Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that require handling bookings, such as seminars, training classes, charity fund-raisers, marketing functions, or even a big event like a concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Managing event bookings is a complicated and time-consuming process. You will most likely be required to co-ordinate event schedules, available dates and seating allocations, participant numbers, data collection and admin, collecting payments and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders and alerts, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to attendees.
There are many advantages to setting up an automated web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce costs, help you easily copy settings for previously-run events, give you more control, improve client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that this can be expensive.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-based site, you can easily install an inexpensive and highly professional online event registration system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Manager Software
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily set up an event and start receiving registrations in just a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and receive online bookings)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Customize registration forms
You can employ a number of event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your participants, or integrating your event registration forms with social media and email marketing software.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Note: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their software: EE 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is completely different than the older EE 3, as the plugin is being revamped using a different structure to enable future expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform 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 and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current online presence into an automated and feature-rich event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by virtually eliminating the need to process registrations and bookings manually.
Essentially, you are making it easier for attendees to perform the sign-up process by themselves.
Allowing your enrollees to do the data entry frees you up from doing admin work and lets you spend more of your resources on creating a more unique event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn shortly, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management process that you want your customers to experience.
Some additional plugin benefits include the following:
- Significantly Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin provides you with a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options 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 then buy addons when you need additional functionality.
- More Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept new registrations 24 hours a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing features (see below) let people interested in attending your event invite friends who may also be interested in attending.
- Green & Paperless Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, the event signup process is conducted wholly online, eliminating traditional paper consumption from tasks associated with admin and record-keeping.
- All Information Belongs To You. You own all the information collected from your event participants.
Event Espresso Features
The Event Espresso plugin delivers functionality to end-users via built-in features (these come with the software) and additional features that users can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many unique features to website owners. Here are just some:
- Quick and simple to install and configure. Be up and running in very little time.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso lets you configure as many kinds of tickets as you want and specify separate prices, ticket quantity limits, etc.
- Custom Notification Email Message. Easily set up automated registration and payment notification email messages to communicate with your clients.
- Ticket Selector. Present several ticket options to registrants so they can purchase the ticket(s) that best suits their needs.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration enables you to customize the display settings of Google Maps on the event listing and event details sections.
- Default Prices. Create events fast by pre-configuring default ticket pricing.
- Promotional Codes. Set up promotional and multiple discount codes to encourage people to take action now, or simply make your offerings more attractive for others. Also useful if you want to increase sales of events close to timelines.
- Event Check-In List. Generate an exportable list of participants and confirm those who have attended.
- Administrative Pre-approval. Be selective about who can participate in your events.
- Public Commenting. Add “social proof” by allowing potential customers to ask questions about your event and past attendees to post feedback that can help others decide whether or not to sign up. Moderation settings for commenting are set up in the WP native commenting system.
- Keyword-Rich Page URLs. Keyword rich event page URLs leverage your WP site’s Permalinks configuration settings. Search engine friendly permalinks with topic-relevant keywords add to the context of your content and improves your search rankings, helping you bring a more targeted audience to your site.
- Easy Event Management. Event Espresso puts event managers in complete control of every aspect of your event’s registration and ticketing processes, and allows you to automate this process with event management tools that include staff and venue manager, custom event designs, payment processing and handling, wait lists, limits on attendees, printable ticketing and more.
- Default Tickets. If you find yourself creating similar tickets for your events, you can set one of those tickets as your default ticket for all new events simply by ticking a checkbox.
- Register Multiple Participants. EE 4 allows one person or people to purchase multiple tickets and different ticket types at once. You decide how many attendees are allowed to enroll in a single booking session by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Event Espresso Community. Event Espresso lets you network with a community of experienced event managers, developers, web designers, web marketers and businesses who also use the plugin. You can network with other Event Espresso users via their community chat room, support forums, job board, and social media pages on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential event registrants who have not fully paid for their registration with a standard but personalized PDF invoice with just one click. Your invoices will reference registered customers who have not paid their registration yet by name, give them the balance they owe, and include links to the event details, a payment link and a link where they can download a PDF invoice.
- Accurate Event Participant Manager. You have control of your attendees’ date; who has registered, for what event and how much they paid. With the attendee manager, you can get a quick overview of registered attendees and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export an event attendee list to an Excel spreadsheet for additional reports, send customized payment reminders and receipts and send messages to your participants individually or collectively.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows developers to have more control and options over the content of your events and how your information displays to your prospective customers.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. EE 4 allows you to generate a log file with debugging data that can be useful for web developers when diagnosing problems.
- 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 modular that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium version of Event Espresso also includes over 40 additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes for including registrant data in emails and updates.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing a group of questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow plugin users to further expand the functionality of your event management process.
Some of these add ons include:
- EE4 Events Grid Template Addon: Displays events in a pure CSS grid-like structure using the featured image. Hovering over the image will display further information. If the event does not have a featured image available, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Template Add-on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes many datetime events into a drop-down list.
- 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 the event thumbnail instead of a date.
- Social Media Buttons Addon: The social media add-on displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media add-on is included free with any of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration addon allows you to take advantage of the WP user system. With the WP User Integration add-on you can give users a special incentive by offering member prices and overriding event prices when members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered website users can 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 make payment for future events.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add on Versions: This add on lets you include others in your organization to help manage your events and give new users the ability to create events or regional managers the ability to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WP users roles and allow them different permissions with different capabilities, so others can help you manage your events or the events that other people create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain areas of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain parts 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 add-on.
- Multi-Event Registration Addon: The Multi-Event registration addon gives your potential customers the ability to register for 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 Multiple 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 Add on: The Events Table Template addon provides you with a simple and easy-to-use system that allows you to modify the design of your event lists. It comes with a simple table template with category filters, table search, table paging and more. It also allows developers to design their own custom templates using one of the templates included as a source template.
- EE4 Infusionsoft Integration Addon: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and marketing plugin addon, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture event attendee data, track enrollments, and accept payments from your web site.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software, including new add-ons.
For complete details about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
Customer Feedback
Below are a few of the many testimonials that satisfied users have written about Event Espresso:
”EventEspresso saves us money, saves our secretary 16-24 hours and looks so professionally done that people ask us how we do it; which we happily tell them, “Event Espresso, and be sure to get the ticketing add-on.”” David, House of Prayer
”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
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, trainer, show promoter, or event consultant, there are just countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a registered owner, search the user forum for useful ideas and practical ways to streamline your event management process or improve the experience of your event customers.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso works with with all WP plugins and WordPress themes that follow standard WP coding guidelines. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive end-user support, as many of its satisfied users attest:
”It’s magical. Support is amazing, plugin is simple to use, a 3 year old could use the iPhone app…it all is very impressive and professional.” David, House of Prayer
The Event Espresso plugin provides exceptional support that includes 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.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can rely on to manage your events.
Plugin Cost
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software functionality, however, you may want to consider downloading one of the paid plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This lets you configure Event Espresso on one site only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This allows you to configure Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This edition enables you to install Event Espresso on five domains. It includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Price details for the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. When we last checked, the plugin sells for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this review was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin developer when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the plugin’s online documentation pages for answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to your particular use-case, or to notify developers about errors and give feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event registration and ticketing manager software, used and trusted by thousands of people.
If you are a WordPress user and you intend to run an event that requires scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), registering participants, and reserving tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
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