Do you currently run or plan to run events that require handling registrations, such as workshops, training courses, charity fund raisers, corporate events, or even a big event like a rave party, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Managing event sign-ups is a complex and time-consuming process. You need to manage event schedules, dates, participant numbers, data processing and storage, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to attendees.
There are many benefits to setting up an online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower costs, help you easily replicate recurring events, give you more control, create a better customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be quite expensive.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-powered website, you can install a very inexpensive and highly professional online event registration solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily set up your event and begin receiving bookings in just a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and receive online event registrations)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
Customize registration forms
You can employ several event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments 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 applications.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is fundamentally different than the older Event Espresso 3, as it has been redeveloped using a different structure to accommodate future growth and expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually transition completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just some of the many benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
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 and automated event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by literally eliminating the need to process registrations manually.
Basically, you are facilitating event participants to perform the registration process on their own.
Allowing your clients to do the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you direct more time on creating a more enjoyable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon see, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management process that you want your participants to experience.
Additional benefits include:
- Lower Costs: Event Espresso is a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third-party service provider. The cost is kept to a minimum through a model where you start with the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and buy add ons only if you need added functionality.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online event registrations any time of day or night. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social addons (see below) let people interested in registering for your event invite their friends who may also be interested.
- Green Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, the event booking process can remain wholly online, eliminating traditional paper consumption from tasks associated with enrollment.
- Own Your Data. You own all the information you acquire from your event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
The Event Espresso software delivers functionality to its customers via built-in features (these are included with the software) and optional features that you can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many great features to WordPress users. Here are just some of these:
- Quick and simple to install and set up. Ready to start accepting registrations in very little time.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso lets you create multiple ticket types and set different pricing options, ticket quantity limits, etc.
- Customizable Event Designs. Customize your events and enrollments page using Event Espresso’s template options and components, plus HTML and/or CSS.
- Ticket Selector. Present a number of ticket options to prospects so they can purchase the ticket(s) that will best fit their needs.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your theme and display registrant information throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types let you create new prices that adjust the base ticket pricing of your system-default ticket.
- Mobile Registration And Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system enables you to validate tickets, speed up door registrations, create multiple check-in “stations” and track all attendees.
- Manual Registration Option. you have the option of booking event attendees when they show up, or send in paper-based forms for manual submission later.
- No-Ticket Events. You can promote events without making it necessary for participants to select tickets. Event Espresso can be used for any form of event, not just those that accept tickets.
- Public Commenting. Add social engagement to your event pages by allowing potential registrants to ask questions about your event and previous attendees to post feedback that can help others consider whether or not to sign up. Moderation settings for commenting are set in the WP native commenting system.
- Draft Events. Draft events enable you to develop your event in your own time-frame without publishing it to your site. You can keep editing your event pages until you are ready to take things live, or schedule to publish your event at a later time and date.
- Easy Event Management. Event Espresso puts you in full control of every aspect of an event’s registration and ticketing, and also lets you automate the process with event management tools that include staff and venue management, customizable event designs, payment processing, wait lists, limits on attendees, printable ticketing and more.
- Exportable Information. You can export all of your data collected from event customers into Excel or CSV format for compiling advanced reports, implementing new marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, etc..
- Event Venue Manager. The venue manager in Event Espresso 4 lets information about venues to appear throughout the Event Espresso admin and the public areas of your website to inform registrants of your event’s location. The venue profile has many standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also lets you add details like venue seating capacity, venue web address, venue phone number, physical and/or virtual location, Google map, etc. You can also display all of your event venues in specific sections of your theme as well as on a venue archive page on your website where you can set up and reuse venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a specific venue.
- Automatic Software Installation Updating. Event Espresso offers simple one-click updating to ensure that you have the newest features and to keep your software installation up-to-date with the latest version of WordPress.
- Staff Management. Save time and stay organized by reusing staff profiles for multiple events or displaying profile information such as staff member’s contact information, resume and photo using a shortcode in an event description.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post type features such as custom fields, post meta data, taxonomies, etc. You can even customize your page templates to display events in your own unique way.
Additional features include:
- Hooks, Actions And Filters. These features allow you to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso application that are fully compatible with the WordPress development platform.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 allows you to generate a log file with debugging data that can be useful for developers when potential plugin errors.
- 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 mission, the software has been built using 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 searching for events in the Event Espresso admin.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing a group of questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Add ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow users to significantly expand the capabilities of managing your event.
Some of these add-ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display all upcoming 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 lets you organize the events with many datetimes into a drop-down list.
- Events Date Range Template Addon: The Date Range custom event list template enables your users to browse for events that take place within a certain date range.
- Events Social Sharing Add on: Add social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that allows your registrants to post a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after registration.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration add-on allows you to take advantage of the WordPress user system. With the WP User Integration addon you can give users a special incentive by offering member pricing and overriding event pricing when members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered site users will have access to these special events. Members can also store personal details into their profile page allowing them to quickly register for events by auto-filling in the personal information on the event registration form. Users can also look up event history and make payment for events.
- Seating Chart Add on: The seating chart addon is great for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is ideal for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart addon lets you offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart add on lets you control the experience for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach single pricing to each seat.
- EE4 Event Ticketing And Bar Scanning Add-on: The Ticketing add-on adds the ability to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add-on adds the capacity to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing addon includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for managing check-in scans at the door. People can either print out their tickets or display them on their mobile devices. The mobile app can be used for checking in or checking out attendees and to validate tickets.
- EE4 Events Table View Template Add-on: The Events Table Template addon provides you with a simple and easy-to-use system that allows you to edit 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 custom templates using one of the included templates as a source template.
- JSON API Add on: The new Event Espresso JSON API add-on gives permission for other applications, web sites, mobile apps, etc… to access your Event Espresso data through an API (Application Programming Interface).
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add ons.
For full details about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website here:
User Feedback
Here are some of the testimonials that users have written 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
”Your plugin rocks! Seriously, saved me hours on the phone setting up attendance manually. Kudos. :)” William, Petruzzo Photography
”I played around with the free version for a couple hours then purchased the Pro for a client. Love it and so do they! Sweetest Event plugin I have tried.” Bill Chambers, Bill Chambers Design
Useful Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, trainer, concert promoter, or event management professional, there are just unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, go through the forums for inspiration and practical suggestions to streamline your event management process or improve the experience of your participants.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with most WordPress plugins and themes that follow standard WP coding guidelines. If you find that you need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great user support, as many of its customers attest:
”No complaints here. Satisfied customer. You can teach us all few things about customer service. Thanks!” Charles
Event Espresso provides comprehensive support with access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, custom development 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.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can depend on to run your events.
Event Espresso Price
Event Espresso is available in different editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you need to consider using one of the premium plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This enables you to install Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This lets you install 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 lets you install Event Espresso on 5 sites. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Pricing details of the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the software is being retailed for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management
Note: The above reflects the pricing when this article was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin developer when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Plugin 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.
Search the software’s documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to a particular situation, or to notify developers about errors and give feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event registration and ticketing manager software, used by thousands of WordPress site owners.
If you are a WordPress user and you plan to run events that involve managing dates and venues, enrolling participants, and/or booking seating, then you will probably not find a better plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso
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