Do you currently run or plan to run events that require handling registrations, such as workshops, community courses, non-profit fund-raisers, marketing functions, or even a big event such as a show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups is a time-consuming process. You need to manage event schedules, date availability, participant numbers, data entry, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders and alerts, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to event registrants.
There are a number 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 copy settings for previous events, give you more control, improve client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be quite costly.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-powered website, you can set up a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event booking solution.
Presenting …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP allows you to easily set up your event and start accepting online registrations in just minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and process online event bookings)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed application that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Customize registration forms
You can employ several event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with an autoresponder system for ongoing notifications.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Important: Currently, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is completely different than the older Event Espresso 3, as it is being redeveloped using a different structure to accommodate future 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 this plugin.
More info:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your site:
Automated Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing web site into a fully-featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to attendee limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically eliminating the chore of processing registrations manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating participants to enrol themselves.
Letting your customers to do the data entry frees up your time and lets you invest more energy on organizing a better event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover in a moment, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your participants to experience.
Additional plugin benefits include the following:
- Less Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd party provider. This is made possible through a model where you purchase the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and purchase add-ons only when you need added functionality.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new registrations any time of day or night. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing add ons (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event share your information with their friends who may be interested in attending.
- Green & Paperless Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign-up process can be conducted entirely in digital form, reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks related to admin and record-storage.
- All Data Belongs To You. You own all the data collected from your event attendees.
Features
The Event Espresso plugin provides functionality to its users through standard features (these are included with the software) and additional features that you can buy for an additional cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many great features to web site owners. Here are just a few:
- Quick and easy to install and configure. Ready to start accepting registrations 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 a single event.
- Customized Notification Email Message. Easily configure automatic registration and payment notification emails to communicate with your participants.
- Ticket Selector. Present multiple ticket options to registrants and let them choose the ticket(s) that will best fit their needs.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration enables you to customize the settings of Google Maps on the event listing and event details sections.
- Default Price Types. Price types let you create new prices that adjust the default ticket pricing for the default ticket.
- Discount Codes. Provide promotional and multiple discount codes to incentivize people to register immediately, or simply make your offerings more appealing for price-sensitive prospects. This is also practical if you want to increase sales of events close to deadlines.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. EE 4 lets you gain a better understanding of who your clients are and how you’ve previously engaged with your customers. Your Contact Profile section records the name, biography, contact information, event registration history, comments, and more about each attendee.
- Admin Pre-approval. Be selective about who can register for your events.
- RSS Feeds. Keep your customers updated about your events, drive quality traffic and reach a wider audience with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Works With The Most Up-To-Date WordPress Version. The EE 4 user interface follows all WordPress guidelines to help you build beautiful event pages that are easier to use and mobile-friendly.
- Multi-Language Software. Event Espresso has been translated into 15+ languages, with more languages planned.
- Exportable Information. You can export all of your information collected from event customers into Excel or CSV format for creating advanced reports, implementing marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, and so on.
- Multiple Participant Enrollments. Event Espresso 4 allows a single person or people to pay for multiple tickets and different types of tickets at once. Event managers can control how many people are allowed to register in one session by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Automatic Updates. Event Espresso provides simple one-click plugin installation upgrading to make sure that you have the newest features and to keep your plugin installation working with the latest version of WordPress.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential participants who have not made payment for their registration with a standard but personalized invoice with just one click of a button. Your invoices will address pre-registered participants who have not paid their registration yet by name, give them the balance they owe, and include a link to the event details, a payment url and a url to download the invoice.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post types. You can also customize the templates to display event information in your own custom way.
Extra features include:
- Hooks, Actions & Filters. These allow web-based software developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso software that are compatible with the WordPress software platform.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registration capabilities for regular site traffic whenever site maintenance is required. You can still work on your content during maintenance mode.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & Value For Money: According to the philosophy stated on their site, 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 mission, the software has been built using a modular and efficient 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 over 40 additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – reduces the work of re-entering event details when creating new events.
- Default surcharge (similar to adding a service tax to all tickets).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Addons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow end-users to significantly expand the capabilities of your event management system.
Some of these addons include:
- EE4 Events Grid Template Addon: 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, a default image will be used.
- Recurring Events Management Addon: The Recurring Events manager add on allows you to put your events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years in advance. You can schedule as many future events as you like. Event Espresso will automatically open and close registrations for all recurring events.
- Events Date Range Template Add on: The Date Range custom event list template allows your users to browse for events that take place in a certain date range.
- EE4 Events Social Sharing Add on: This add on adds social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that lets your registrants to share a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after registration.
- Custom Template Add on: The Custom Template add on lets you display your event lists in a number of visually exciting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add on Editions: This add on lets you include staff in your organization to help manage your events and give new users permission to create events or regional managers permission 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 privileges, so others can help you manage your events or events that others create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain areas of your WP dashboard and/or certain parts of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to create geographic regions for other people to manage events, use the Roles and Permissions Pro add-on.
- Multi-Event Registration Add on: The Multiple Event registration add-on gives 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 shopping 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.
- Events Calendar Add on: This addon uses the WP calendar to display events and event categories via a nice graphical calendar.
- JSON API Add on: The Event Espresso JSON API addon gives permission for other applications, online tools, mobile applications, etc… to access your Event Espresso information through an API (Application Programming Interface).
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software, including new add ons.
For full details about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website here:
Users – Testimonials
Here are a few of the many testimonials that satisfied customers have posted about Event Espresso:
”Event Espresso is one of the nicest Event Managers (WP Plugin) I have come across.” Joe Distefano, Citizen Joe
”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
”At first we looked at CVENT for one of our clients and they wanted $16,000 per year for 3000 event attendees + fees totaling $22k. That is before Staff and Webinar fees. Worst of all we had to prepay the $16k amount even if we never used all 3000 attendees. That was when we looked at Event Espresso and we realized we could build our own event system for less than 16K. For the most part we have been very satisfied with our decision. The real ROI will come next year when they don’t have to pay another 16k-22K! Over the next 5-6 years we should be able to claim that we saved the company over $100,000 – Thanks Event Espresso!” David Waterman (Long Version), KT Benefits & InkItDigital.com
Plugin Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, teacher, show planner, or event consultant, there are simply countless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered owner, visit the user forum for new ideas and practical suggestions to streamline your event management workflow and improve the experience of your event attendees.
Support
Event Espresso works with with all WP plugins and 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 customers confirm:
”These guys are right on any problem or issue or even general questions. You can’t really put a value high enough on the kind of support these guys offer.” Mark Wigston, Muskoka Graphics
Event Espresso provides comprehensive support with access to support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, premium 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 a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can count on to run your events.
Product Price
Event Espresso is available in different plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you need to consider using one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This license option allows you to set up Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This option enables you to set up Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Edition – This edition lets you install Event Espresso on five sites. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Pricing details of the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Presently, the software is being retailed for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management
Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this review was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the website.
Additional Plugin Info
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the software’s documentation pages for answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to your specific use-case, or to notify developers about problems and leave feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product site.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event registration and ticketing management plugin, used and trusted by thousands of WP site owners.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you intend to run events that require scheduling dates, times and venues, booking attendees, or selling tickets, then you will probably not find a better solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticket Registration Software
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