Does your company currently run or plan to run events that require co-ordinating bookings, such as seminars, community courses, not-for-profit fund-raisers, corporate functions, or even a large-scale event such as a rave party, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Managing event registrations is a complicated and time-consuming process. You will most likely have to co-ordinate calendar schedules, availability, registration numbers, data administration, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations, reminders and alerts, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to event attendees.
There are a number of benefits to setting up an online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily duplicate repeat events, give you more control, improve user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event registration system can be quite costly.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-based website, you can download and install a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event booking solution.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – Event Management & Registration Software For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress plugin lets you easily create an event and start processing online bookings in just minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and process online registrations)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed software that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can use several event registration strategies, from simple online registration 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 autoresponders.
View detailed information about event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is considerably different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the plugin is being redeveloped using a different structure to allow for future growth and expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform 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 read more about this plugin.
Learn more about the plugin here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just some of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website or blog into an automated and fully featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically doing away with the chore of processing registrations manually.
Essentially, you are making it easier for attendees to perform the registration by themselves.
Allowing your enrollees to do all of the data themselves frees up your time and lets you concentrate more of your resources on creating a better event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon see, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management and booking process that you want your customers to experience.
Some additional benefits include the following:
- Reduced Costs: Event Espresso is a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to building your own software or using a third-party provider. The cost is kept low through a model where you buy the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and purchase add ons when you need new features.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept online event sign-ups outside traditional business hours. In addition, Event Espresso social and marketing features and add-ons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event invite others who may also be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign up process remains entirely online, reducing traditional paper waste from tasks related to administration.
- All Data Belongs To You. You own all the information you acquire from your event participants.
Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to its customers through built-in features (these come with the plugin) and optional features that users can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many unique features to WP users. Here are just some of these:
- Quick and easy to install and configure. Ready to start using in minutes.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso lets you configure multiple ticket types and set prices, number of tickets, etc.
- Custom Notification Email Message. Easily set up customized automated booking and payment notification emails to communicate with your clients.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso integrates with payment gateways, enabling you to collect money before running events.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration allows you to configure the display of Google Maps on the event listing and event details sections.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow you to create new prices that adjust the base ticket pricing of the default ticket.
- Discount Codes. Offer promotional and discount codes to encourage people to take action immediately, or make your events more appealing for price-sensitive prospects. This is also practical if you want to increase sales of events close to timelines.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. EE 4 lets you gain a better understanding of who your customers are and how you have previously done business with them. Your Contact Profile section stores updated records like the name, biography, contact information, event registration history, comments, and more about each client.
- Administrative Pre-approval. Control who can and cannot attend your events.
- Event RSS Feeds. Keep your blog readers up-to-date about your events, drive quality traffic and widen your content distribution with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- SEO Friendly Event Page URLs. Keyword rich event page URLs leverage your Permalinks configuration settings. Search engine friendly urls with relevant keywords add to the context of your events and is favored by search engines, helping you bring a more targeted audience to your site.
- Easy Event Management. Event Espresso puts you in full control of every aspect of an event’s registration and ticketing, and lets you automate this process with event management tools that include staff and venue manager, customizable event page designs, payment processing and handling, list waiting, attendee limits, print-ready tickets and more.
- Exportable Information. You can output all of your data gathered from event participants into Excel or CSV format for creating advanced reports, planning marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, etc..
- Register Multiple Event Participants. EE 4 allows a single person or a group to purchase multiple tickets and different types of tickets at the same time. Event managers control how many attendees can enroll in a single registration session by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Attendee Records. You can manage each customer’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their records organized and easily within reach.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential attendees who have not paid yet for their registration with a standard but personalized invoice with one click. Your invoices will address registered customers who have not paid their registration yet by name, give them the amount they owe, and include a link to the event, a payment link and a link to download a PDF invoice.
- Event Reports. Event reporting gives you information of all registrations and transactions, allowing you to measure the performance of your events with the aggregate number of people who have registered and amount of revenue has been collected.
Additional features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming. Event Espresso is simple enough for most users, and also robust and customizable for enterprise-level users and developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, Event Espresso 4 permits more complex enhancements and customizations to the application.
- Metabox Management And Reorganization. Event Espresso lets you leverage the WordPress user interface, which brings the ability to organize the user interface to match your workflow. Each control box can be collapsed, re-arranged or removed from the workflow configuration.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & 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 objectives, the company operates on a model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also comes with over 40 additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes for including registrant data in emails and email newsletters.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing a series of questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Add ons
As well as a very large number of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow end-users to further expand the capabilities 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 Manager Addon: The Recurring Events management add on lets you put events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months ahead. You can create as many events in advance as you want. Event Espresso will automatically open and close registrations for all of your recurring events.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add-on: The Category Accordion template shows categories as a simple list. Clicking a category name shows the events related to that category and closes any previously open categories.
- EE4 Events Social Sharing Addon: Add social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that allows your attendees to share a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after registration.
- Custom Template Add-on: The Custom Template add on is capable of displaying your event lists in a number of visually exciting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add on Editions: This addon lets you involve others in your organization to help manage your events 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 capabilities, allowing staff to help you manage your events or events that other people create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain parts of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain sections 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 add on.
- Multi-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 Multiple 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 WordPress calendar to display events and categories of events using a nice graphical calendar.
- JSON API Addon: The Event Espresso JSON API add on lets other applications, websites, mobile apps, etc… to access your Event Espresso content through an Application Programming Interface (API).
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add-ons.
For complete details about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website here:
Plugin Users – Feedback
Here are a few of the testimonials that customers have posted about Event Espresso:
”I want to commend you on a fabulous product which is just the right price for a small non-profit. People are happy with the registration process, as are we! …Thank you SO much for a great product.” Sandra Forero Bush, World Trade Center Tacoma
”Event Espresso event management plugin for WordPress is really an awesome plugin.” Cheryl Smithem, Charleston PR & Design
”I’m using it on multiple sites and enjoying it. It’s simple and as others have stated… fast service and real help.” Arlen Nagata
Plugin Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, teacher, show planner, or event professional, there are just unlimited possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a registered owner, search the forums for inspiration and practical ways to streamline your event management workflow and enhance the experience of your event customers.
Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with most WP plugins and WordPress themes that follow standard WP development guidelines. If you find that you need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent customer support, as so many of its satisfied customers attest:
”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 comprehensive support including 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 an established team of experienced WordPress developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely software you can rely on to manage your events.
Plugin Pricing
Event Espresso is available in various editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you should consider downloading one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This edition allows you to set up Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This enables you to run Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This license option enables you to configure Event Espresso on five sites. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The cost to purchase the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. When we last checked, the plugin sells for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Management
Please 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 seller when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Plugin Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up 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 bugs and leave feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event registration and ticketing management plugin, used by thousands of WP users.
If you own a WordPress website and you currently run events that involve scheduling dates, times and venues, booking attendees, and reserving tickets, then you will probably not find a better WordPress plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Management
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