Does your company currently run or plan to run events that need to accept bookings, such as workshops, training classes, non-profit fund raisers, social functions, or even a large-scale event such as a concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups can be a complex process. You may need to manage event schedules, available dates and spaces, participant numbers, data administration, payments and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and issuing tickets to event registrants.
There are lots of advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily reproduce previous events, give event managers more control, create a better customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that this can be very expensive.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-based web site, you can install a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event registration solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Manager
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin allows you to easily create multiple events and start receiving online registrations in just minutes.
(Set up multiple events and accept online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can use multiple event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your participants, or integrating your event bookings with social media sites like Facebook.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their software: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is fundamentally different than the older EE 3, as it has been rebuilt using a different structure to accommodate future growth. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually phase out Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and features of this plugin.
To learn more about the plugin go here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just a few of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your site:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing digital presence into an automated and feature-rich event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Higher 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 and sign-ups manually.
Essentially, you are enabling attendees to register on their own.
Letting your attendees to do the data entry frees you up from doing admin work and lets you spend more of your energy on delivering a more enjoyable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon see, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and registration process that you want your participants to experience.
Additional benefits and advantages include the following:
- Reduced Costs: Event Espresso is a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own solution or using a 3rd-party provider. This is made possible through a model where Event Espresso users buy the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then buy addons only when you need additional functionality.
- More Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept new registrations outside traditional business hours. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social and marketing addons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event invite their friends who may also be interested in attending.
- Green Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign-up process is kept entirely online, significantly reducing typical paper waste from tasks associated with admin and record-keeping.
- Own Your Information. You control all the data you acquire from your event participants.
Features
The Event Espresso plugin delivers functionality to its users through built-in features (these come with the software) and additional features that you can buy for an added cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many built-in to website owners. Here are just a few:
- Fast and easy to install and set up. Ready to use 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.
- Customizable Event Designs. Create a unique look and feel for your events and bookings page using Event Espresso’s template options and components, as well as HTML and CSS.
- Tax Administration Options. Event Espresso 4 provides several options to handle taxes for an event and provide reports of tax fees to registrants when purchasing tickets. You can configure taxes globally or on a per-ticket basis.
- Smart Single Page Checkout Process. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically copy the primary attendee’s registration information for any additional attendees.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow event managers to create new prices that adjust the base ticket price for the system-default ticket.
- In-App Documentation Systems. Event Espresso 4 comes with 3 comprehensive in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Event Check-In List. Generate an exportable list of participants and confirm those who attend.
- Ticketless Events. Create events without the requirement for attendees to select tickets. Use Event Espresso for all kinds of events, not only when tickets are for sale.
- XML RSS Feeds. Keep your users up-to-date about your events, bring in more visitors and widen your content distribution with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events let you build an event over time without displaying it live on your website. You can continue developing your event until you are ready to publish it live on your website, or schedule to publish your event page at a later time and date.
- Your Organization Settings. Configure your organization’s profile to be deployed throughout Event Espresso and your front-end templates. Organization information include: business name, address, city, state, country, zip code, email, telephone number, tax number, logo, Facebook profile URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ URL, Instagram URL.
- Exportable Data. You can output all of your information collected from your event attendees into Excel or CSV format for producing reports, planning new marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, etc..
- Event Venue Profiles. The venue manager in Event Espresso 4 lets information about a venue to be made available throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front end of your website to inform visitors of the location of your event. The venue profile has many of the standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also displays venue information like venue seating capacity, venue site URL, telephone number, venue location details, Google map, etc. You can also display venues throughout different parts on your WordPress theme and on a venue archive page on your site where you can set up and reuse venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have listed for a given venue.
- Event Espresso Community. Event Espresso provides users with access to an expert community of experienced event managers and plugin users. You can interact with other members of the Event Espresso community via their community chat room, support forums, job board, and social media pages on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Social Sharing. Event participants and site visitors can help increase exposure for your events using social media sharing buttons.
- 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 your page templates to display event information in your own custom way.
Additional features include:
- Hooks, Actions And Filters. These allow developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso plugin that are fully compatible with the WordPress development platform.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. EE 4 lets you output a log file with debugging data that can be helpful for developers when potential plugin errors.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & 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 mission, the company operates on a modular that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium version of Event Espresso also comes with over 40 added features, including:
- Duplicating events – streamlines the work of re-entering event information when adding new events.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing a series of questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page in the registration process.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow users to significantly expand the capabilities of the event management process.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display upcoming events by location. Four maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Template Addon: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes events with many datetimes into a drop-down list.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add-on: The Category Accordion template shows categories as a simple list. Clicking a category name shows all events related to that category and closes any previously open categories.
- Social Coupons Integration Add-on: If your web site is featured on Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can also specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- Custom Template Addon: The Custom Template add on lets you display your events in a variety of visually exciting ways.
- Seating Chart Add on: The seating chart addon is great 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 from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart add-on lets you control the experience for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach single prices to each seat.
- EE4 Event Ticketing And Bar Scanning Addon: The Ticketing add-on adds the ability to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add on gives you the capacity to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing add-on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for handling check-in scans at the venue door. Attendees can either print out their tickets or display them on their mobile devices. The barcode scanner can be used for checking in or checking out registrants and to validate tickets.
- EE4 Events Table View Template Add-on: The Events Table Template add-on gives you an easy-to-use system that allows you to 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 lets web developers build custom templates using one of the included templates as a source template.
- JSON API Addon: The Event Espresso JSON API add on gives permission for other applications, online tools, mobile applications, etc… to access your Event Espresso information through an API (Application Programming Interface).
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add ons.
For complete details about the latest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
User Testimonials
Here are just some of the many testimonials that plugin users have posted about Event Espresso:
”Broadcasting my support for Event Espresso will be a pleasure. I recently helped the Webmaster at a sister church configure your event manager for their site, so I can say with confidence and from experience, that Event Espresso is the best Event Manager plugin ever!” Philip Simpson, The Charlotte Church
”Probably the best event management plugin available.” Materia Inspiration Centre
”I’m using it on multiple sites and enjoying it. It’s simple and as others have stated… fast service and real help.” Arlen Nagata
Useful Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, presenter, concert planner, or event management consultant, there are just endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed user, visit the forums for tips and practical suggestions to streamline your event management workflow or improve the experience of your event customers.
Event Espresso Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with all WP plugins and themes that follow standard WP coding guidelines. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive support, as so many of its satisfied plugin users attest:
”By far, the customer service experience with Event Espresso has been the best of any WordPress Theme or Paid Plugin that I’ve used in the past two years!” Megan Murray, Boys & Girls Club of Lake Tahoe
The Event Espresso software provides comprehensive support that includes access to support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledge base 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.
In addition, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can rely on to run and manage your events.
Product Pricing
Event Espresso is available in a number of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin options, however, you need to consider purchasing one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This allows you to set up Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This enables you to install Event Espresso on one domain only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This lets you run Event Espresso on 5 domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Current pricing for the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. When we last checked, the plugin is being retailed for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Manager
Note: The pricing above was current at the time this review was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin developer when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Info
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the plugin’s online documentation pages for answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to a specific use-case, or to notify developers about problems and give feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event booking and ticketing manager plugin, used by thousands of companies.
If you are a WordPress user and you plan to run an event that requires managing dates, times and venues, enrolling attendees, and booking tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better WP plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
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