Do you currently run or plan to run events that require handling bookings or registrations, such as workshops, training classes, non-profit fundraisers, social conferences, or even a large-scale event like a music concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Managing event bookings can be a time-consuming process. You will probably need to co-ordinate scheduling, availability, participant numbers, data collection and storage, payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to event participants.
There are lots of benefits to setting up an automated web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce costs, help you easily copy settings for repeat events, give event managers more control, improve user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event registration system can be costly.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-powered web site, you can download and install a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event booking solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily set up your event and begin accepting registrations in just minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and receive online event bookings)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
Customize registration forms
You can use multiple event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up ticket sales, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your participants, or integrating your event registration forms with social media and email marketing tools.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their software: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is fundamentally different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the plugin is being rebuilt using a different structure to allow for future growth and expansion. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually move completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and advantages of this plugin.
More info:
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 website:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website or blog into a fully-featured and automated event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by literally eliminating the chore of processing registrations and bookings manually.
Basically, you are facilitating event attendees to register by themselves.
Letting your customers to do all of the data themselves frees up your time and lets you focus more of your energy on delivering a more enjoyable event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn shortly, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management and registration process that you want your users to experience.
Additional plugin benefits include:
- Significantly Lower Costs: Event Espresso gives you an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own solution or using a third-party service provider. The cost is kept low through a model where you start with the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and purchase add-ons when you need extra functionality.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept online bookings 24 hours a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing addons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event invite friends who may also be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, the event booking process can remain entirely online, reducing typical paper consumption from tasks related to administration.
- All Information Belongs To You. You own all the data acquired from event attendees.
Features
The Event Espresso software delivers functionality to its users through built-in features (these are included with the software) and additional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many great built-in to WordPress users. Here are just some:
- Fast and simple to install and use. Be up and running in minutes.
- Custom Event Registration Form. With Event Espresso you can gather unique data using custom event registration forms on your website to prepare a customized experience for your event participants.
- Custom Confirmation Emails. Easily configure automatic registration and payment confirmation email messages to communicate with event participants.
- Tax Admin And Reporting Options. Event Espresso 4 gives you a number of options to administer taxes for an event and report tax fee components to registrants when purchasing tickets. You can administer taxes globally or on a per-ticket basis.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration enables you to configure the display of Google Maps on the event listing and event details sections.
- Default Price Types. Price types let event managers create new prices that adjust the default ticket pricing for the default ticket.
- Discount And Promotional Codes. Provide promotion and discount codes to encourage visitors to register without delaying, or simply make your offerings more attractive for others. This is also practical if you want to sell out events close to deadlines.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. EE 4 lets you know who your customers are and how they’ve done business with you.
- No Ticket Events. You can list events without making it necessary for registrants to book tickets. Use Event Espresso for all kinds of events, not only when tickets are required.
- RSS Event Feeds. Keep your customers up-to-date about your events, bring in more visitors and reach a wider audience with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Keyword Rich Page URLs. Keyword rich event page Web links take advantage of your WP site’s Permalinks configuration settings. “Pretty” permalinks that have relevant keywords add to the context of your events and improves your search rankings, helping you drive a more targeted audience to your events.
- Your Organization Settings. Configure your organization’s profile to display throughout Event Espresso and your WP themes. The organization fields include: company name, street address, city, state, country, zip/postal code, primary contact email address, telephone, tax number, business logo, Facebook profile URL, Twitter URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ profile URL, Instagram profile URL.
- Exportable Data. You can output all the data gathered from your event customers into Excel or CSV format for compiling advanced reports, devising new marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, etc..
- Event Venue Manager. The venue management feature in EE 4 lets details about venues to be made available throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front-end of your website to inform registrants of your event’s location. The venue record displays many standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also lets you add venue information such as venue seating capacity, venue web address, telephone number, physical and virtual location, location map, etc. You can also display venue profiles on specific locations of your WP theme and on a venue archive page on your site where you can set up and reuse venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a specific venue.
