Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that need handling registrations, such as seminars, group classes, charity fund raisers, marketing events, or even a big event such as a food fair, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Co-ordinating event bookings can be a complex process. You may be required to co-ordinate calendar schedules, dates, attendee numbers, data entry, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and issuing tickets to event participants.
There are lots of benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily replicate repeat events, give event managers more control, create a more enjoyable customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that this can be very costly.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-based web site, you can easily set up a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event booking system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Ticketing Registration System
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress lets you easily schedule multiple events and begin accepting online registrations in just a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and process online event bookings)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed application that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can employ a range of event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your event attendees, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing notifications.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is fundamentally different than the older EE 3, as the platform has been redeveloped using a different structure to accommodate future growth and expansion. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually phase out EE 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and features of using the plugin.
Learn more here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current digital presence into an automated and feature-rich event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Better 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 signups manually.
Basically, you are enabling event attendees to perform the registration by themselves.
Letting your clients to do the data entry frees you up from doing admin work and lets you concentrate more of your time on organizing a better event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon discover, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management process that you want your attendees to experience.
Some additional benefits and advantages include:
- Lower Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd party service provider. This is made possible by using a model where users buy the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then purchase optional add-ons only when you need additional functionality.
- More Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept online event bookings outside normal business hours. In addition, Event Espresso social features and add-ons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event share your information with friends who may also be interested.
- Green Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign-up process remains wholly online, eliminating traditional paper waste from tasks associated with admin and record-storage.
- All Information Belongs To You. You control all the information you obtain from your event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to its customers via built-in features (these come with the software) and additional features that users can buy for an additional cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many built-in to WordPress users. Here are just a few:
- Fast and easy to install and implement. Ready to use in no time.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In Event Espresso 4, events can have multiple dates and times (called datetimes), that these can be managed from a single event.
- Custom Confirmation Emails. Easily set up customized automatic registration and payment confirmation email messages to communicate with your clients.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso integrates with payment gateways, allowing you to collect money prior to running events.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration allows you to customize the display of Google Maps on your event listing and event details pages.
- Spam Protection. Eliminate the risk of spamming and bot software programs creating fake registrations with reCAPTCHA settings that provide human authentication.
- In-App Documentation Systems. Event Espresso 4 comes with three comprehensive in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. Event Espresso 4 lets you know who your customers are and how they have done business with you.
- Ticketless Events. You can promote events without requiring registrants to book tickets. Event Espresso can be used for any kind of event, not just when tickets are for sale.
- Public Commenting. Add social engagement to your event page by allowing potential registrants to interact with you online via commenting and previous customers to post comments that can help others decide whether or not to enroll. Moderation settings for public comments are configured via the WordPress built-in commenting admin area.
- Draft Events. Draft events enable you to develop an event page at your own leisure without publishing it to your website. You can continue working on your event pages until you are ready to publish it on your website, or schedule your event to publish at a future time and date.
- Country-specific Settings. You can configure the country and currency settings to be used in your events, including currency name, currency signs, decimal signs, characters and places, country codes, regions, and so on.
- Bulk Edit Events. EE 4 provides a CSV-based importing feature that allows you to easily import a lot of event data all at one time. You can export, edit and import details about events, datetimes, ticketing details, pricing, custom registration questions, venues, terms, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Register Multiple Event Attendees. EE 4 allows an individual or people to enroll multiple participants simultaneously. Event managers control how many people can enroll in one registration by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Registrant Profiles. You can manage each attendee’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their data organized and easily accessible.
- Social Sharing. Event registrants and your website visitors can help publicize your events using social media sharing buttons.
- Transaction Reports. Quick-view event reports provides you with information of your 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 you’ve collected.
Extra features include:
- Hooks, Actions & Filters. These allow web developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso application that are compatible with the WordPress development platform.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. EE 4 allows you to output a log file with debugging data which can be helpful for web developers when troubleshooting.
- 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 mission, the software has been built using a model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also provides you with 40+ added features, including:
- Email shortcodes for including customer data in emails and newsletters.
- Default surcharge (the same as adding a service fee to all tickets).
- Default payment status.
Add ons
In addition to an incredible number of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow plugin users to significantly enhance the capabilities of your event management process.
Some of these add-ons include:
- EE4 Events Grid Template Add on: 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, a default image will be used instead.
- Recurring Events Manager Add on: The Recurring Events manager add on enables you to put your events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months in advance. You can schedule as many future events as you need. Event Espresso will automatically open and close registrations for all of your recurring events.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add on: The Category Accordion template displays categories as a simple list. Clicking a category name displays all events related to that category and closes any previously open categories.
- Social Media Buttons Addon: The social media addon displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media addon comes free with all of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- Custom Template Add-on: The Custom Template add on is capable of displaying your events in a number of visually exciting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Addon Editions: This add on lets you involve other users in your organization to help manage your events and give new users the capacity to create events or regional managers permission to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WordPress users roles and give 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 a user does not have access to certain parts of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain areas of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to create geographic regions for other people to manage events, use the Roles and Permissions Pro addon.
- Event Ticketing And Bar Scanning Add-on: The Ticketing add-on gives you the ability to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add-on adds the ability to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing add on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for handling check-in scans at venues. Registrants 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 registrants and to validate tickets.
- EE4 Events Table View Template Add-on: The Events Table Template add-on provides event managers with an easy-to-use system that lets you change the look and feel of your event lists. It comes with a simple table template with category filters, table search, table paging and more. It also lets web developers design custom templates using one of the templates included as a base template.
- MailChimp Integration Add on: The MailChimp add on allows you to automatically register participants to a specific mailing autoresponder list or group within MailChimp.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin, including new add ons.
For more information about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website:
User Testimonials
Here are a few of the testimonials that plugin users have written 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
”Event Espresso event management plugin for WordPress is really an awesome plugin.” Cheryl Smithem, Charleston PR & Design
”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
Plugin Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, trainer, seminar promoter, or event management consultant, there are simply unlimited possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, go through the user forum for useful ideas and practical suggestions to streamline your event management and registration process and improve the experience of your participants.
Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with other WordPress 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 customers confirm:
”These guys are right on any problem or issue or even general questions. You can’t really put a value high enough on the kind of support these guys offer.” Mark Wigston, Muskoka Graphics
The software provides comprehensive support with access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, priority 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 web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can count on to run and manage your events.
Product Price
Event Espresso is available in a range of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin options, however, you need to consider downloading one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This allows you to configure Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This enables you to run 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 license option allows you to install Event Espresso on five sites. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Pricing details of the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Presently, the software retails for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Note: The pricing above was current at the time this review was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin developer when you visit the website.
Additional Plugin Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the software’s documentation tools for answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to your particular use-case, or to report issues and share 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 WordPress event registration and ticketing manager software, used and trusted by thousands of WP site owners.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you plan to run an event that involves managing dates, times and venues, booking attendees, or selling seating, then you will probably not find a better plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticketing Registration System
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