Do you currently run or plan to run events that need co-ordinating registrations, such as workshops, group classes, not-for-profit fundraisers, marketing events, or even a large-scale event like a rave party, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Co-ordinating event registrations can be a complicated and time-consuming process. You may have to co-ordinate scheduling, event dates, registration numbers, data administration, payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to event participants.
There are many benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily replicate previous events, give event managers more control, improve user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that this can be expensive.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-based website or blog, you can easily set up an inexpensive and professional online event booking system.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Management Software
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily set up an event and begin accepting bookings literally in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and take online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed software that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can employ several event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event attendees, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing notifications.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is fundamentally different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the platform has been revamped using a different structure to enable future growth. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. 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
Here are just some of the many benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current web site into a feature-rich and professional event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by literally eliminating the need to process registrations and signups manually.
Basically, you are facilitating attendees to perform the registration themselves.
Allowing your attendees to do the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you spend more of your energy on creating a memorable event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will see in a moment, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your attendees to experience.
Some additional benefits and advantages include:
- Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin provides you with a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd party service provider. The cost is kept to a minimum through a model where users purchase the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then purchase addons when you need new features.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept online event registrations 24 hrs a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social and marketing features (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with their friends who may also be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign up process can remain wholly in digital form, significantly reducing traditional paper waste from tasks associated with admin and record-storage.
- Own Your Information. You own all the data you acquire from event participants.
Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to users through standard features (these come with the software) and additional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many built-in to web site owners. Here are just some of these:
- Fast and easy to install and use. Ready to start accepting registrations in minutes.
- Custom Event Registration Form. With Event Espresso you can collect specific data using a custom event registration form on your web pages to create a customized experience for your attendees.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Customers can easily see your events and add these to their schedule with the calendar.
- Tax Administration Options. Event Espresso 4 gives you a number of options to manage taxes for an event and provide reports of tax fee components to customers when purchasing tickets. You can administer taxes globally or on a per-ticket basis.
- Intelligent Single Page Checkout. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically duplicate the primary registrant’s details for any additional attendees.
- Spam Protection. Prevent the likelihood of spamming and robots creating false registrations by using reCAPTCHA tools to authenticate human activity.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system allows you to validate tickets, speed up in-venue registrations, create various check-in “stations” and track event attendees.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of event registrants and check-in everyone who has attended.
- Ticketless Events. List events without making it necessary for participants to get tickets. Event Espresso can be used for any kind of event, not only when tickets are for sale.
- RSS Feeds. Keep your blog readers up-to-date about your events, bring in more visitors and reach a wider number of potential customers with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Keyword-Rich URLs. Keyword rich Web links leverage your Permalinks configuration settings. “Pretty” web links that use relevant keywords enhance the context of your pages and is favored by search engines, helping you drive a more targeted audience to your events.
- Country-specific Settings. You can configure the country and currency settings that will be used to host events, including currency name, currency symbols, decimal characters and places, country codes, states or provinces, and so on.
- Default Tickets. If you find yourself creating similar tickets for many of your events, you can easily set up as your default ticket for the next event simply by checking a box.
- Multiple Event Participant. EE 4 allows an individual or an organization to order multiple tickets and different types of tickets at the same time. You specify how many people are able to register in one booking session by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso lets you interact with a community of experienced event managers, software programmers, web designers, marketers and business owners who also use the plugin. You can engage with other Event Espresso users via their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Social Sharing. Event participants and site visitors can spread the word about your events using social media share buttons.
- Attendee Reporting. Event reporting provides you with data of your registrations and transactions, enabling you to track the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and how much money you have collected.
Extra features include:
- Hooks, Actions & Filters. These features allow developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso application that are compatible with WordPress.
- Control Box Management And Organization. Event Espresso lets you leverage the WP user interface, which gives you the ability to reorder the user interface to match your workflow process. Each control box can be collapsed, re-arranged or entirely removed from the page.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value For Money: 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 software has been built using a 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 40+ additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – simplifies the need to re-enter event data when creating new events.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing the same questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Addons
In addition to an amazing array of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow customers to significantly enhance the functionality of the event management process.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add-on: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display the upcoming events by location. There are 4 maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Management Add-on: The Recurring Events management addon enables you to put events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years ahead. You can create as many future events as you want. Event Espresso will then 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 search for events that take place in a certain date range.
- Social Coupons Integration Addon: If your site uses 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 event lists in a range of visually exciting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add on Versions: This add on lets you include your 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 give them different permissions with different capabilities, allowing others 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 parts of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain sections 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.
- EE4 Event Ticketing & Bar Scanning Addon: The Ticketing add-on gives you the capacity to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add-on gives you the capacity to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing addon includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode types are included for managing check-in scans at the 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 attendees and to validate tickets.
- Events Table View Template Add on: The Events Table Template addon gives event managers an easy-to-use system that lets you modify 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 their own custom templates using one of the included templates as a base template.
- MailChimp Integration Add-on: The MailChimp add-on allows you to automatically register participants to a specified mailing autoresponder list or group within MailChimp.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin, including new addons.
For more details about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, visit the plugin website:
User Feedback
Below are some of the many testimonials that satisfied customers have posted about Event Espresso:
”Event Espresso rocks! I use it for my dance class registrations. Unlike most dance studios where people have to call or send an email in advance, Event Espresso puts a registration form right there in front of the user and allows me to collect valuable information from the user during the registration process with custom questions such as “Do you have previous dance experience?” or “How did you hear about us?”. It also gives my site a professional look and feel.” Ral, Ral’eau Salsa Dance Company
”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
”I am in love with your product, I work with many educational institutions that hold classes/events and I will definitely recommend this to all of them, the only time I have seen a system this comprehensive and sophisticated is when an organization I worked with paid a programmer nearly $8,000 for a custom solution, and yet still there are features in your registration system that his didn’t have. Thank you so much for your help and patience.” Abdullah J.
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, presenter, show promoter, or event management professional, there are just endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a licensed user, go through the forums for useful ideas and practical suggestions to improve your event management and registration process and improve the experience of your participants.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with all WordPress plugins and WordPress themes that follow standard WP development rules. If you find that you need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive customer support, as so many of its end-users attest:
”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 amazing support that includes access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, custom development 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 a well-staffed team of experienced web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can count on to run your events.
Plugin Price
Event Espresso is available in a range of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software functionality, however, you need to consider purchasing one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This lets you configure Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This lets you install Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This license allows you to configure Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The cost to purchase the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, the software is selling for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest price: Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticket Registration Software For WordPress
Please Note: The pricing above was current at the time this review was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin author when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the software’s online documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to your specific use-case, or to notify developers about bugs and leave feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product site.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WP event booking and ticketing manager software, used and trusted by thousands of people.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you currently run an event that involves managing dates, times and venues (offline and online), booking attendees, and/or selling seating, then you will probably not find a better plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticketing Registration Software
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