Do you currently run or plan to run events that require handling bookings or registrations, such as workshops, group courses, charity fund raisers, networking events, or even a large-scale event such as an art exhibition, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event bookings can be a complex process. You may have to manage scheduling, dates, attendee numbers, data collection, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders and notifications, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and issuing tickets to event attendees.
There are many benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower expenses, help you easily reproduce repeat events, give event managers more control, create a better user experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that this can be costly.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-based site, you can download and install an inexpensive and professional web-based event registration solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Manager Software
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP lets you easily create multiple events and start processing online bookings in a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and take online event bookings)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can employ several event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up selling tickets, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your event participants, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing updates.
Access 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 Event Espresso 4 is considerably different than the older EE 3, as the plugin is being revamped using a different structure to accommodate future growth. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually retire EE 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
For more details go here:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just some of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website into a feature-rich and professional event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically eliminating the chore of processing registrations and sign-ups manually.
Basically, you are enabling attendees to enrol themselves.
Letting your customers to do the data entry frees you up from doing administration and lets you concentrate more time on delivering a more unique event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon discover, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and registration process that you want your clients to experience.
Some additional benefits of the plugin include:
- Reduced Costs: Event Espresso gives you an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third-party service provider. This is made possible through a model where Event Espresso users purchase the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and buy optional add-ons when you need additional functionality.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept new event registrations 24/7. In addition, Event Espresso social features (see below) let people interested in registering for your event share your information with their friends who may also be interested in attending.
- Green And Paperless Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event registration process remains entirely in digital form, reducing typical paper consumption from tasks associated with administration.
- All Data Belongs To You. You control all the data gathered from your event participants.
Plugin Features
The Event Espresso plugin delivers functionality to end-users through standard features (these come with the software) and optional features that you can buy for an added cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many great built-in to web site owners. Here are just a few of these:
- Fast and simple to install and use. Ready to start accepting registrations in minutes.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In Event Espresso 4, events can have multiple dates and times (datetimes), and these can be managed from a single event.
- Event Calendar. Registrants can easily see your upcoming events and add these to their schedule using a calendar.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso seamlessly integrates with leading payment gateways, enabling you to collect payments before running your events.
- Smart 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 attendee’s registration information for any added participants.
- Spam Protection. Prevent the risk of spammers and bot software programs creating bogus registrations on your web site with reCAPTCHA option that authenticate human activity.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system allows you to authenticate tickets, speed up door registrations, create multiple check-in “stations” and track your participants.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. Event Espresso 4 provides you with the tools to know who your customers are and how they’ve done business with you.
- Event Manager Pre-approval. Be selective about who can attend your events.
- Public Commenting. Add social engagement to your event by allowing potential customers to interact with you online via commenting and previous participants to post reviews that can help others consider whether or not to register. Moderation settings for public comments are configured via the WP commenting admin area.
- Keyword-Rich Page URLs. Keyword rich Web links take advantage of your Permalinks configuration settings. Search engine friendly permalinks with relevant keywords add to the context of your content and is favored by search engines, helping you get more traffic to your events.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your organization’s profile to display throughout Event Espresso and your front-end templates. Organization information include: business name, street address, city, state, country, zip code, email address, phone number, VAT/tax number, logo, Facebook URL, Twitter URL, LinkedIn URL, Pinterest profile URL, Google+ profile URL, Instagram URL.
- Exportable Information. You can output all the information gathered from event participants into Excel or CSV format for compiling advanced reports, planning marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, etc..
- Multiple Attendee Bookings. Event Espresso 4 allows a single person or people to enroll multiple participants at once. You decide how many people can register in one registration session by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Automatic Software Installation Updating. Event Espresso provides easy one-click updates to ensure that you have the latest features and to keep your installation up-to-date with new versions of WordPress.
- Social Sharing. Event registrants and your website visitors can tell others about your event using social media sharing buttons.
- Accurate Event Participant Manager. You have control of your participants’ date; who has registered, for what event and what amount they paid. With the attendee manager, you can get a quick overview of registered participants and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export an event attendee list to a CSV file for additional uses, send customized payment reminders and receipts and send messages to your registrants on a person-by-person basis or collectively.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows you to have more control and options over your content and how your information displays to readers.
- Maintenance Mode. Pause registrations for normal website traffic whenever site maintenance is required. You can still work on the back-end of your site during maintenance mode.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And Value For Money: According to the mission statement on their website, 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 software has been built using a model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium version of Event Espresso also provides you with over 40 added features, including:
- Duplicating events – streamlines the work of re-entering event data when adding new events.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing the same questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Addons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow software users to further enhance the functionality of your event management process.
Some of these add-ons 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 Manager Add-on: The Recurring Events management add on enables you to put events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months in advance. You can schedule as many future events as you want. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close bookings for all recurring events.
- Events Calendar Table Template Addon: The Calendar Table template is a list template with a bold date and customizable “register now” button. The template can be customized to show an event thumbnail instead of a date.
- Social Coupons Integration Add on: If your 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.
- Custom Template Addon: The Custom Template add-on is capable of displaying your event lists in a range of exciting and interesting ways.
- Seating Chart Add on: The seating chart add-on is 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 addon allows you to offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues right 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.
- EE4 Event Ticketing Add-on: The Ticketing add on adds the capacity to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon gives you the ability to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing addon includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for handling check-in scans at venues. People 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 attendees and to validate tickets.
- EE4 Events Calendar Add on: This WordPress events calendar displays events and event categories via an attractive graphical calendar.
- Infusionsoft Integration Add-on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft integration all-in-one sales and business marketing plugin addon, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture event attendee data, track registrations, and accept payments from your web site.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add-ons.
To learn more about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
Customer Feedback
Here are some of the many testimonials that plugin users have written about Event Espresso:
”I can’t even imagine what I would want the plugin to do that it doesn’t already do. I’m really happy with the features.” Jim Harmer
”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
”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
Useful Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, trainer, workshop planner, or event professional, there are simply countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a registered user, spend a little time researching the forums for useful ideas and practical suggestions to streamline your event management workflow and enhance the experience of your registrants.
Product Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with other WP plugins and WP themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great technical support, as many of its users 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 Event Espresso plugin provides incredible support including access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base 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 WordPress developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely software you can rely on to run and manage your events.
Plugin Price
Event Espresso is available in various editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you will want to consider downloading one of the ”Pro” plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This license enables you to configure Event Espresso on one domain only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This license enables you to set up Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This allows you to configure Event Espresso on 5 domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The cost to purchase the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the plugin retails for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current price: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Note: The pricing above was current at the time this review was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin developer when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Plugin Information
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.
Look up the software’s documentation pages for answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to a specific use-case, or to report issues and share feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event booking and ticketing management plugin, used and trusted by thousands of event managers.
If you own a WordPress web site and you currently run events that involve managing dates, times and venues, registering attendees, or booking tickets, then you will probably not find a better software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
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