- Event Espresso Community. Event Espresso provides users with access to an expert community of event managers and other plugin users. You can engage with other Event Espresso users through their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential attendees who have not fully paid for their enrollment with a standard but personalized PDF invoice with one click of a button. Your invoices will address pre-registered participants who have not paid their registration in full by name, display the balance they owe, and include links to the event details, a payment link and a link to download the invoice.
- Accurate Event Attendee Manager. You control your customers’ details; who has registered, for what event and how much they’ve paid. With the attendee manager, you can get a quick overview of registered attendees and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export a list of event attendees to an Excel spreadsheet for additional reports, send customizable payment reminders and receipts and send messages to your customers individually or collectively.
Additional features include:
- Hooks, Actions & Filters. These allow you to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso plugin that are fully compatible with WordPress.
- Maintenance Mode. Pause registration capabilities for normal website traffic when website maintenance is needed. You can continue to work on the back-end of your site during maintenance mode.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And 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 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 includes 40+ added features, including:
- Email shortcodes for including participant data in emails and updates.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing the same group of questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Add-Ons
As well as a very large array of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow end-users to significantly expand the capabilities of managing an event.
Some of these add-ons include:
- 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 an event does not have a featured image, a default image will be used.
- Recurring Events Management Addon: The Recurring Events management add-on enables you to put events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months … even years in advance. You can create as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in advance as you like. Event Espresso will automatically open and close registrations for all recurring events.
- Events Date Range Template Addon: The Date Range custom event list template allows your users to search for events that occur in a certain date range.
- Social Media Buttons Add-on: The social media addon displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media addon is included free with all of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- Custom Template Add-on: The Custom Template add-on lets you display your events in a variety of visually exciting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add on Versions: This add-on lets you include 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 allow them different permissions with different privileges, so others can help you manage your events or events that others create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain sections of your WP dashboard and/or certain parts 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.
- EE4 Event Ticketing & Bar Scanning Add-on: The Ticketing add-on gives you the capacity to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon gives you the capacity to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing add-on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode types are included for handling check-in scans at venues. 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 Calendar Addon: This add on uses the WP calendar to display events and event categories via an attractive graphical calendar.
- JSON API Addon: The Event Espresso JSON API addon lets other applications, online tools, mobile apps, etc… to access your Event Espresso information through an Application Programming Interface (API).
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add-ons.
For complete details about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, visit the plugin website:
Users – Testimonials
Below are just some of the many great testimonials that users have posted about Event Espresso:
”My hope with this whole integration is to be able to show other school districts an affordable and easy solution to these registrations. I cannot believe how much money they are charged for less by other companies. This has the potential to save schools tens of thousands, which is huge right now.” Kelly, College Station Independent School District
”Your plugin rocks! Seriously, saved me hours on the phone setting up attendance manually. Kudos. :)” William, Petruzzo Photography
“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
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, teacher, festival planner, or event professional, there are simply countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, spend a little time researching the user forum for inspiration and practical suggestions to streamline your event management workflow or improve the experience of your event customers.
Support
Event Espresso works with with other WordPress plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress development rules. If you find that you need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent technical support, as so many of its satisfied users attest:
”No complaints here. Satisfied customer. You can teach us all few things about customer service. Thanks!” Charles
The Event Espresso software provides exceptional support that includes access to a support forum, in-depth 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 an established team of experienced WordPress developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can rely on to run your events.
Software Cost
Event Espresso is available in a number of editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin features, however, you will want to consider downloading one of the ”Pro” plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This license lets you set up Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This edition allows you to run Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This license lets you configure Event Espresso on 5 domains. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The price of the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, the plugin sells for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest price: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing when this review was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin developer when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Information
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 documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to your specific use-case, or to notify developers about issues and give feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WP event booking and ticketing manager plugin, used by thousands of users.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you currently run events that involve scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), registering attendees, and booking tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable WP plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso
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