Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that require managing registrations, such as workshops, training courses, non-profit fundraisers, marketing events, or even a big event like a concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Managing event registrations can be a complex process. You have to manage scheduling, dates, participant numbers, data collection, payments and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to event attendees.
There are a number 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 recurring events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be quite costly.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-powered web site, you can install an inexpensive and highly professional online event booking solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticketing Registration System
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin lets you easily schedule your event and start accepting bookings in just minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and receive online event registrations)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can employ several event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up ticket sales, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media and autoresponders.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Note: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their software: EE 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is significantly different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the plugin is being revamped using a different structure to enable future growth. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans 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, visit the plugin site here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just some of the many benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current website or blog into a fully-featured event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to attendee limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by virtually eliminating the chore of processing registrations and bookings manually.
Essentially, you are making it easier for event participants to perform the enrolment process by themselves.
Allowing your clients to do all of the data entry frees you up from doing administration and lets you concentrate more of your resources on planning a better event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover shortly, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management and registration process that you want your customers to experience.
Additional plugin benefits include:
- Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin provides you with a very low cost 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 users purchase the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then buy optional add-ons only if you need new functionality.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online sign-ups 24/7. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social addons (see below) let people interested in registering for your event invite others who may be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, your event signup process can be kept wholly in digital form, reducing typical paper waste from tasks related to administration.
- All Data Belongs To You. You control all the information gathered from event participants.
Event Espresso Features
The Event Espresso software provides functionality to its customers via built-in features (these are included with the plugin) and additional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many unique built-in to website owners. Here are just some:
- Quick and easy to install and configure. Ready to start using in no time.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso allows you to set up as many types of tickets as you need and specify different prices, number of tickets, and more.
- Customizable Event And Registration Page Designs. You can customize your events and registrations page using Event Espresso’s limitless template options and elements, plus HTML and/or CSS.
- Tax Admin And Reporting Options. Event Espresso 4 provides several ways to handle taxes for your event and provide reports of tax fees to registrants when purchasing tickets. You can administer taxes globally or on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your WP theme and reuse attendee information throughout other areas of your site.
- Spam Protection. Prevent the chance of spammers and robots making bogus registrations on your site by using reCAPTCHA tools to provide human authentication.
- Mobile Registration & Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system allows you to validate tickets, speed up door registrations, set up various check-in “stations” and track participants.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of booking event participants when they show up, or send in paper registration forms for manual submission later.
- No Ticket Events. You can set up events without the requirement for attendees to book tickets. Event Espresso can be used for all types of events, not only those that need tickets.
- Public Commenting. Add social interactivity to your event by encouraging potential attendees to interact with you online via commenting and past customers to post feedback that can help others choose whether or not to register. Moderation settings for comments are set up in the WordPress built-in commenting settings.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events allow you to develop an event page in your own timeframe without displaying it live on your website. You can work on your event pages until you are ready to take things live, or schedule your event page to publish at a later date and time.
- Country Settings. Event managers can configure the country and currency settings that will be used for your events, such as currency, currency symbols, decimal characters and places, country codes, regions, etc.
- Import Events. EE 4 provides a CSV-based importing feature that enables you to upload a lot of event data all at one time. You can export, edit and upload data for events, datetimes, ticketing details, pricing, registration questions, venues, terms, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Multiple Participant Enrolments. EE 4 allows one person or a group to register multiple attendees at the same time. Event managers decide how many attendees can register in a single session by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Event Espresso Community. Event Espresso gives you access to an expert community of event managers and plugin users. You can interact with other members of the Event Espresso community via their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media pages on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Staff Management. Save time and keep your data organized by reusing staff member profiles for multiple events or displaying their profile using a shortcode in an event description.
- 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 page templates to display event information in your own unique way.
Extra features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for basic WordPress users, and also extremely robust and customizable for higher end users and developers. The bottom line is that by using Object-oriented programming (OOP), EE 4 allows for more complex developments and customizations to the software.
- Control Box Management And Organization. Event Espresso lets you leverage the WordPress user interface, which gives you the ability to reconfigure the user interface to match your workflow. Each control box can be collapsed, re-arranged or deleted from your workflow configuration.
- Autonomy, Flexibility And Value: According to the philosophy stated on their website, Event Espresso’s aim 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 model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium version of Event Espresso also includes 40+ added features, including:
- Email shortcodes that includes customer data in emails and email updates.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse the same group of questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow users to further enhance the capabilities of events.
Some of these addons include:
- EE4 Events Grid Template Add-on: Displays events in a pure CSS grid-like structure using the featured image. Hovering over the image will display further information. If an event does not have a featured image, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Custom Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes many datetime events into a dropdown list.
- Events Date Range Template Addon: The Date Range custom event list template enables your users to search for events that take place in a certain date range.
- Social Media Buttons Add on: The social media addon displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media addon comes free with any of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration add-on allows you to take full 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 members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered users of the site will have access to these special events. Members can also input personal information into their profile page allowing them fast registration for events by auto-filling in their personal information on the event booking form. Your users can also view event history and make payment for events.
- Seating Chart Add-on: The seating chart addon is suitable for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is perfect for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart addon lets you offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart add on lets you control the environment for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach single prices to each seat.
- EE4 Event Ticketing Add on: The Ticketing add on adds the capacity to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add-on gives you the capacity 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 door. 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 Add-on: The Events Table Template add on gives you a simple and easy-to-use system that lets you modify 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 web developers build custom templates using one of the included templates as a base template.
- MailChimp Integration Addon: The MailChimp addon allows you to automatically register attendees to a selected autoresponder list or group within MailChimp.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software, including new add-ons.
For complete details about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
User Testimonials
Below are some of the many great testimonials that satisfied users have written about Event Espresso:
”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
”You can tell that the Event Espresso team is really passionate about their work, and that they care and spend a lot of time helping people work with their plugin and use it with their events – it’s something every WordPress service should aim for.” Ryan Imel, WPCandy
“Love the plugin, we only use it once a year for a race we have in February. This saved us tons of time in data entry. In addition, we had more runners register than any other year. We attribute that to the ease of registering online. Thanks for your work.” Ed, Friends of Oscar Scherer Park
Useful Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, presenter, festival planner, or event management professional, there are just endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered owner, spend a little time visiting the forums for new ideas and practical suggestions to improve your event management and registration process or enhance the experience of your customers.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso is compatible with most WordPress plugins and themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive customer support, as so many of its users attest:
“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
The Event Espresso software provides robust support including access to support forums, in-depth 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.
In addition, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely software you can count on to manage your events.
Event Espresso Pricing
Event Espresso is available in different plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you will want to consider purchasing one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This license lets you install Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This enables you to install Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This allows you to install Event Espresso on five domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The price of the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the software is being retailed for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing: Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticket Registration Plugin For WordPress
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this review was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin developer when you visit the website.
Additional Plugin Information
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.
Use the software’s documentation pages for answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to your specific use-case, or to notify developers about errors and leave feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event booking and ticketing manager plugin, used and trusted by thousands of event managers.
If you own a WordPress site and you intend to run an event that requires scheduling dates and venues, registering attendees, or selling tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso
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