Do you currently run or plan to run events that require handling registrations, such as seminars, community classes, non-profit fund-raisers, social functions, or even a big event like a music concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Co-ordinating event registrations can be a time-consuming process. You will probably have to manage scheduling, available dates and spaces, participant numbers, data processing, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to event participants.
There are lots of advantages to setting up an automated web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower costs, help you easily duplicate recurring events, give event managers more control, create a better client experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that this can be very costly.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-powered website, you can easily set up an inexpensive and highly professional web-based event booking solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Manager
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress software enables you to easily schedule multiple events and start accepting online bookings literally in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and receive online event registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
Customize event registration forms
You can use a number of event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your participants, or integrating your event registration forms with social media and email marketing solutions.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Please Note: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their software: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is fundamentally different than the older EE 3, as it has been revamped using a different structure to enable future growth and expansion. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually move completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
Learn more about the plugin here:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just some of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your site:
Automated Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website or blog into an automated and fully featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating limits, multiple price 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 virtually eliminating the chore of processing registrations and bookings manually.
Essentially, you are enabling attendees to register by themselves.
Letting your attendees to do the data entry frees you up from doing administration and lets you direct more attention on planning a memorable event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover shortly, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your participants to experience.
Some additional benefits and advantages include:
- Reduced Costs: Event Espresso gives you an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own system or using a 3rd-party service. This is made possible by using a model where Event Espresso users pay for the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then buy addons when you need extra features.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept online event bookings 24 hours a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event share your information with others who may be interested.
- Green & Paperless Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign up process remains entirely in digital form, significantly reducing traditional paper waste from tasks associated with enrollment.
- All Information Belongs To You. You own all the information you acquire from event participants.
Plugin Features
The Event Espresso software delivers functionality to its customers via built-in features (these come with the software) and optional features that you can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers a number of built-in to website owners. Here are just some:
- Fast and easy to install and set up. Be up and running 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 create a unique experience for your customers.
- Customizable Event Designs. Create a unique look and feel for your events and signup page using Event Espresso’s unlimited template options and parts, and HTML or CSS.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso seamlessly integrates with leading payment gateways, allowing you to collect booking payments before running the events.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your theme and reuse registrant information throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Prices. Set up events quickly and easily by pre-configuring default ticket pricing.
- Mobile Registration And Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system lets you validate tickets, speed up door registrations, set up various check-in “stations” and track attendees.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. EE 4 lets you know who your customers are and how you’ve done past business with your clients. The Contact Profile section stores updated records like the name, biography, contact information, event registration details, comments, etc. about each client.
- No Ticket Events. You can promote events without requiring attendees to book tickets. Use Event Espresso for any kind of event, not only when tickets are needed.
- Private Contact Notes. Keep observations about contacts on their profile and how you’ve assisted them. Private notes allows you to keep records of when users contacted you, your internal observations, and how you’ve helped your customers.
- SEO Friendly Page URLs. Keyword rich URLs take advantage of your Permalinks configuration settings. Search engine friendly web links that include topic-relevant keywords add to the context of your events and improves your search rankings, helping you bring more traffic to your site.
- Multi-Language Application. Event Espresso can be run in 15+ languages, with more translations planned.
- Upload Events. EE 4 provides a CSV-based importing feature that lets you easily upload a lot of event data all at one time. You can export, edit and upload data for events, datetimes, tickets, pricing, custom registration questions, venues, terms, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Venue Profiles. The venue manager in Event Espresso 4 lets details about venues to be made available throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front end of your website to inform site visitors of your event’s location. The venue profile displays many of the standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also displays information like venue seating capacity, venue web address, telephone number, physical, Google map, etc. You can also list venues throughout different sections of your WP theme and on a venue listing page on your site where you can set up and publish venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have listed for a specific venue.
