Do you currently run or plan to run events that need co-ordinating bookings or registrations, such as seminars, group courses, non-profit fund-raisers, networking functions, or even a big event like a regional festival, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Managing event bookings is a time-consuming process. You may need to manage calendar schedules, availability, attendee numbers, data collection and admin, payments and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to event participants.
There are many benefits to setting up an online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily copy settings for previous events, give event managers more control, create a better user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be expensive.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-based website or blog, you can easily install an inexpensive and professional web-based event registration system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Ticketing Registration Software
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily schedule an event and begin receiving online bookings in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and accept online event registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed software that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can employ various event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up selling tickets, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media sites like Facebook.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is completely different than the older EE 3, as the plugin has been rebuilt using a different structure to allow for future expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually transition completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and advantages of using the plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing web site into a fully-featured and automated event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple price 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 literally doing away with the chore of processing registrations manually.
Basically, you are enabling event attendees to perform the registration by themselves.
Letting your customers to do the data themselves frees up your time and lets you concentrate more of your resources on delivering a memorable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover shortly, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management process that you want your attendees to experience.
Additional benefits include the following:
- Significantly Lower Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third party service. The cost is kept low by using a model where Event Espresso users buy the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and buy addons when you need additional features.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept online signups any time of day or night. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features and addons (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event share your information with their friends who may also be interested.
- Green Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, the event registration process can remain wholly online, significantly reducing typical paper consumption from tasks associated with admin and record-storage.
- All Data Belongs To You. You control all the data acquired from event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to users through built-in features (these are included with the software) and optional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of built-in to WordPress users. Here are just some:
- Quick and simple to install and set up. Be up and running in very little time.
- Customized Event Registration Form. Event Espresso lets you gather specific data using custom event registration forms on your web site to plan a customized experience for your customers.
- Customized Notification Emails. Set up automatic registration and payment notification email messages to communicate with event clients.
- Tax Administration. Event Espresso 4 provides a number of ways to administer taxes for your event and provide reports of tax fee components to registrants when purchasing tickets. Event managers can configure taxes globally or on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your theme and display venue information throughout other areas of your site.
- Spam Protection. Prevent the chance of spammers and bot software programs making bogus registrations on your web site by using reCAPTCHA tools to confirm human activity.
- Promotional Codes. Provide promotion and discount codes to incentivize visitors to make a decision without delays, or make your offers more appealing for price-sensitive customers. Also useful for helping to sell-out events close to deadlines.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of booking event participants when they show up, or sending in paper-based registration forms for manual processing later.
- Administrative Pre-approval. Control who can and can’t register for your events.
- Private Commenting On Contacts. Keep comments about contacts on their profile. Private commenting allows you to keep a record of when users contacted you, your internal observations, and how you’ve helped them.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events let you build an event page at your own leisure without publishing it to your site. You can work on your events until you are ready to take it live, or schedule your event to publish at a later date and time.
- Complete Control Of Your Event Management. Event Espresso puts event managers in full control of every aspect of an event’s registration and ticketing, and also allows you to automate this process with event management tools that include staff and venue management, custom event page designs, payment processing and handling, wait lists, limits on attendees, print-ready ticketing and more.
- Exportable Information. You can export all the data gathered from your event participants into Excel or CSV format for compiling reports, implementing new marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, etc..
- Event Venue Manager. The venue management feature in EE 4 allows details about a venue to be published throughout the Event Espresso admin and the public areas of your website to inform registrants of your event’s location. The venue record has many of the standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also includes information such as venue seating capacity, venue website, venue phone number, venue address, map, etc. You can also display venue profiles on different areas in your theme and on a venue listing page on your website where you can set up and publish venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have booked for a given venue.
- Automatic Updating. Event Espresso provides easy one-click plugin installation upgrades to ensure that you have the newest features and to keep your software installation compatible with the latest version of WordPress.
- Social Sharing. Event attendees and site visitors can tell others about your events using social share buttons.
- Categorize Events. If you have a number of event types such as free and paid, workshops and breakout sessions, different types of exercise classes, etc. you can categorize them to make it easier for event participants to find what they’re searching for. You can display all events in a category on a custom event category page, make all events searchable by category, and colour-code your events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make these easier to find, in addition to suggesting other events in the categories that appeal to your existing customers.
Additional features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming. Event Espresso is simple enough for general users, and also extremely robust and customizable for enterprise-level users and developers. The bottom line is that by using Object-oriented programming (OOP), EE 4 enables more complex extensions and customizations to the software.
- Metabox Management & Organization. Event Espresso leverages the WordPress user interface, which brings the ability to organize the user interface to match your workflow. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or entirely removed from the page.
- Autonomy, Flexibility And Value: According to the mission statement on their web site, Event Espresso’s goal 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 effective 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+ additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – simplifies the need to re-enter event information when creating new events.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing 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 significantly enhance the capabilities of the event management process.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Addon: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display all upcoming events by location. 4 maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Manager Add-on: The Recurring Events management add-on allows you to put events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years ahead. You can schedule as many events in advance as you need. Event Espresso will automatically open and close bookings for all of these recurring events.
- Events Date Range Template Add-on: The Date Range custom event list template allows your users to browse for events that occur within a certain date range.
- 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 Add on: The Custom Template add on can display your events in a number of exciting and interesting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add on Editions: This add-on lets you involve staff in your organization to help manage your events and give new users the capacity to create events or regional managers the ability 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 capabilities, allowing staff to help you manage your events or events that other people create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain sections of your WP dashboard and/or certain sections of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to allow users to have geographic responsibilities for events and users, use the Roles and Permissions Pro add-on.
- Multi-Event Registration Add-on: The Multiple Event registration add-on 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 Template Addon: The Events Table Template addon provides you with an easy-to-use system that allows you to edit 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.
- JSON API Add on: The Event Espresso JSON API addon permits other software applications, web sites, mobile apps, etc… to access your Event Espresso details through an Application Programming Interface (API).
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin, including new addons.
To learn more about the newest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
User Testimonials
Below are a few of the many testimonials that satisfied users have posted about Event Espresso:
”I want to commend you on a fabulous product which is just the right price for a small non-profit. People are happy with the registration process, as are we! …Thank you SO much for a great product.” Sandra Forero Bush, World Trade Center Tacoma
”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, KT Benefits & InkItDigital.com
“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, teacher, conference planner, or event consultant, there are simply countless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a registered user, search the forums for tips and practical suggestions to streamline your event management workflow and enhance the experience of your participants.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso works with with all WordPress plugins and themes that follow standard WP development rules. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive support, as many of its satisfied clients confirm:
”No complaints here. Satisfied customer. You can teach us all few things about customer service. Thanks!” Charles
Event Espresso provides incredible support with access to a support forum, comprehensive 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 WordPress developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can depend on to organize and manage your events.
Software Pricing
Event Espresso is available in various editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you will want to consider downloading one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This allows you to configure Event Espresso on one domain only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This license enables you to set up Event Espresso on one domain only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Edition – This enables you to configure Event Espresso on five sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The cost of purchasing the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the software is selling for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest price: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Note: The pricing above was current at the time this review was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin developer when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the software’s online documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to a particular situation, or to report issues 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 management plugin, used by thousands.
If you are a WordPress user and you plan to run events that require managing dates, times and venues, registering attendees, and/or booking seating, then you will probably not find a better solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager
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