Do you currently run or plan to run events that need co-ordinating bookings or registrations, such as workshops, training courses, not-for-profit fund raisers, networking events, or even a big event such as a trade exhibit, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event bookings is a complicated and time-consuming process. You will probably have to co-ordinate scheduling, dates, registration numbers, data processing, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to attendees.
There are a number of benefits to setting up an automated web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily copy settings for recurring events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event registration system can be costly.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-powered web site, you can install an inexpensive and highly professional web-based event registration system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Manager
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress allows you to easily schedule your event and begin receiving online registrations literally in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and process online event registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can use multiple event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your participants, or integrating your event bookings with social media and email marketing systems.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their software: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is fundamentally different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the software is being redeveloped using a different structure to allow for future growth. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually migrate completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and advantages of this plugin.
To learn more about the plugin go here:
Benefits
Here are just some of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current web site into a fully-featured and automated event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by literally doing away with the chore of processing registrations and bookings manually.
Essentially, you are enabling participants to perform the enrollment process by themselves.
Allowing your clients to do all of the data themselves frees up your time and lets you invest more of your attention on creating a memorable event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover in a moment, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your users to experience.
Additional benefits of the plugin include the following:
- Less Costs: The Event Espresso plugin is a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third party provider. The cost is kept low by using a model where Event Espresso users purchase the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then purchase add ons only when you need extra features.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online event signups any time of day or night. In addition, Event Espresso social and marketing features and addons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event invite other people they know who may be interested.
- Green Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign-up process can remain wholly in digital form, eliminating traditional paper waste from tasks associated with administration.
- All Information Belongs To You. You own all the data you collect from event attendees.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to users through standard features (these come with the plugin) and optional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many built-in to WP users. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and easy to install and configure. Ready to start accepting registrations in no time.
- Custom Event Registration Form. With Event Espresso you can collect unique information using a custom event registration form on your website to plan a great experience for your event participants.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Attendees can easily see your events and add these to their schedule with the WordPress calendar.
- Tax Administration Options. Event Espresso 4 gives you several ways to handle taxes for your event and report tax fees to registrants who purchase tickets. Event managers can configure taxes globally and on a per-ticket basis.
- Smart Single Page Checkout. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is smart, fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically duplicate the primary attendee’s registration details for any additional registrants.
- Spam Protection. Prevent the likelihood of spammers and bots making fake registrations by using reCAPTCHA option to validate human activity.
- Discount Codes. Set up promotion and multiple discount codes to incentivize visitors to make a buying decision without hesitation, or make your events more attractive for others. Also useful for helping to sell-out events close to timelines.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of registering event attendees at the door, or send in paper-based forms for manual registration later.
- Event Manager Pre-approval. Be selective about who can register for your events.
- Private Contact Commenting. Record notes about users on their profile and how you’ve assisted them. Private commenting helps you keep a record of when event participants contacted you, your internal observations, and how you have assisted them.
- Draft Events. Draft events enable you to develop an event page in your own timeframe without displaying it live on your website. You can continue working on your events until you are ready to publish it to your website, or schedule your event pages to publish at a later date and time.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your organization’s profile to display throughout Event Espresso and your WP themes. The organization fields include: business name, address, city, state, country, zip code, email, telephone, VAT/tax number, logo, Facebook URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ URL, Instagram URL.
- Import Event Information. EE 4 provides a CSV-based importing feature that lets you quickly import bulk event data at once. You can export, edit and upload data for events, datetimes, ticketing details, pricing, registration questions, venues, terminology, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Register Multiple Event Attendees. Event Espresso 4 allows a single person or a group to buy multiple tickets and different types of tickets at once. Event managers can control how many attendees are allowed to register in a single registration by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Automatic Software Updates. Event Espresso provides simple one-click upgrades to make sure that you have the newest features and to keep your installation working with the latest version of WordPress.
- Social Sharing. Event participants and your website visitors can help promote your events using social media share buttons.
- Event Reporting. Quick-view event reports provides you with information of all registrations and transactions, enabling you to measure the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and how much money has been collected.
Extra 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 compatible with WordPress.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registrations for normal site visitors when you need to perform maintenance on your website. You can continue to work on the back-end of your site during maintenance mode.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And 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 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 additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – simplifies the work of re-entering event details when creating new events.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse the same questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
In addition to an incredible array of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow plugin users to significantly enhance the functionality of your event management system.
Some of these add ons include:
- EE4 Events Grid Template Add on: 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.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Custom Template Addon: 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 allows your users to search for events that occur within a certain date range.
- EE4 Events Social Sharing Addon: Add social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that allows your registrants to share a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after booking.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration add-on lets you take full advantage of the WP user system. With the WP User Integration add-on you can give your users a special incentive by offering member pricing and overriding event prices when your members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered site users will have access to your special events. Members can also add personal information into their profile page allowing them to quickly register for events by auto-filling in their personal information on the event registration form. Your users can also view past events and pay for new events.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Addon Editions: This addon lets you involve other users in the event management process 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 assign 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 areas of your WP 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 addon.
- Multiple Event Registration Addon: The Multi-Event registration add-on gives your potential attendees 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 Multiple 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 addon provides you with an easy-to-use system that allows you to 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 allows developers to build their own custom templates using one of the included templates as a base template.
- MailChimp Integration Addon: The MailChimp add-on lets you automatically register attendees to a chosen mailing list or group within your MailChimp account.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software, including new add-ons.
For more details about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
Customer Feedback
Here are just some of the many testimonials that plugin users have posted 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
”Event Espresso event management plugin for WordPress is really an awesome plugin.” Cheryl Smithem, Charleston PR & Design
”I’m so excited to fire Eventbrite! Event Espresso has an amazing WP plugin for event management. We’re testing it now & are very impressed! In a nutshell Event Espresso saves us money & does everything Eventbrite did before. :)” Dustin Nay
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, presenter, workshop promoter, or event consultant, there are simply endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a licensed user, go through the forums for new ideas and practical suggestions to streamline your event management workflow and enhance the experience of your event customers.
Product Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with most WordPress plugins and WP themes that follow standard WP development rules. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great end-user support, as so many of its satisfied plugin clients 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
The plugin provides exceptional support with access to support forums, in-depth 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 plugin you can count on to run your events.
Event Espresso Price
Event Espresso is available in a number of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you will want to consider purchasing one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This edition enables you to install Event Espresso on 1 site only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This license option lets you set up Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License – This enables you to configure Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Price details for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Presently, the software is selling for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticket Registration System For WordPress
Note: The above reflects the pricing when this article was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin seller when you visit the website.
Additional Information
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the software’s online documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to your specific use-case, or to notify developers about problems and give feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WP event registration and ticketing management plugin, used and trusted by thousands of WordPress website owners.
If you are a WordPress user and you intend to run events that involve scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), enrolling participants, or booking tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Manager Software
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