Does your company currently run or plan to run events that require handling bookings or registrations, such as workshops, training classes, not-for-profit fundraisers, networking conferences, or even a large-scale event like a trade show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Co-ordinating event bookings can be a time-consuming process. You may need to manage scheduling, available dates and spaces, participant numbers, data processing and storage, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to participants.
There are many advantages to setting up an online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily copy settings for recurring events, give event managers more control, improve client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event booking system can be expensive.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-based website or blog, you can easily set up an inexpensive and professional web-based event booking solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticketing Registration Plugin
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress software lets you easily schedule your event and start accepting bookings literally in minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and receive online bookings)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed application that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can employ several event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your participants, or integrating your event bookings with social media and email marketing software.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is considerably different than the older EE 3, as the software is being redeveloped using a different structure to accommodate future 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 advantages of using the plugin.
Go here to learn more:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just a few of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Automated Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current web site into a fully-featured and automated event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to attendee limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by virtually doing away with the chore of processing registrations and bookings manually.
Basically, you are facilitating participants to complete the enrollment process themselves.
Letting your enrollees to do the data entry frees up your time and lets you spend more of your resources on creating a more unique event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon discover, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management and registration process that you want your clients to experience.
Additional benefits of the plugin include:
- Significantly Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to building your own system or using a 3rd-party service provider. This is made possible by using a model where users pay for the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and purchase add ons only when you need new functionality.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept new bookings any time of day or night. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing features and add-ons (see below) let people interested in attending your event invite other people they know who may also be interested in attending.
- Green And Paperless Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign up process is completed wholly online, significantly reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks associated with admin and record-keeping.
- All Information Belongs To You. You own all the information you acquire from event participants.
Plugin Features
The Event Espresso software delivers functionality to its users via built-in features (these are included with the plugin) and optional features that you can buy for an added cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers a number of great built-in to web site owners. Here are just some:
- Quick and easy to install and implement. Ready to start using in minutes.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In EE 4, events can have many dates and times (datetimes), that these can be managed from one single event.
- Event Calendar. Attendees can easily find your events and add these to their schedule using the calendar.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso seamlessly integrates with payment gateways, enabling you to collect payments before running events.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your theme and display registrant information throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types let you create new prices that adjust the default ticket price for the system-default ticket.
- Discount & Promotional Codes. Offer promotional and discount codes to encourage prospects to register now, or simply make your offers more appealing for price-sensitive customers. Also useful if you want to sell out events close to deadlines.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. EE 4 provides you with the tools to understand who your customers are and how they’ve done business with you.
- Waiting Lists. Latecomers can subscribe to a waiting list if your event is full. You can also make it a requirement waiting list attendees pre-pay if you plan to add more capacity for the event.
- Private Contact Comments. Record observations about event registrants on their profile and how you have assisted your customers. Private commenting enables you to keep records of when event registrants contacted you, your internal comments, and how you have assisted your contacts.
- Draft Events. Draft events allow you to develop your event page in your own time-frame without publishing it to your site. You can work on your event pages until you are ready to publish it live to your website, or schedule your event to publish at a future time and date.
- 15+ Languages. Event Espresso is currently available in 15+ languages, and more languages are being added all the time.
- Default Tickets. If you create identical tickets for most of your events, you can automatically set one of those tickets as your default ticket for the next time you create an event simply by ticking a checkbox.
- Venue Profiles. The venue management feature in Event Espresso 4 lets details about a venue to display throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front-end of your website to inform users of the location of your event. The venue profile has many standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also lets you republish details such as venue capacity, venue site URL, phone number, physical and/or virtual location, map, etc. You can also display all of your venues throughout various areas of your theme and on a venue archive page on your site where you can set up and display venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have listed for a specific venue.
- Automatic Software Installation Upgrading. Event Espresso provides simple one-click updating to make sure that you have the newest features and to keep your installation compatible with the latest version of WordPress.
