Do you currently run or plan to run events that need managing bookings, such as seminars, community courses, not-for-profit fundraisers, corporate functions, or even a big event such as a concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Managing event bookings can be a time-consuming process. You have to co-ordinate event schedules, event dates, registration numbers, data collection and storage, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and providing tickets to event registrants.
There are a number 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 copy settings for repeat 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-powered website, you can easily set up an inexpensive and professional online event booking solution.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticket Registration Software For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily set up multiple events and begin accepting bookings in just a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and accept online event bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize registration forms
You can use multiple event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your participants, or integrating your event registration forms with social media and email marketing tools.
View detailed information about event attendees
Note: Currently, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their software: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is significantly different than the older EE 3, as the plugin has been redeveloped using a different structure to enable future growth. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually transition completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and features of this plugin.
Go here to learn more about the plugin:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just a few of the benefits 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 existing web site into a feature-rich and professional event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically eliminating the need to process registrations manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for event participants to perform the sign-up process by themselves.
Letting your enrollees to do all of the data themselves frees up your time and lets you focus more resources on creating a memorable event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon discover, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and registration process that you want your participants to experience.
Some additional benefits and advantages include:
- Lower Costs: Event Espresso provides you with an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd party service. The cost is kept low through a model where you buy the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and buy optional add ons only if you need added functionality.
- More Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept new sign-ups 24 hrs a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing features and add-ons (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event invite other people they know who may also be interested.
- Green & Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, your event booking process can remain entirely online, reducing typical paper waste from tasks related to admin and record-storage.
- All Information Belongs To You. You control all the data you acquire from event participants.
Plugin Features
The Event Espresso plugin delivers functionality to its users through built-in features (these are included with the software) and additional features that you can buy for an additional cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many unique built-in to WordPress users. Here are just a few:
- Fast and simple to install and use. Ready to start accepting registrations in very little time.
- Customized Event Registration Forms. With Event Espresso you can gather specific data using a custom event registration form on your website to create a tailored experience for your clients.
- Event Calendar. Customers can easily see your events and add these to their schedule using the calendar.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso provides integration with payment gateways, enabling you to collect money before running your events.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your WP theme and reuse contact data throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow you to create new prices that adjust the base ticket pricing of the default ticket.
- Discount Codes. Set up promotion and discount codes to incentivize visitors to register without delays, or simply make your events more attractive for price-sensitive prospects. This is also practical if you want to sell out events close to timelines.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of event attendees and check-in everyone who attends.
- No-Ticket Events. You can promote events without making it necessary for registrants to book tickets. Use Event Espresso for all types of events, not just those that need tickets.
- Private Notes On Contacts. Keep comments about contacts on their profile and how you have assisted them. Private commenting helps you keep records of when users contacted you, your internal comments, and how you have helped them.
- Keyword-Rich URLs. Keyword-rich Web links leverage your Permalinks configuration settings. SEO-friendly permalinks with relevant keywords add to the context of your content and improves your search rankings, helping you bring a more targeted audience to your events.
- 15+ Languages. Event Espresso has been translated into more than 15 languages, with more translations coming soon.
- Exportable Information. You can output all the data collected from your event customers into Excel or CSV format for compiling reports, planning new marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, and so on.
- WP WYSIWYG Editor. Event Espresso uses the default WordPress WYSIWYG editor, so you can quickly and easily add images and write your content without knowledge of HTML or CSS, just like any WP post or page.
- Registrant Profiles. Manage your attendee’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their information organized and easily accessible.
- Team Member Management. Save time and stay organized by reusing team member profiles for multiple events or displaying their profile using a shortcode in any event description.
- Accurate Participant Management. You control your participants’ date; who has registered, for what event and what amount they have 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 a list of event attendees to a spreadsheet for additional uses, send customizable payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your attendees on a person-by-person basis or as a group.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows web developers to have more control and options over the content of your events and how your information displays to your prospective event registrants.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 lets you create a log file with debugging data which can be useful for web developers when troubleshooting.
- Autonomy, Flexibility And Value For Money: 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 software has been built using a modular and highly efficient 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:
- Live-filtering when you search for events inside the Event Espresso admin.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse a common set of questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page during registration.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow you to significantly enhance the capabilities of managing an event.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Addon: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display the scheduled events by location. 4 maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Manager Add on: The Recurring Events management add on lets you put events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months ahead. You can add as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in the future as you need. Event Espresso will automatically open and close bookings for all of your recurring events.
- Events Calendar Table Template Addon: The Calendar Table template is a list template with a bold date and customizable “register now” button. The template can be customized to display an event thumbnail image instead of a date.
- Events Social Sharing Add on: Add social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that lets your attendees to share a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after registration.
- Custom Files Addon: The Custom Files add on provides PHP files that allow you to override certain aspects of the plugin.
- Seating Chart Add on: The seating chart add on is great 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 addon lets you promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues right from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart add-on lets you control the environment for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach single pricing to each seat.
- EE4 Event Ticketing & Bar Scanning Add on: The Ticketing addon gives you the ability to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon 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 the venue door. Attendees 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 attendees and to validate tickets.
- EE4 Events Calendar Addon: This addon uses the WP calendar to display events and event categories via a nice graphical calendar.
- MailChimp Integration Add on: The MailChimp add on lets you auto-register attendees to a chosen mailing autoresponder list or group within MailChimp.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software, including new add-ons.
For full details about the latest Event Espreso features and add-ons, visit the plugin website here:
User Feedback
Here are some of the many testimonials that satisfied customers have written 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
”Probably the best event management plugin available.” Materia Inspiration Centre
”Just bought an Event Espresso license for an upcoming conference website we are working on. The custom registration forms functionality rocks!” Eric Sopp, Inside Design
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, teacher, show planner, or event management consultant, there are simply unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a registered user, visit the user forum for useful ideas and practical ways to improve your event management and registration workflow or enhance the experience of your event attendees.
Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with other WordPress plugins and themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you do need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great user support, as many of its end-users 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
The software provides great 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 a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can depend on to manage your events.
Plugin Pricing
Event Espresso is available in different 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 premium plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This option enables you to run Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This edition enables you to run Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Edition – This license enables you to set up Event Espresso on 5 domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Pricing details of the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. When we last checked, the software sells for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Management
Please Note: The pricing above was current at the time this review was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the site.
Additional Plugin Info
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the software’s documentation tools 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 situation, or to notify developers about problems and share feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event registration and ticketing management plugin, used by thousands of businesses.
If you own a WordPress web site and you currently run an event that requires managing dates and venues, registering attendees, and/or selling tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable WordPress plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management
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