Do you currently run or plan to run events that require managing registrations, such as workshops, training courses, not-for-profit fundraisers, 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 or participate?
Managing event bookings is a complex process. You may be required to co-ordinate scheduling, date availability, registration numbers, data collection, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders and notifications, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to event registrants.
There are lots of advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce costs, help you easily reproduce previous events, give you more control, improve customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be quite costly.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-based digital presence, you can download and install an inexpensive and highly professional online event registration solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Registration Plugin
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress lets you easily set up your event and start accepting registrations literally in a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and receive online bookings)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed plugin that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize registration forms
You can use a number of event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up ticket-selling, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your event attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media and email marketing systems.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Note: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is fundamentally different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the platform has been revamped using a different structure to accommodate future growth and expansion. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually phase out EE 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and features of using this plugin.
Go here to learn more:
Benefits
Here are just some of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current website or blog into a feature-rich and professional event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple pricing 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 literally eliminating the chore of processing registrations and bookings manually.
Essentially, you are making it easier for event attendees to perform the enrollment process on their own.
Allowing your attendees to do all of the data themselves frees you up from doing admin work and lets you concentrate more of your energy on creating a memorable event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover shortly, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and booking process that you want your users to experience.
Some additional plugin benefits include:
- Reduced Costs: The Event Espresso plugin provides you with a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd party provider. The cost is kept low through a model where you purchase the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and purchase optional add ons when you need added features.
- More Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept online bookings 24 hrs a day. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing features and add-ons (see below) let people interested in registering for your event invite friends who may also be interested in attending.
- Green Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event signup process remains entirely in digital form, significantly reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks associated with enrollment.
- All Information Belongs To You. You control all the data obtained from event participants.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to its customers through standard features (these are included with the plugin) and optional features that you can buy for an additional cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many great built-in to web site owners. Here are just some:
- Quick and easy to install and use. Ready to start accepting registrations in no time.
- Customized Event Registration Form. With Event Espresso you can gather unique information using a custom event registration form on your website to prepare a customized experience for your clients.
- Custom Confirmation Emails. Set up automatic registration and payment notification emails to communicate with event participants.
- Tax Administration. Event Espresso 4 provides a number of ways to administer taxes for your event and provide reports of tax fee components to customers who purchase tickets. You can configure taxes globally or on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your WP theme and display attendee information throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Prices. Create events quickly and easily by pre-configuring default ticket prices.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 provides three built-in in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of event participants and confirm everyone who has attended.
- Waiting Lists. Latecomers can join a waiting list if your event has reached maximum attendance. Additionally, you can specify that wait-list registrants pay for their spots if you plan to expand numbers for your event.
- Public Commenting. Add social interactivity to your event by allowing potential prospects to interact with you online via commenting and previous customers to post feedback that can help others decide whether or not to register. Moderation settings for commenting are configured via the WP commenting section.
- Works With The Latest Version Of WordPress. The Event Espresso 4 user interface follows the WordPress guidelines to help you build beautifully-designed event pages that are responsive and mobile-friendly.
- Country Settings. Event managers can configure the country and currency settings that will be used throughout Event Espresso, such as currency name, currency signs, decimal characters and places, country codes, states or provinces, etc.
- Default Tickets. If you create 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.
- Multiple Participant Registration. Event Espresso 4 allows an individual or a group to book multiple attendees simultaneously. Event managers can control how many people are able to enrol in a single session by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso lets you network with an expert community of event managers and plugin users. You can engage with other Event Espresso users via their community chat room, support forums, job board, and social media pages on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Social Sharing. Event attendees and website visitors can help promote your events using social media share buttons.
- Event Reports. Quick-view event reporting gives you data of all of your registrations and transactions, allowing you to analyze the performance of your events with the aggregate number of people who have registered and amount of revenue has been collected.
Additional features include:
- Hooks, Actions & Filters. These allow web developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso software that are fully compatible with WordPress.
- 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 processes. Each control box can be collapsed, re-arranged or completely 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 goals, 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 edition of Event Espresso also comes with over 40 additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes that includes attendee data in notification emails and email newsletters.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse a group of questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Add ons
In addition to a very large range of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow end-users to significantly expand the capabilities of events.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display all upcoming events by location. There are 4 maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Management Add-on: The Recurring Events management add on enables you to put your events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months … even years in advance. You can schedule as many events in advance as you want. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close registrations for all recurring events.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add on: The Category Accordion template displays event categories as a simple list. Clicking the category name shows all events related to that category and closes any previously open categories.
- Social Coupons Integration Add-on: If your site 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 addon provides PHP files that let you override certain aspects of the plugin.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add on Versions: This add-on lets you include staff in the event management process and give new users permission to create events or regional managers the ability to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WordPress 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 a user does not have access to certain areas of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain areas 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 addon.
- EE4 Event Ticketing & Bar Scanning Add-on: The Ticketing addon gives you the capacity to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add-on adds the capacity to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing addon includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for managing check-in scans at the 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.
- Events Table Template Add on: The Events Table Template addon gives event managers an easy-to-use system that lets you change the design of your event lists. It comes with a simple table template with category filters, table search, table paging and more. It also lets developers design their own 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 attendees to a chosen mailing autoresponder list or group within MailChimp.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add ons.
To learn more about the newest Event Espreso features and add ons, visit the plugin website here:
User Feedback
Here are just some of the testimonials that users have posted about Event Espresso:
”Event Espresso is one of the nicest Event Managers (WP Plugin) I have come across.” Joe Distefano, Citizen Joe
”Your plugin rocks! Seriously, saved me hours on the phone setting up attendance manually. Kudos. :)” William, Petruzzo Photography
”Event Espresso plugin still rocks. Saw you guys were up for the WP Honors too. Glad I paid for it! If you need event management on your WordPress site I recommend Event Espresso.” Patrick Allmond, Focus Consulting
Plugin Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, trainer, seminar planner, or event management professional, there are just endless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed user, go through the support forum for tips and practical suggestions to streamline your event management and registration process and enhance the experience of your event registrants.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso is compatible with all WP plugins and themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you find that you need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent support, as so many of its customers attest:
”Your plugin saved our client nearly $9000 in development costs because it handled the majority of the functionality we were looking for at a much lower cost. EventEspresso’s staff have been very responsive to our needs when we have them (which has been rare, because the plugin is so well coded). Great job on a great plugin!” Brandon P., Experience Farm
Event Espresso provides incredible support with access to support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledge base 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 an established team of experienced WordPress web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely software you can count on to run your events.
Plugin Cost
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software features, however, you will want to consider purchasing one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This allows you to run Event Espresso on 1 site only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This license lets you install Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This option allows you to set up Event Espresso on five sites. It includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one 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 special offers. Currently, the software is selling for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Note: The above reflects the pricing when this review was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin author when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Info
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the software’s documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to your specific situation, or to notify developers about issues and leave feedback.
For detailed 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 manager software, used by thousands of people.
If you are a WordPress user and you plan to run any event that requires scheduling dates, times and venues (offline and online), booking attendees, or selling tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable WordPress plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Management & Registration Software For WordPress
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