Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that need to accept registrations, such as seminars, group courses, non-profit fund raisers, social conferences, or even a large-scale event like a music concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event bookings can be a complex and time-consuming process. You need to co-ordinate scheduling, event dates, registration numbers, data entry, collecting payments and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders and notifications, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to participants.
There are a number of benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower expenses, help you easily copy settings for previously-run events, give you more control, create a better client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be quite expensive.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-powered website, you can download and install a very inexpensive and professional online event registration solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Manager Plugin
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily create an event and begin processing bookings literally in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and accept online bookings with Event Espresso)
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 use a range of event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up selling tickets, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your event attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media and email marketing applications.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Important: Currently, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is fundamentally different than the older EE 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 price. The company plans to eventually retire EE 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and features of this plugin.
Go here to learn more:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current website or blog into a feature-rich and professional event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple pricing options 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 doing away with the need to process registrations manually.
Essentially, you are enabling attendees to enrol by themselves.
Letting your clients to do all of the data entry frees you up from doing administration and lets you direct more resources on planning a better event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon discover, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your participants to experience.
Additional plugin benefits include:
- Reduced Costs: The Event Espresso plugin provides you with an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own solution or using a 3rd party service provider. The cost is kept to a minimum by using a model where you buy the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then purchase optional addons when you need extra functionality.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept new event bookings 24/7. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features and add ons (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with other people they know who may be interested.
- Paperless Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign up process can be kept wholly in digital form, reducing typical paper consumption from tasks related to administration.
- All Information Belongs To You. You own all the data you collect from your event attendees.
Features
The Event Espresso plugin delivers functionality to users via standard features (these come with the software) and additional features that customers can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many built-in to web site owners. Here are just a few:
- Quick and simple to install and configure. Ready to use in very little time.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In Event Espresso 4, events can have many dates and times (datetimes), and these can be managed from a single event.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Participants can easily see your events and add these to their schedule with a calendar.
- Ticket Selector. Present multiple ticket options to registrants and let them purchase the ticket(s) that will best fit their needs.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your theme and reuse events data throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Prices. Create events quickly and easily by pre-configuring default ticket pricing.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 includes 3 comprehensive in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. EE 4 provides you with the tools to gain a better understanding of who your clients are and how you have done business with them. Your Contact Profile section stores the name, biography, contact details, event registration details, comments, etc. about each customer.
- Event Manager Pre-approval. Be selective about who can and cannot participate in your events.
- Public Commenting. Add “social proof” by allowing potential attendees to ask questions about your event and past attendees to post feedback that can help others decide whether or not to register. Moderation settings for public commenting are configured via the WordPress built-in commenting settings.
- Works With The Most Recent Version Of WordPress. The EE 4 user interface follows the WordPress guidelines to help you build visually attractive event pages that are responsive and mobile-friendly.
- Your Organization Settings. Configure your organization’s profile to display throughout the plugin and your WordPress themes. Your organization fields include: organization name, street address, city, state, country, zip code, primary contact email address, phone, VAT/tax number, company logo, Facebook URL, Twitter URL, LinkedIn URL, Pinterest profile URL, Google+ URL, Instagram profile URL.
- Bulk Upload Events. EE 4 provides a CSV-based importing capability that enables you to easily import bulk event data at once. You can export, edit and import data for events, datetimes, tickets, prices, registration questions, venue info, terminology, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Visual Editor. Event Espresso uses the built-in WordPress Visual editor, so you can quickly and easily insert photos and create your event descriptions without having to know HTML or CSS, just like any other WordPress post or page.
- Registrant Records. You can manage each attendee’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their records organized.
- Team Member Manager. Save time and stay organized by reusing team member profiles for multiple events or displaying profile information such as staff member’s contact information, resume and photo using a shortcode in an event description.
- Attendee Reports. Event reporting gives you data of your registrations and transactions, allowing you to analyze the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and how much money you’ve collected.
Extra features include:
- Hooks, Actions & Filters. These features allow developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso software that are 100% compatible with WordPress.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 lets you create a log file with debugging data that can be helpful for web developers when diagnosing plugin errors.
- 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 objectives, the software has been built using a modular that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also includes 40+ added features, including:
- Email shortcodes that includes customer data in emails and updates.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse a common set of questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Add ons
As well as a comprehensive array of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow users to significantly expand the functionality of events.
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 the event does not have a featured image available, a default image will be used instead.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize many datetime events into a drop-down list.
- Events Date Range Template Add on: The Date Range custom event list template lets your users to search for events that take place in a certain date range.
- Events Social Sharing Add on: Add 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 addon lets you display your event lists in a variety of exciting and interesting ways.
- 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 ideal for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart addon allows you to promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues directly from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart add-on lets you control the experience for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach single pricing to each seat.
- Multi-Event Registration Add on: The Multi-Event registration addon gives your potential customers the ability to book 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 addon, 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 add on uses the WordPress calendar to display events and categories of events using an attractive graphical calendar.
- JSON API Addon: The new Event Espresso JSON API addon gives permission for other software applications, web tools, mobile applications, etc… to access your Event Espresso data through an API (Application Programming Interface).
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software, including new addons.
For more information about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, visit the plugin website here:
User Testimonials
Here are some of the testimonials that satisfied users have written about Event Espresso:
”Thanks to you and the rest of the team for Event Espresso – Every time I get a signup for an event, I think about how much time EE saves me – and signups happen while I’m out on the water teaching kayaking, not answering the phone. :-)” Tue Brems Olesen, OnAdventure
”I recently downloaded it to add to a nonprofit site for a Boy Scout troop and the features work wonderfully with what we wanted to accomplish for the site. It allows us to set up calendar, events, and even take payments for trips. At first, I thought that it would be overkill for such a small site, but now I see the possibilities and will definitely be offering Event Espresso to my clients that need an event organization system for their web sites.” Lucy Conn, Troop 462
”Just bought an Event Espresso license for an upcoming conference website we are working on. The custom registration forms functionality rocks!” Eric Sopp, Inside Design
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, presenter, show promoter, or event consultant, there are just unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a registered user, visit the forums for inspiration and practical suggestions to improve your event management workflow and improve the experience of your registrants.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with all WP plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress coding guidelines. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent user support, as many of its satisfied plugin end-users 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 great support including access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase 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.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts an established team of experienced WordPress developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can depend on to manage your events.
Product Pricing
Event Espresso is available in a range of editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you should consider purchasing one of the premium plugin versions below:
- Personal License Edition – This edition allows you to configure Event Espresso on one site only. It includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This enables you to run Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This lets you install Event Espresso on five sites. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Pricing for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. When we last checked, the software retails for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest price: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Manager
Please Note: The pricing above was current at the time this review was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin developer when you visit the site.
Additional Plugin Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding 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.
Use the plugin’s documentation pages for answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to your specific use-case, or to report errors and leave feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product information pages.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event booking and ticketing management software, used and trusted by thousands of WP users.
If you own a WordPress-powered site and you plan to run an event that requires managing dates, times and venues (offline and online), booking participants, and reserving tickets, then you will probably not find a better plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso
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