Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that need to accept bookings or registrations, such as seminars, group classes, not-for-profit fundraisers, corporate functions, or even a big event like a music show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups can be a time-consuming process. You need to co-ordinate event schedules, available dates and spaces, attendee numbers, data entry, payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to attendees.
There are many advantages to setting up an online 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 customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that this can be expensive.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-based digital presence, you can download and install a very inexpensive and professional web-based event booking solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticketing Registration Software For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily schedule your event and begin accepting registrations literally in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and take online bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed application that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize event registration forms
You can use several event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up selling tickets, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media sites like Facebook.
View detailed information about event attendees
Please Note: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is significantly different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the software is being revamped using a different structure to accommodate future expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually migrate completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and advantages of using the plugin.
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Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just some of the many benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current online presence into a feature-rich and professional 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.
Higher Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by literally doing away with the need to process registrations and bookings manually.
Basically, you are enabling event attendees to perform the registration by themselves.
Allowing your enrollees to do the data themselves frees up your time and lets you focus more of your attention on planning a more enjoyable event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn in a moment, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and registration process that you want your attendees to experience.
Additional benefits and advantages include:
- Reduced Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own system or using a 3rd-party service provider. This is made possible through a model where Event Espresso users pay for the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then purchase add ons when you need extra features.
- More Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept online signups any time of day or night. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing features and addons (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event invite others who may be interested.
- Green Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign up process can remain entirely online, eliminating traditional paper waste from tasks related to admin and record-keeping.
- Own Your Information. You own all the data you collect from event attendees.
Features
The Event Espresso software provides functionality to its users via standard features (these come with the software) and optional features that customers can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers a number of features to WP users. Here are just some:
- Quick and simple to install and configure. Ready to use in minutes.
- Customized Event Registration Form. With Event Espresso you can collect unique data using custom event registration forms on your web pages to prepare a customized experience for your users.
- Event Calendar. Participants can easily find your events and add these to their schedule with the WordPress calendar.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso provides integration with leading payment gateways, allowing you to collect money before running events.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your theme and reuse events details throughout other areas of your site.
- Spam Protection. Prevent the likelihood of spamming and bots creating bogus registrations with reCAPTCHA features to confirm human activity.
- Promotional Codes. Offer promotional and multiple discount codes to encourage visitors to take action without delaying, or make your offers more affordable for others. Also useful for helping to increase sales of events close to deadlines.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of participants and confirm everyone who attends.
- Event Manager Pre-approval. Be selective about who can and cannot attend your events.
- XML RSS Feeds. Keep your site visitors up-to-date about your events, drive quality traffic and widen your content distribution with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- SEO Friendly URLs. Keyword rich Web links take advantage of your WP Permalinks configuration settings. “Pretty” urls that have topic-relevant keywords add to the context of your pages and improves your search rankings, helping you get a more targeted audience to your events.
- Multi-Language Application. Event Espresso has been translated into over 15 languages, with more translations planned.
- Exportable Data. You can export all the information gathered from event customers into Excel or CSV format for compiling reports, implementing marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, etc..
- Venue Manager. The venue manager in EE 4 allows details about venues to display throughout the Event Espresso admin and the public areas of your site to inform visitors of your event’s location. The venue profile has many standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also displays venue details such as venue capacity, venue site URL, phone number, physical, maps, etc. You can also list all of your venues in specific locations of your WP theme and on a venue archive page on your website where you can set up and reuse venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a specific venue.
- Automatic Plugin Installation Updating. Event Espresso offers simple one-click updating 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 paid yet for their booking with a standard but personalized invoice with just one click. Your invoices will address registered customers who have not paid their registration yet by name, display the balance owing, and include a link to the event details, a payment url and a link to download a PDF invoice.
- Attendee Reports. Event reports gives you information of all registrations and transactions, enabling you to measure the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and amount of revenue you’ve collected.
Additional features include:
- Hooks, Actions & Filters. These allow developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso software that are 100% compatible with the WordPress software platform.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 lets you generate a log file with debugging data which can be helpful for developers when diagnosing software errors.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & Value: According to the philosophy stated on their website, Event Espresso’s aim 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 as a result.
The premium version of Event Espresso also includes over 40 additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – limits the need to re-enter event details when creating new events.
- Default surcharge (the same as adding a service fee to every ticket).
- Option to skip the confirmation page during the registration process.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As well as an amazing number of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow you to significantly enhance the functionality of events.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display the scheduled events by location. There are 4 maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Management Add-on: The Recurring Events manager add-on allows you to put events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months … even years in advance. You can add as many events in advance as you like. Event Espresso will automatically open and close bookings for all recurring events.
- Events Date Range Template Addon: The Date Range custom event list template allows your users to search for events that occur in a certain date range.
- Social Media Buttons Add on: The social media add-on displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media addon comes free with any of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- Custom Template Addon: The Custom Template add-on lets you display your events in a number of visually exciting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add on Editions: This add-on lets you involve your staff in the event management process and give new users the ability to create events or regional managers the capacity to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WP users roles and assign them different permissions with different privileges, so others can help you manage your events or the events that other people create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain areas of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain areas of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to allow users to have geographic responsibilities for events and users, use the Roles and Permissions Pro addon.
- Multiple Event Registration Add-on: The Multiple Event registration addon gives your potential customers the ability to book multiple events at once. In each event listing attendees 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.
- Events Table View Template Add on: The Events Table Template add-on provides event managers with an easy-to-use system that allows you to change the design 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 add on allows you to auto-register attendees to a specific mailing autoresponder list or group within your MailChimp account.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin, including new addons.
For full details about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, visit the plugin website here:
Customers – Testimonials
Here are some of the many great testimonials that customers have posted about Event Espresso:
”My hope with this whole integration is to be able to show other school districts an affordable and easy solution to these registrations. I cannot believe how much money they are charged for less by other companies. This has the potential to save schools tens of thousands, which is huge right now.” Kelly, College Station Independent School District
”You can tell that the Event Espresso team is really passionate about their work, and that they care and spend a lot of time helping people work with their plugin and use it with their events – it’s something every WordPress service should aim for.” Ryan Imel, WPCandy
”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, Improve Photography
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, trainer, conference planner, or event professional, there are just countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, go through the support forum for inspiration and practical suggestions to streamline your event management and registration workflow and improve the experience of your event participants.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso works with with other WP plugins and themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive support, as many of its satisfied customers confirm:
”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
Event Espresso provides comprehensive support that includes access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, email 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 web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely software you can count on to run and manage your events.
Software Pricing
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you need to consider downloading one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal Edition – This enables you to set up 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 lets you set up Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License – This allows you to configure Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The cost of purchasing the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Presently, the software sells for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Please Note: The pricing above was current when this review was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin author when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the software’s online documentation pages for answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to your specific situation, or to notify developers about errors and give feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WP event registration and ticketing manager software, used by thousands.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you intend to run any event that involves scheduling dates, times and venues (offline and online), enrolling participants, and selling tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better WP plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticketing Registration Plugin
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