- Automatic Plugin Installation Upgrades. Event Espresso provides easy one-click software updating to ensure that you have the latest features and to keep your installation compatible with the latest version of WordPress.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential event clients who have not made payment for their booking with a standard but personalized PDF invoice with just one click of a button. Your invoices will address pre-registered participants who have not paid their registration in full by name, display the amount they owe, and include links to the event details, a payment url and a link to download a PDF invoice.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post types. You can even customize your page templates to display events in your own custom way.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows you to have more control and options over your events and how the information displays to visitors.
- Metabox Management & Organization. Event Espresso leverages the WP user interface, which brings the ability to reorganize the user interface to match your workflow process. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or removed from your page.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value For Money: According to the mission statement on their site, Event Espresso’s objective is to “empower business and organization leaders with the event registration, ticketing and management tools that maximize the success of events.” To achieve their goals, the company operates on a model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium version of Event Espresso also provides you with over 40 added features, including:
- Live-filtering when searching for events within the Event Espresso admin.
- Default surcharge (the same as adding a service fee to tickets).
- Default payment status.
Addons
As well as an incredible number of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow you to further enhance the capabilities of managing your event.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display the scheduled events by location. 4 maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes events with multiple datetimes into a drop-down list.
- Events Calendar Table Template Add-on: The Calendar Table template is a list template with a bold date and customizable “register now” button. The template can also be customized to display the event thumbnail instead of the date.
- EE4 Events Social Sharing Add-on: Add social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that allows your attendees to share a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after booking.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration addon allows you to take full advantage of the WordPress 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 members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered users of the website will have access to these special events. Members can also add personal details into their profile page allowing them fast registration for events by auto-filling in their personal information on the event booking form. Your users can also look up event history and pay for events.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add-on Versions: This add on 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 WP users roles and assign them different permissions with different privileges, so others can help you manage your events or the events that other people create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain sections of your WordPress 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 addon.
- Event Ticketing And Bar Scanning Add on: The Ticketing addon adds the capacity to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon adds the capacity to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing add on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for managing check-in scans at the venue door. Customers 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.
- Events Calendar Add on: This WordPress events calendar displays events and categories of events via an attractive graphical calendar.
- JSON API Add on: The Event Espresso JSON API add on permits other applications, websites, mobile apps, etc… to access your Event Espresso details through an API (Application Programming Interface).
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software, including new addons.
For full details about the latest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
User Feedback
Here are some of the testimonials that plugin users have written about Event Espresso:
”I can’t even imagine what I would want the plugin to do that it doesn’t already do. I’m really happy with the features.” Jim Harmer
”I searched long and hard to find something that would serve my needs. This is, by far, the most complete and comprehensive solution I have found.” Bill Hepper, We Teach Live
”Event Espresso plugin still rocks. Saw you guys were up for the WP Honors too. Glad I paid for it! If you need event management on your WordPress site I recommend Event Espresso.” Patrick Allmond, Focus Consulting
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, trainer, event planner, or event professional, there are simply endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, search the support forum for inspiration and practical ways to streamline your event management and registration workflow and enhance the experience of your event participants.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with other WordPress plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress coding rules. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive user support, as many of its satisfied plugin clients confirm:
”No complaints here. Satisfied customer. You can teach us all few things about customer service. Thanks!” Charles
The software provides comprehensive support that includes access to support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, email 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 an established team of experienced WordPress developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can count on to manage your events.
Plugin Cost
Event Espresso is available in different plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software functionality, however, you need to consider purchasing one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This allows you to install Event Espresso on 1 site only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This lets you install Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This option allows you to install Event Espresso on 5 domains. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Current pricing for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. When we last checked, the plugin sells for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest price: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Manager
Note: The above reflects the pricing when this review was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin author when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the plugin’s online documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to a specific use-case, or to notify developers about errors and give feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product web site.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event booking and ticketing management software, used and trusted by thousands of event managers.
If you own a WordPress website and you plan to run any event that involves managing dates and venues (offline and online), enrolling attendees, and reserving seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
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