Does your company currently run or plan to run events that require handling bookings or registrations, such as workshops, community courses, charity fund raisers, networking events, or even a big event such as a trade show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Co-ordinating event registrations is a complicated and time-consuming process. You have to manage calendar schedules, date availability, participant numbers, data collection, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to participants.
There are lots 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 duplicate recurring events, give you more control, improve customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be quite expensive.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-based site, you can set up a very inexpensive and professional web-based event registration system.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Ticketing Registration Plugin
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP allows you to easily create your event and start accepting online registrations in minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and process online event bookings)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed plugin that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can employ a range of event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up selling tickets, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media sites like Facebook.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their software: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is fundamentally different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the plugin has been redeveloped using a different structure to allow for future growth and expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually move completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and features of this plugin.
For more details go here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just some of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current website into a feature-rich and professional event management website … 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 a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by practically doing away with the need to process registrations manually.
Essentially, you are enabling participants to register on their own.
Allowing your customers to do all of the data entry frees up your time and lets you spend more time on delivering a memorable event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn in a moment, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management and booking process that you want your attendees to experience.
Additional plugin benefits include:
- Reduced Costs: The Event Espresso plugin provides you with a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to developing your own system or using a third party provider. The cost is kept low by using a model where Event Espresso users start with the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then purchase add-ons when you need extra features.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online event signups 24 hrs a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social features (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event invite others who may also be interested.
- Green Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, your event booking process remains wholly online, eliminating typical paper consumption from tasks associated with administration.
- Own Your Information. You control all the data you collect from your event participants.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to end-users via built-in features (these are included with the plugin) and optional features that users can buy for an added cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many unique features to website owners. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and simple to install and implement. Be up and running in minutes.
- 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 one single event.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Attendees can easily find your upcoming events and add these to their schedule with a calendar.
- Ticket Selector. Present multiple ticket options to prospects and let them choose the ticket(s) that best fits their needs.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your WP theme and display contact information throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types let event managers create new prices that adjust the base ticket price of your system-default ticket.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system allows you to validate tickets, speed up in-venue registrations, set up various check-in “stations” and track attendees.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of participants and check in everyone who attends.
- No-Ticket Events. Create events without making it necessary for participants to book tickets. Use Event Espresso for any kind of event, not only those that require tickets.
- Public Commenting. Add social a new level of engagement to your event pages by allowing potential prospects to interact with you online via commenting and past attendees to post feedback that can help others decide whether or not to enroll. Moderation settings for public commenting are configured via the WP commenting admin area.
- Draft Events. Draft events let you develop an event page at your own leisure without displaying it live on your website. You can continue building your event pages until you are ready to go live, or schedule your event page to publish at a future date and time.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your organization’s profile to be used throughout the plugin and your front-end templates. The organization information include: company name, address, city, state, country, zip/postal code, email address, telephone number, tax number, logo, Facebook URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn URL, Pinterest profile URL, Google+ URL, Instagram profile URL.
- Default Tickets. If you find yourself creating identical tickets for many of your events, you can set one of those tickets as your default ticket for the next time you create an event simply by ticking a checkbox.
- Register Multiple Participants. Event Espresso 4 allows an individual or an organization to book multiple participants at once. You control how many people are able to register in a single registration session by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Registrant Profiles. You can manage your attendee’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their data organized and easily accessible.
- Team Member Management. Save time and keep your information organized by reusing staff member profiles for multiple events or displaying profile information such as team member’s contact information, resume and photo using a shortcode in an event description.
- Event Reports. Event reports provides you with data of your registrations and transactions, enabling you to analyze the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and how much money has been collected.
Additional features include:
- Hooks, Actions And Filters. These features allow developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso plugin that are 100% compatible with the WordPress development platform.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registration capabilities for normal website traffic when you need to carry out maintenance on your site. You can still work on your event pages during maintenance mode.
- 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 mission, the software has been built using a modular and effective model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium version of Event Espresso also includes over 40 additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – limits the need to re-enter event information when adding new events.
