Does your business currently run or plan to run events that need managing bookings, such as workshops, training courses, charity fundraisers, networking functions, or even a large-scale event like a food fair, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event bookings can be a complex and time-consuming process. You will most likely need to co-ordinate calendar schedules, event dates, participant numbers, data processing, payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders and alerts, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to event registrants.
There are lots of benefits to setting up an online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce costs, help you easily duplicate previously-run events, give event managers more control, improve client experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be very expensive.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-based website or blog, you can easily install an inexpensive and professional online event registration system.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Management
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily create an event and start receiving registrations in just a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and accept online event registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize registration forms
You can use multiple 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 participants, or integrating your event registration forms with social media sites like Facebook.
View detailed information about event attendees
Important: Currently, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their software: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is considerably different than the older EE 3, as the platform is being redeveloped using a different structure to enable future expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually retire Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and advantages of using the plugin.
Learn more here:
Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing digital presence into an automated and feature-rich event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by literally doing away with the need to process registrations manually.
Basically, you are facilitating attendees to enrol by themselves.
Letting your clients to do all of the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you invest more attention on organizing a memorable event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn shortly, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your participants to experience.
Some additional benefits of the plugin include the following:
- Significantly Lower Costs: Event Espresso provides you with 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 users purchase the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and purchase optional addons only when you need additional functionality.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online sign-ups any time of day or night. In addition, Event Espresso social and marketing features and addons (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with other people they know who may be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign up process is performed entirely online, significantly reducing typical paper waste from tasks associated with enrollment.
- All Data Belongs To You. You own all the information you acquire from event participants.
Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to users via standard features (these come with the software) and optional features that customers can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of built-in to site owners. Here are just a few of these:
- Fast and simple to install and set up. Ready to start using in minutes.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso lets you set up as many different types of tickets as you need and specify prices, limits on ticket quantities, and more.
- Customizable Event Page Designs. Customize your events and bookings page using Event Espresso’s template options and components, plus HTML and/or CSS.
- Tax Admin & Reporting Options. Event Espresso 4 provides several ways to handle taxes for your event and provide reports of tax fees to registrants who purchase tickets. Event managers can administer taxes globally and on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your theme and display attendee data throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Prices. Set up events quickly and easily with pre-configured default pricing.
- Mobile Registration & Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system enables you to validate tickets, speed up door registrations, set up various check-in “stations” and track your attendees.
- Manual Registration Option. you have the option of registering event attendees when they show up, or sending in paper forms for manual registration later.
- Waiting Lists. Latecomers can join a waiting list if your event has reached capacity. You can also specify that wait-listed attendees pre-pay if you plan to expand numbers for the event.
- Private Contact Comments. Keep observations about a contact on their profile. Private notes enables you to keep records of when users contacted you, your internal observations, and how you’ve interacted with them.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events let you build an event over multiple sessions without publishing it to your site. You can continue building your event pages until you are ready to take it live, or schedule to publish your event at a later date and time.
- 15+ Languages. Event Espresso has been translated into 15+ languages, with more languages coming soon.
- Default Tickets. If you create similar tickets for most of your events, you can easily set up as your default ticket for the next time you create an event simply by checking a box.
- Multiple Participant Registration. Event Espresso 4 allows one person or people to register multiple participants at the same time. Event managers control how many attendees are able to enrol in a single booking session by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Event Espresso Community. Event Espresso lets you interact with an expert community of event managers and other plugin users. You can network with other members of the Event Espresso community using their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media pages on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Social Sharing. Event participants and your website visitors can help publicize your event using social sharing buttons.
- Categorize Events. If you have a number of types of events such as free and paid, conference speakers and breakout sessions, different kinds of courses, etc. you can categorize them to make it easier for event attendees to find what they’re looking for. You can list all the 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 them easier to find, in addition to suggesting other events in the categories that interest your visitors.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows web-based software developers to have more control and options over your events and how the information displays to your site visitors.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registration capabilities for normal website visitors when website maintenance is required. You can continue to work on the back-end of your site during maintenance mode.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & Value For Money: According to the philosophy stated on their web 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 objectives, the company operates on a model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also includes over 40 added features, including:
- Live-filtering when searching for events inside the Event Espresso admin.
- Default surcharge (the same as adding a service fee to each ticket).
- Default payment status.
Addons
As well as a comprehensive range of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow customers to significantly enhance the functionality of your event management system.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Addon: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display upcoming events by location. There are four maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Management Add-on: The Recurring Events manager add-on lets you put events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months ahead. You can create as many future events as you need. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close registrations for all of your recurring events.
- 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 Coupons Integration Addon: If your website uses Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can even specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- Custom Template Add-on: The Custom Template add on is capable of displaying your event lists in a variety of visually exciting ways.
- 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 ideal for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart add-on allows you to promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues 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 Multiple Event registration addon gives potential attendees 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.
- Events Table View Template Add-on: The Events Table Template add-on provides you with a simple and easy-to-use system that lets you change 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 design their own custom templates using one of the included templates as a source template.
- EE4 Infusionsoft Integration Addon: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and business marketing software add-on, you can completely automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture event attendee data, track enrollments, and accept payments from your web site.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software, including new add-ons.
For full details about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, visit the plugin website here:
Customers – Feedback
Below are a few of the many testimonials that satisfied plugin users have posted about Event Espresso:
”Event Espresso is so easy to use yet feature rich and stable. It is a cornerstone of our site and our success.” Fraser Barner, Speaker’s Lab
”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
“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
Plugin Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, presenter, workshop planner, or event professional, there are simply endless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a registered owner, go through the user forum for tips and practical ways to improve your event management and registration workflow or improve the experience of your customers.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with other WordPress plugins and themes that follow WP coding standards. 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 end-users confirm:
”No complaints here. Satisfied customer. You can teach us all few things about customer service. Thanks!” Charles
Event Espresso provides incredible 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 an established team of experienced web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely software you can count on to run and manage your events.
Plugin Pricing
Event Espresso is available in different editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software features, however, you need to consider using one of the ”Pro” plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This lets you set up Event Espresso on one site only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License – This edition enables you to set up Event Espresso on one site only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This allows you to install Event Espresso on five sites. It includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Price details for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Presently, the software retails for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Please 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 author when you visit the site.
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.
Look up the plugin’s online documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to your particular situation, or to report bugs and share feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event registration and ticketing manager plugin, used and trusted by thousands of companies.
If you own a WordPress-powered website and you plan to run events that require scheduling dates and venues, booking attendees, or reserving tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – Event Manager & Registration Plugin For WordPress
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