Do you currently run or plan to run events that require co-ordinating bookings or registrations, such as seminars, group classes, non-profit fundraisers, networking functions, or even a large-scale event such as a music show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Co-ordinating event bookings can be a time-consuming process. You will probably have to manage scheduling, dates, registration numbers, data administration, payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders and alerts, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and issuing tickets to event registrants.
There are lots of advantages to setting up an online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower expenses, help you easily copy settings for previous events, give event managers more control, improve customer experience and increase 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 easily install an inexpensive and highly professional web-based event booking system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress plugin allows you to easily schedule an event and start processing online bookings in just minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and process online event registrations)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich software that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can employ several event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up ticket sales, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your event participants, or integrating your event registration forms with social media and email marketing tools.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their software: EE 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is significantly different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the software has been rebuilt using a different structure to enable future growth and expansion. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually move completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
Learn more here:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just some 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 current website into a fully-featured and automated event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by literally eliminating the need to process registrations and signups manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating participants to enrol by themselves.
Allowing your attendees to do the data entry frees up your time and lets you focus more attention on creating a better event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon learn, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management and booking process that you want your users to experience.
Additional plugin benefits include the following:
- Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin is an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third party service provider. The cost is kept low through a model where you purchase the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then purchase optional add ons when you need additional features.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online signups 24/7. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event invite others who may also be interested.
- Paperless Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign up process can be completed wholly online, eliminating typical paper waste from tasks related to administration.
- Own Your Data. You own all the information gathered from your event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
The Event Espresso software delivers functionality to users through standard features (these are included with the plugin) and additional features that users can buy for an added cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many great built-in to WP users. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and simple to install and configure. Ready to start using in minutes.
- Customized Event Registration. With Event Espresso you can gather unique information using custom event registration forms on your web pages to plan a great experience for your users.
- Customizable Event Designs. Customize your events and enrollments page using Event Espresso’s unlimited template options and parts, plus HTML or CSS.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso provides integration with several payment gateways, enabling you to collect payments before running events.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your theme and reuse events information throughout other areas of your site.
- Spam Protection. Eliminate the risk of spammers and bot software programs creating fake registrations by using reCAPTCHA option that authenticate human activity.
- Promotional Codes. Provide promotional and discount codes to incentivize visitors to take action immediately, or make your offerings more affordable for price-sensitive customers. This is also practical for helping to increase sales of events close to timelines.
- Event Check-In List. Generate an exportable list of participants and confirm everyone who has attended.
- Admin Pre-approval. Be selective about who can and cannot register for your events.
- Public Commenting. Add social a new level of interaction to your events by allowing potential prospects to interact with you online via commenting and previous attendees to post reviews that can help others decide whether or not to register. Moderation settings for comments are specified in the WordPress built-in commenting section.
- Works With The Latest Version Of WP. The Event Espresso 4 user interface follows all WordPress guidelines to help you build beautifully-designed event pages that are easier to use and mobile-friendly.
- Your Organization Settings. Configure your profile to be used throughout the software and your front-end templates. Organization information include: organization name, street address, city, state, country, zip/postal code, primary contact email address, telephone, VAT/tax number, logo, Facebook URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest profile URL, Google+ profile URL, Instagram profile URL.
- Bulk Import Event Information. EE 4 provides an advanced importing capability that enables you to upload bulk event data all at one time. You can export, edit and import details about events, datetimes, ticketing details, pricing, registration questions, venues, terms, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Event Venue Manager. The venue manager in Event Espresso 4 allows information about a venue to be published throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front-end of your site to inform visitors of your event’s location. The venue record displays many of the standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also lets you add venue information like venue seating capacity, venue site URL, phone number, physical and virtual location, map, etc. You can also display venues on various locations on your WP theme and on a venue listing page on your site where you can set up and reuse venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a given venue.
- Registrant Profiles. Manage each customer’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their records organized.
- Social Sharing. Event participants and your site visitors can help promote your events using social media sharing buttons.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post type features such as custom fields, post meta data, taxonomies, etc. You can also customize the templates to display event information in your own unique way.
Additional features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for basic users, and also robust and customizable for enterprise-level users and web-based software developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, EE 4 permits more complex extensions and customizations to the application.
- Maintenance Mode. Pause registration capabilities for regular website visitors whenever you need to make updates on your site. You can still work on your content during maintenance mode.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value: According to the philosophy stated on their site, Event Espresso’s goal 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 that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium version of Event Espresso also comes with over 40 additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – limits the work of re-entering event data when creating new events.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse commonly asked questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page in the registration process.
Addons
As well as a very large array of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow you to further enhance the capabilities of the event management system.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display scheduled events by location. There are four maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Management Add-on: The Recurring Events management add-on allows you to put your events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years in advance. You can create as many future events as you want. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close bookings for all of these 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 also be customized to display the event thumbnail instead of the date.
- Social Media Buttons Add on: The social media add-on displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media add-on is included 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 variety of visually exciting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add-on Editions: This addon lets you involve others 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 WP users roles and give them different permissions with different capabilities, so your staff can help you manage your events or events that others create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain sections of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain parts of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to allow users to control factors geographically for events and users, use the Roles and Permissions Pro addon.
- Event Ticketing Add on: The Ticketing addon gives you the ability to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon gives you the ability to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing add on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for handling check-in scans at venues. Customers 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.
- Events Table Template Addon: The Events Table Template add-on provides you 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 enables web developers to build custom templates using one of the templates provided as a base template.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp addon allows you to auto-register attendees to a chosen mailing list or group within your MailChimp account.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software, including new addons.
For full details about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website here:
Plugin Users – Testimonials
Below are some of the many testimonials that satisfied plugin users have posted about Event Espresso:
”My clients have used Event Espresso for Transportation (Cadet Bus for leave), Parties (tailgates and brewery tours), and Horse-back riding lessons and camps. What a terrific plug-in and fantastic support from Seth!” Nina, Blue Iris Web Design
”When you can get a company to expend more money switching systems just to use your plugin…you’ve really accomplished something.” David, House of Prayer
”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
Useful Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, teacher, seminar promoter, or event consultant, there are simply countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, spend a little time researching the support forum for useful ideas and practical ways to streamline your event management and registration workflow and enhance the experience of your event participants.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with other WordPress plugins and WordPress themes that follow WP coding standards. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive end-user support, as many of its customers confirm:
”No complaints here. Satisfied customer. You can teach us all few things about customer service. Thanks!” Charles
Event Espresso provides incredible support that includes access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase 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 a well-staffed team of experienced web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely software you can depend on to manage your events.
Plugin Pricing
Event Espresso is available in a range of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software functionality, however, you may want to consider purchasing one of the paid plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This lets you configure Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This allows you to install Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This option enables you to set up Event Espresso on 5 domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The price of the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. When we last checked, the plugin retails for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Manager
Note: The pricing above was current when this review was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the website.
Additional Info
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the plugin’s online documentation tools for answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to a particular use-case, or to report errors and give feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event booking and ticketing management plugin, used by thousands of WordPress website owners.
If you are a WordPress user and you currently run any event that requires managing dates, times and venues (offline and online), enrolling attendees, or selling tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso
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