- Team Member Manager. Save time and keep your data organized by reusing staff profiles for multiple events or displaying profile information such as team member’s contact information, resume and photo using a shortcode in any event description.
- Categorize Events. If you have multiple event types like free and paid, workshops and breakout sessions, different types of programs and program modules, etc. you can categorize these to help event registrants to locate what they’re looking for. You can list all events in a category on an event category page, make events searchable by category, and color-code events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make these easier to find, in addition to suggesting new events in the categories that appeal to your visitors.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows web developers to have more control and options over your events and how the information displays to your prospective event registrants.
- Metabox Management & Reorganization. Event Espresso lets you leverage the WordPress user interface, which gives you the ability to organize the user interface to match your workflow. Each control box can be collapsed, re-arranged or entirely deleted from the workflow configuration.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & 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 goals, the company operates on 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 includes 40+ added features, including:
- Duplicating events – eliminates the need to re-enter event details when creating new events.
- Default surcharge (the same as applying a service tax to all tickets).
- Default payment status.
Add ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow customers to further enhance the capabilities of managing your event.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display upcoming events by location. Four maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Custom Template Addon: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize multiple datetime events into a drop-down list.
- Events Date Range Template Add-on: The Date Range custom event list template enables your users to search for events that occur within a certain date range.
- 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 Files Add on: The Custom Files addon lets you bypass certain aspects of the Event Espresso plugin.
- Seating Chart Add-on: The seating chart add on is for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart add on lets you offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues directly from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart addon lets you manage the experience for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to each seat.
- Multi-Event Registration Addon: The Multiple Event registration addon gives your potential customers the ability to register for multiple events at once. In each event listing attendees will be given the option to either register for a single event or add multiple events to their cart. With the Multi-Event Registration add on, attendees can register for several events at once and even add additional attendees to any of the same events in the same checkout process.
- EE4 Events Calendar Add-on: This WordPress events calendar displays events and categories of events using a nice graphical calendar.
- JSON API Addon: The Event Espresso JSON API add on permits other applications, websites, mobile applications, etc… to access your Event Espresso content through an API (Application Programming Interface).
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin, including new add ons.
To learn more about the latest Event Espreso features and add-ons, visit the plugin website:
User Feedback
Here are a few of the many testimonials that customers have posted 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
”…it really does blow everything else that’s out there out of the water.” Chris Reynolds, Arcane Palette Creative Design
”Hello. I wanted to say that I’ve purchased Event Espresso twice now for two different organizations and have had great success with the purchases. Outside of photography, I also build small websites with WordPress as the CMS. I built two websites for two different martial arts organizations who host yearly seminars and tournaments. The plug in has provided a way for attendees to sign up online from both Canada and the United States with ease, and also allowed the organizations to easily manage payments, attendee lists, and many other aspects of the events. Thanks to Seth for creating such a great plug in, and for your constant support!” James Zedd, James Zedd Photography
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, teacher, festival planner, or event professional, there are just unlimited possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a registered user, search the user forum for new ideas and practical ways to streamline your event management process and improve the experience of your event registrants.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso works with with all WP plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress coding guidelines. 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 satisfied users confirm:
“I’m really impressed with not only the application itself but the support. I have rarely seen such a responsive support staff than at EE. They rock…I highly recommend this plugin!” sock2me
Event Espresso provides incredible support that includes access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, custom development 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.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts an established team of experienced WordPress developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can count on to run your events.
Plugin Pricing
Event Espresso is available in a range of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as 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 Edition – This license option lets you install Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This lets you install Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This edition lets you run Event Espresso on five sites. It includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The cost to purchase the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. When we last checked, the software is selling for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing: Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticket Registration Software For WordPress
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing when this review was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin developer when you visit the website.
Additional Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to stay 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 setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to a particular situation, or to report problems and leave feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event registration and ticketing management software, used by thousands of users.
If you own a WordPress site and you plan to run any event that involves managing dates, times and venues (offline and online), registering participants, and/or selling seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
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