Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that need handling bookings, such as workshops, community classes, non-profit fund-raisers, corporate functions, or even a large-scale event such as a dance party, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Co-ordinating event bookings is a complex and time-consuming process. You need to co-ordinate calendar schedules, available dates and spaces, registration numbers, data collection and storage, payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders and notifications, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to event registrants.
There are lots 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 duplicate previously-run events, give event managers more control, improve user experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event booking system can be costly.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-powered digital presence, you can download and install an inexpensive and professional web-based event registration system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WP software enables you to easily set up multiple events and begin processing online bookings in just minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and accept online registrations)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed software that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can use multiple event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media sites like Facebook.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Note: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their software: EE 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is fundamentally different than the older Event Espresso 3, as it has been redeveloped using a different structure to allow for future expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually move completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
Learn more about the plugin here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just some of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Automated Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing digital presence into a fully-featured event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by practically doing away with the chore of processing registrations and sign-ups manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating attendees to complete the enrollment process themselves.
Letting your clients to do all of the data entry frees up your time and lets you invest more of your attention on planning a better event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn shortly, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management process that you want your clients to experience.
Additional benefits include:
- Lower Costs: Event Espresso is a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third-party provider. The cost is kept low by using a model where Event Espresso users buy the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and purchase add-ons only if you need new functionality.
- More Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept online event bookings any time of day or night. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social and marketing features and addons (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event share your information with others who may be interested.
- Green & Paperless Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event registration process can remain entirely online, significantly reducing typical paper consumption from tasks related to administration.
- All Information Belongs To You. You control all the information gathered from your event participants.
Plugin Features
The Event Espresso software delivers functionality to its users through built-in features (these are included with the software) and optional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many unique features to WordPress users. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and simple to install and configure. Be up and running in minutes.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In EE 4, events can have many dates and times (called datetimes), that these can be managed from one single event.
- Customized Confirmation Emails. Easily configure customized automated registration and payment notification emails to communicate with event attendees.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso seamlessly integrates with leading payment gateways, allowing you to collect payments prior to running events.
- Smart Single Page Checkout Process. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically duplicate the primary registrant’s information for any additional participants.
- Default Prices. Create events quickly and easily with pre-configured default prices.
- Discount & Promotional Codes. You can leverage promotion and discount codes to encourage prospects to register without delays, or simply make your events more attractive for price-sensitive customers. This is also practical for helping to sell out events close to deadlines.
- Manual Registration Option. you have the option of booking event participants at the door, or send in paper forms for manual inputting later.
- Waiting Lists. Latecomers can join a waiting list if your event has reached maximum capacity. Additionally, you can specify that wait-listed attendees pay for their spots if you plan to expand capacity for the event.
- XML RSS Event Feeds. Keep your users up-to-date about your events, drive quality traffic and reach a wider number of potential customers with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Works With The Latest WP Version. The Event Espresso 4 user interface follows the WordPress guidelines to help you create highly aesthetic event pages that are responsive and mobile-friendly.
- Country-specific Settings. You can configure the country and currency settings that will be used in your events, including currency name, currency signs, decimal signs, characters and places, country codes, states or provinces, and so on.
- Bulk Import Event Data. EE 4 provides an advanced importing feature that allows you to upload a lot of event data all at one time. You can export, edit and import information about events, datetimes, tickets, pricing, registration questions, venues, terms, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Event Venue Management. The venue manager feature in Event Espresso 4 lets details about venues to be published throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front end of your site to inform attendees of your event’s location. The venue profile has many of the standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also displays information like venue capacity, venue website, telephone number, physical and virtual location, map, etc. You can also display all of your event venues on different parts of your WordPress theme as well as on a venue listing page on your website where you can set up and display venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a specific venue.
- Automatic Software Installation Updates. Event Espresso offers simple one-click software upgrades to ensure that you have the newest features and to keep your plugin installation up-to-date with the latest version of WordPress.
- Social Sharing. Event attendees and site visitors can tell others about your event using social media share buttons.
- Accurate Event Participant Manager. You control your customers’ records; who has enrolled, for what event and how much 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 an Excel spreadsheet for additional uses, send customized payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your event registrants on a person-by-person basis or all at once.
Extra features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for general WP users, and also robust and customizable for higher end users and web-based software developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, EE 4 facilitates more complex developments and customizations to the application.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registration capabilities for normal website visitors whenever website maintenance is required. You can continue to work on the back-end of your site during maintenance mode.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & 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 company operates on 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+ additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – streamlines the work of re-entering event data when adding new events.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse a group of questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Addons
As well as a comprehensive number of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow end-users to significantly expand the functionality of managing your event.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display scheduled events by location. 4 maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Custom Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize events with many datetimes 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 show an event thumbnail instead of a date.
- Social Coupons Integration Add-on: If your website is featured on Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can also specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- Custom Files Add on: The Custom Files add-on allows you to bypass certain aspects of the plugin.
- 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 add-on lets you offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart add-on lets you manage the environment for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to every seat.
- Multi-Event Registration Add on: 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 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 Calendar Addon: This add-on uses the WP calendar to display events and categories of events via a nice graphical calendar.
- JSON API Add-on: The new Event Espresso JSON API add-on enables other applications, web sites, mobile apps, etc… to access your Event Espresso content through an API (Application Programming Interface).
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software, including new add ons.
For complete details about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website:
User Feedback
Below are just some of the testimonials that satisfied customers have posted about Event Espresso:
”Tri-South, Inc is using Event Espresso to manage the course catalog, event ticketing, and class registration. [As their developer] I have customized a few items to make the site and plugin a seamless integration. The client is very pleased!” Jenifer Design
”I have to say that it has been the right choice for me…I’ve been extremely pleased with the way my site is working.” Robin, RobinTime
”At first we looked at CVENT for one of our clients and they wanted $16,000 per year for 3000 event attendees + fees totaling $22k. That is before Staff and Webinar fees. Worst of all we had to prepay the $16k amount even if we never used all 3000 attendees. That was when we looked at Event Espresso and we realized we could build our own event system for less than 16K. For the most part we have been very satisfied with our decision. The real ROI will come next year when they don’t have to pay another 16k-22K! Over the next 5-6 years we should be able to claim that we saved the company over $100,000 – Thanks Event Espresso!” David Waterman (Long Version), KT Benefits & InkItDigital.com
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, presenter, seminar promoter, or event management consultant, there are simply unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, search the forums for inspiration and practical ways to improve your event management workflow and enhance the experience of your participants.
Support
Event Espresso works with with most WP plugins and themes that follow standard WP development guidelines. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great support, as so many of its satisfied plugin clients confirm:
”No complaints here. Satisfied customer. You can teach us all few things about customer service. Thanks!” Charles
Event Espresso provides great support that includes access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, priority 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 a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can rely on to manage your events.
Product Price
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin features, however, you may want to consider downloading one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal Edition – This license allows you to configure Event Espresso on one site only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This allows you to install Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This lets you install Event Espresso on five domains. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Current pricing for the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Presently, the software is being retailed for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management
Note: The above reflects the pricing when this article was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin developer when you visit the website.
Additional Plugin Info
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the plugin’s online documentation pages to find 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 problems and share feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event registration and ticketing management plugin, used and trusted by thousands.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you plan to run events that require scheduling dates, times and venues, enrolling participants, or reserving tickets, then you will probably not find a better plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Management And Registration Software For WordPress
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