- Default surcharge (the same as applying a service fee to all tickets).
- Option to skip the confirmation page during registration.
Add ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow users to further expand the capabilities of events.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Addon: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display the upcoming events by location. Four maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Manager Addon: The Recurring Events management add-on allows you to put events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years ahead. You can schedule as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in advance as you like. Event Espresso will automatically open and close registrations for all of these recurring events.
- Events Calendar Table Template Add on: The Calendar Table template is a list template with a bold date and customizable “register now” button. The template can be customized to show 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 addon comes free with all of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration add-on lets you take advantage of the WordPress user system. With the WP User Integration add-on you can give your users a special incentive by offering member pricing and overriding event prices when your members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered users of the website will have access to your special events. Members can also input personal data into their profile page allowing them fast registration for events by auto-filling in their personal information on the event registration form. Your users can also look up event history and pay for new events.
- Seating Chart Addon: The seating chart add-on is 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 add on lets you promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues right from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart addon lets you control the environment for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to every seat.
- EE4 Event Ticketing And Bar Scanning Add-on: The Ticketing add-on gives you the capacity to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add on gives you the ability to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing addon includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for handling check-in scans at venues. People can either print out their tickets or display them on their mobile devices. The barcode scanner can be used for checking in or checking out attendees and to validate tickets.
- Events Table Template Add-on: The Events Table Template addon provides you with a simple and easy-to-use system that allows you to edit 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 their own custom templates using one of the included templates as a base template.
- JSON API Addon: The Event Espresso JSON API add on enables other applications, web tools, mobile apps, etc… to access your Event Espresso information through an API (Application Programming Interface).
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software, including new add-ons.
To learn more about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
User Feedback
Below are some of the many great testimonials that customers have written about Event Espresso:
”Broadcasting my support for Event Espresso will be a pleasure. I recently helped the Webmaster at a sister church configure your event manager for their site, so I can say with confidence and from experience, that Event Espresso is the best Event Manager plugin ever!” Philip Simpson, The Charlotte Church
”Event Espresso event management plugin for WordPress is really an awesome plugin.” Cheryl Smithem, Charleston PR & Design
”Event Espresso is very nice and functional plugin. Set it up is not very easy for a beginner like me, but you have one of the best support team in your side. They answer all questions in a timely manor. I didn’t know anything about setting up the plugins, Thanks to Event Espresso Support team that now I can find my way around this plugin. Event Espresso helps our company to manage the workshops, keep track of our students, manage the emails, and much more. We upgrade from personal License to Business license in just two weeks of using Personal license. I strongly recommend the Business license.” Ted Karlsalr, Omnilargess
Plugin Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, teacher, workshop promoter, or event professional, 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 registered user, search the user forum for tips and practical ways to streamline your event management workflow or improve the experience of your participants.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with all WP plugins and WordPress themes that follow standard WP coding guidelines. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive support, as many of its users attest:
”By far, the customer service experience with Event Espresso has been the best of any WordPress Theme or Paid Plugin that I’ve used in the past two years!” Megan Murray, Boys & Girls Club of Lake Tahoe
The Event Espresso plugin provides great support including access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, custom development 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 a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can rely on to manage your events.
Event Espresso Price
Event Espresso is available in a number of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin options, however, you should consider downloading one of the ”Pro” plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This option enables you to set up Event Espresso on one site only. It includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This license option lets you install Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This lets you configure Event Espresso on 5 domains. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The cost of purchasing the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Presently, the software is selling for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current price: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this review was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin seller when you visit the website.
Additional Information
Event Espresso regularly adds 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.
Search the software’s online documentation tools for answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to a particular use-case, or to report errors and share feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event booking and ticketing management software, used by thousands of WP website owners.
If you own a WordPress web site and you intend to run any event that involves managing dates, times and venues (offline and online), registering attendees, or selling tickets, then you will probably not find a better solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso
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