure that you have the latest features and to keep your installation up-to-date with the latest version of WordPress.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential registrants who have not made payment for their booking with a standard but personalized PDF invoice with one click. Your invoices will address registered participants who have not paid their registration yet by name, display the balance they owe, and include links to the event, a payment url and a url to download a PDF invoice.
- Categorize Events. If you have a number of types of events such as free and paid, conference speakers and mastermind sessions, different types of programs and program modules, etc. you can categorize these to help event participants to locate what they’re looking for. You can display all events in a category on a custom event category page, make events searchable by category, and color-code events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make these easier to find, in addition to suggesting other events in the categories that interest your visitors.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows developers to have more control and options over your content and how the information displays to your visitors.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registration capabilities for regular website traffic when website maintenance is needed. You can still work on the back-end of your site during maintenance mode.
- 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 software has been built using a modular and highly efficient model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium version of Event Espresso also provides you with 40+ added features, including:
- Live-filtering when you search for events within the Event Espresso admin.
- Default surcharge (the same as adding a service fee to tickets).
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
In addition to an incredible range of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow you to significantly expand the capabilities of the event management system.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Addon: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display the scheduled events by location. There are four maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Template Add-on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize many datetime events into a dropdown list.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add on: The Category Accordion template displays categories as a simple list. Clicking a category name shows all events associated with that category and closes previously open categories.
- Events Social Sharing Add-on: This add on 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 registration.
- Custom Files Add on: The Custom Files add-on provides PHP files that let you override certain aspects of the Event Espresso plugin.
- Seating Chart Add-on: The seating chart add-on is suitable for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart add-on allows you to promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues directly from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart addon lets you manage the environment for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach single pricing to every seat.
- Event Ticketing Add-on: The Ticketing add-on gives you the capacity to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add-on adds the capacity to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing add on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for handling check-in scans at venues. Attendees 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.
- EE4 Events Calendar Add-on: This addon uses the WordPress calendar to display events and event categories using an attractive graphical calendar.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp add-on lets you auto-register participants to a specified mailing list or group within your MailChimp account.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software, including new addons.
For more details about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website:
Customer Feedback
Below are a few of the many testimonials that satisfied users have written 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
”When you can get a company to expend more money switching systems just to use your plugin…you’ve really accomplished something.” David, House of Prayer
”Thank you, we just did 2 sell out seminars of 50 attendees in 48 hours using Event Espresso and it was awesome. My wife was able to pick up on the processing backend with ease. You have done a great job on getting this system together – very simple, clear and well laid out With powerful functionality. I am so glad I dumped the old booking application we had and gave Event Espresso a go. Just wanted to say thanks, and thanks for the very patient, friendly and speedy assistance in helping me to get it all set up at the start. Many thanks to you and your team. A grateful customer.” Nicholas de Castella, Emotional Intelligence Trainings
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, trainer, concert promoter, or event management professional, there are just countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed user, spend a little time visiting the user forum for tips and practical ways to streamline your event management and registration workflow or enhance the experience of your event participants.
Support
Event Espresso works with with other WP plugins and themes that follow standard WP development guidelines. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive end-user support, as so many of its end-users confirm:
”Thank you Seth for being so responsive and going above and beyond the call of duty with your app! I highly recommend Event Espresso for its functionality and for the stellar support. Seth has a deep knowledge and understanding of WordPress and has built a tool that is seamless to use for both organizer and attendee alike! After looking at a bunch of alternatives, Event Espresso far surpasses the other apps that are available.” Wendy Troupe, ICS North Pole Express
Event Espresso provides exceptional support including access to support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, one-on-one 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 solution you can depend on to run and manage your events.
Plugin Price
Event Espresso is available in different plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin features, however, you will want to consider purchasing one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This allows you to configure Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This edition lets you run Event Espresso on one domain only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This lets you set up Event Espresso on five domains. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Pricing details of the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the plugin is being retailed for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management
Note: The above reflects the pricing when this review was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin author when you visit the site.
Additional Information
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the software’s online documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to a particular use-case, or to notify developers about problems and share feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event booking and ticketing management plugin, used by thousands of WordPress users.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you currently run an event that involves managing dates, times and venues, booking participants, and selling tickets, then you will probably not find a better solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
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