Do you currently run or plan to run events that need managing bookings, such as workshops, community courses, not-for-profit fund raisers, networking conferences, or even a big event like an exhibition, 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 complex and time-consuming process. You may be required to manage scheduling, event dates, participant numbers, data processing, payments and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders and alerts, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to attendees.
There are a number of advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce costs, help you easily copy settings for similar events, give event managers more control, create a more enjoyable client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that this can be costly.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-powered web site, you can set up a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event registration system.
Introducing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily schedule an event and start accepting bookings in a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and receive online event bookings)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich software that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize registration forms
You can use a number of event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up selling tickets, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media and email marketing software.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their software: EE 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is completely different than the older EE 3, as the platform has been revamped using a different structure to accommodate future growth and expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually retire EE 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and advantages of this plugin.
More info:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just some of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing web site into a fully-featured event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by practically doing away with the chore of processing registrations manually.
Essentially, you are enabling participants to perform the registration on their own.
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 better event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon discover, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management process that you want your customers to experience.
Additional benefits and advantages include:
- Significantly Lower Costs: Event Espresso is a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own software or using a third party provider. This is made possible by using a model where users start with the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and purchase add-ons when you need extra functionality.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept new signups any time of day or night. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing addons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event invite their friends who may be interested in attending.
- Green And Paperless Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event registration process can remain entirely online, reducing typical paper consumption from tasks associated with enrollment.
- Own Your Data. You own all the data you collect from event participants.
Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to users through standard features (these are included with the plugin) and additional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many great built-in to website owners. Here are just some of these:
- Quick and easy to install and use. Ready to start using in minutes.
- Customized Event Registration. With Event Espresso you can gather unique information using custom event registration forms on your website to plan a unique experience for your clients.
- Custom Confirmation Email Message. Easily set up automatic booking and payment notification emails to communicate with event registrants.
- Tax Admin & Reporting Options. Event Espresso 4 gives you several options to manage taxes for your event and provide reports of tax fee components to registrants who purchase tickets. Event managers can configure taxes globally or on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your theme and reuse venue data throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types let you create new prices that adjust the default ticket price for the default ticket.
- Discount And Promotional Codes. Offer promotion and discount codes to encourage prospects to take action without delaying, or simply make your events more affordable for others. Also useful if you want to sell out events close to deadlines.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. EE 4 lets you know who your clients are and how you’ve done business with them. The Contact Profile section records the name, biography, contact information, event registration details, comments, and more about each attendee.
- Waiting Lists. Interested persons can subscribe to a waiting list if your event has reached maximum attendance. You can also make it a requirement wait-listed members pre-pay if you plan to add more capacity for the event.
- Private Contact Commenting. Keep observations about contacts on their profile. Private commenting enables you to keep a record of when event registrants contacted you, your internal comments, and how you’ve interacted with your contacts.
- Draft Events. Draft events let you develop an event over multiple sessions without displaying it live on your website. You can work on your events until you are ready to publish it live on your site, or schedule to publish your event at a later time and date.
- Multi-Language Application. Event Espresso can be run in 15+ languages, with more languages planned.
- Default Tickets. If you find yourself creating similar tickets for most of your events, you can set one of those tickets as your default ticket for any new events simply by ticking a checkbox.
- Venue Manager. The venue management feature in Event Espresso 4 allows details about a venue to display throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front end of your site to inform users of your event’s location. The venue record displays many standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also includes information like venue capacity, venue web address, phone number, physical and virtual location, maps, etc. You can also list venue profiles on specific locations on your WP theme and on a venue archive page on your website where you can set up and display venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a specific venue.
- Registrant Records. Manage each attendee’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their records organized and easily accessible.
- Staff Member Management. Save time and stay organized by reusing staff profiles for multiple events or displaying profile information such as team member’s contact information, resume and photo using a shortcode in an event description.
- Accurate Participant Manager. You control your customers’ records; who has registered, which event they have booked 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 an event attendee list to a CSV file for additional uses, send customized payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your clients individually or collectively.
Additional features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming. Event Espresso is simple enough for basic users, and also extremely robust and customizable for enterprise-level users and developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, EE 4 facilitates more complex developments and customizations to the application.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 allows you to create a log file with debugging data which can be helpful for developers when troubleshooting.
- Autonomy, Flexibility 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 mission, 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 includes over 40 additional features, including:
- Live-filtering when you search for events inside the Event Espresso admin.
- Default surcharge (similar to adding a service fee to tickets).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Add-Ons
As well as an amazing range of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow end-users to further enhance the functionality of managing an event.
Some of these add-ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display all scheduled events by location. Four maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Template Add-on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes many datetime events into a dropdown list.
- Events Calendar Table Template Addon: The Calendar Table template is a list template with a bold date and customizable “register now” button. The template can also be customized to show the event thumbnail image instead of the date.
- Social Coupons Integration Add-on: If your site uses Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can even specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- Custom Template Add-on: The Custom Template addon is capable of displaying your event lists in a range of visually exciting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Addon Versions: This add-on lets you involve others in your organization to help manage your events and give new users the ability 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 privileges, so others can 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 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 add on.
- Multiple Event Registration Addon: The Multi-Event registration addon gives your potential customers 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 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 Calendar Add on: This add-on uses the WP calendar to display events and event categories using a nice graphical calendar.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp addon lets you automatically register participants to a specified mailing autoresponder 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 add-ons, check out the plugin here:
User Testimonials
Below are some of the many great testimonials that satisfied customers have posted about Event Espresso:
”Broadcasting my support for Event Espresso will be a pleasure. I recently helped the Webmaster at a sister church configure your event manager for their site, so I can say with confidence and from experience, that Event Espresso is the best Event Manager plugin ever!” Philip Simpson, The Charlotte Church
”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
”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, Improve Photography
Useful Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, teacher, seminar planner, or event professional, there are simply endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a licensed user, spend a little time visiting the support forum for inspiration and practical ways to streamline your event management and registration workflow or improve the experience of your event registrants.
Support
Event Espresso works with with all WP plugins and WordPress themes that follow WP coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent technical support, as many of its customers confirm:
”Thank you Seth for being so responsive and going above and beyond the call of duty with your app! I highly recommend Event Espresso for its functionality and for the stellar support. Seth has a deep knowledge and understanding of WordPress and has built a tool that is seamless to use for both organizer and attendee alike! After looking at a bunch of alternatives, Event Espresso far surpasses the other apps that are available.” Wendy Troupe, ICS North Pole Express
Event Espresso provides amazing support that includes access to a support forum, comprehensive 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 web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely software you can rely on to manage your events.
Software Cost
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software options, however, you should consider downloading one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This lets you configure Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License – This allows you to install Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License – This lets you set up Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Current pricing for the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. When we last checked, the software is being retailed for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Management And Registration Software For WordPress
Note: The pricing above was current at the time this review was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin developer when you visit the site.
Additional Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the software’s documentation tools for answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to your specific situation, or to notify developers about errors and share feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event registration and ticketing manager plugin, used by thousands of users.
If you own a WordPress web site and you currently run an event that involves managing dates and venues, booking participants, and reserving tickets, then you will probably not find a better plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticketing Registration Software For WordPress
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