Does your company currently run or plan to run events that require bookings or registrations, such as workshops, training classes, not-for-profit fundraisers, networking functions, or even a big event such as an exhibition, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event registrations can be a time-consuming process. You may have to manage event schedules, event dates, participant numbers, data collection and admin, payments and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and providing tickets to participants.
There are lots of benefits to setting up an online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce costs, help you easily duplicate previously-run events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable user experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that this can be very costly.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-based website, you can set up an inexpensive and professional online event booking solution.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily create multiple events and begin accepting online bookings literally in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and take online event bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can use a range of event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up ticket-selling, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event participants, or integrating your event registration forms with an autoresponder system for ongoing follow-ups.
View detailed information about event attendees
Please Note: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is fundamentally different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the software has been redeveloped using a different structure to enable future expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually move 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:
Benefits
Here are just some of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current digital presence into an automated and feature-rich event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically eliminating the need to process registrations and bookings manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for event participants to perform the registration by themselves.
Allowing your enrollees to do all of the data entry frees up your time and lets you invest more of your attention on organizing a more unique event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover shortly, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management process that you want your clients to experience.
Additional plugin benefits include:
- Significantly Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin provides you with a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd-party service provider. The cost is kept low through a model where users buy the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then purchase addons only when you need new features.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online signups outside normal business hours. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing addons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event share your information with other people they know who may also be interested in attending.
- Green Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event registration process can remain entirely in digital form, eliminating typical paper waste from tasks related to enrollment.
- Own Your Data. You own all the information you acquire from event attendees.
Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to its customers via standard features (these come with the software) and additional features that users can buy for an added cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of built-in to site owners. Here are just a few:
- Fast and easy to install and set up. Be up and running in minutes.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso allows you to configure as many different types of tickets as you need and specify prices, maximum number of tickets, etc.
- Customizable Event Page Designs. Customize your events and bookings page using Event Espresso’s template options and components, and HTML or CSS.
- Tax Administration Options. Event Espresso 4 provides a number of ways to handle taxes for an event and provide reports of tax fee components to registrants who purchase tickets. You can configure taxes globally or on a per-ticket basis.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration enables you to configure the look and control settings of Google Maps on your event listing and event details pages.
- Spam Protection. Reduce the risk of spamming and bots creating false registrations with reCAPTCHA tools that provide human validation.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 provides 3 useful in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Manual Registration Option. you have the option of booking event attendees when they show up, or send in paper registration forms for manual submission later.
- No Ticket Events. You can promote events without the requirement for participants to get tickets. Event Espresso can be used for any type of event, not just when tickets are needed.
- RSS Event Feeds. Keep your users up-to-date about your events, bring in more visitors and widen your content reach with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Works With The Most Up-To-Date Version Of WP. The EE 4 user interface follows all WordPress guidelines to help you create aesthetically beautiful event pages that are easier to use and mobile-friendly.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your profile to display throughout Event Espresso and your front-end templates. The organization fields include: business name, street address, city, state, country, zip/postal code, email, phone, VAT/tax number, logo, Facebook profile URL, Twitter URL, LinkedIn URL, Pinterest profile URL, Google+ URL, Instagram profile URL.
- Default Tickets. If you find yourself creating identical tickets for your events, you can set one of those tickets as your default ticket for the next time you create an event simply by checking a box.
- Venue Management. The venue manager in Event Espresso 4 lets details about venues to be published throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front end of your site to inform attendees of the location of your event. The venue profile has many standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also displays information like venue seating capacity, venue site URL, phone number, venue location details, location map, etc. You can also list venue profiles in various parts of your WordPress theme and on a venue archive page on your website where you can set up and display venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have listed for a specific venue.
- Attendee Records. You can manage each registrant’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their information organized.
- Social Sharing. Event participants and site visitors can help increase exposure for your events using social sharing buttons.
- 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 the templates to display event information in your own unique way.
Extra features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming. Event Espresso is simple enough for basic users, and also robust and customizable for higher end users and developers. The bottom line is that by using Object-oriented programming (OOP), EE 4 facilitates more complex extensions and customizations to the application.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. EE 4 lets you output a log file with debugging data that can be useful for developers who are diagnosing plugin errors.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And 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 objectives, the software has been built using a modular and highly effective model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also includes 40+ additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – reduces the need to re-enter event data when adding new events.
- Default surcharge (similar to applying a service fee to each ticket).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
In addition to a comprehensive number of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow users to significantly 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 upcoming events by location. There are 4 maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Custom Template Add-on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes the events with many datetimes into a dropdown 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 be customized to show the event thumbnail instead of a date.
- Social Coupons Integration Addon: If your web site is featured on Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can even specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- Custom Files Add-on: The Custom Files addon lets you override certain aspects of the Event Espresso plugin.
- 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 promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart addon lets you control the environment for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to each seat.
- Event Ticketing Add-on: The Ticketing addon adds the capacity to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add-on adds the capacity to scan ticket bar codes. 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 attendees and to validate tickets.
- EE4 Events Table Template Add-on: The Events Table Template add on gives event managers an easy-to-use system that lets you 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 enables developers to build custom templates using one of the templates provided as a base template.
- JSON API Addon: The new Event Espresso JSON API addon lets other software applications, web sites, mobile applications, etc… to access your Event Espresso content through an Application Programming Interface (API).
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software, including new add ons.
For complete details about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
Customer Feedback
Here are some of the many great testimonials that plugin users have written about Event Espresso:
”Event Espresso is so easy to use yet feature rich and stable. It is a cornerstone of our site and our success.” Fraser Barner, Speaker’s Lab
”I have been using Event Espresso to run my festival and have been very happy with how it has worked out. They have provided tremendous support and their iPhone app is amazing and easy to use. I suggest using it for your event.” Alex Grant, Byron Spirit Festival
”You guys have done an AWESOME job with this system…promise me to keep up the excellent work you guys are doing, for as long as you can… Respect!” Robert Jarnroth, Jarnroth Digital Productions
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, teacher, conference promoter, or event consultant, there are just unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a registered owner, search the support forum for inspiration and practical suggestions to improve your event management workflow or enhance the experience of your customers.
Event Espresso Support
Event Espresso works with with most WordPress plugins and WP themes that follow standard WP coding rules. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent user support, as many of its customers confirm:
”Your plugin saved our client nearly $9000 in development costs because it handled the majority of the functionality we were looking for at a much lower cost. EventEspresso’s staff have been very responsive to our needs when we have them (which has been rare, because the plugin is so well coded). Great job on a great plugin!” Brandon P., Experience Farm
The Event Espresso software provides great support with access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base 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 WordPress developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely software you can count on to run your events.
Product Cost
Event Espresso is available in a number of editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin options, however, you will want to consider downloading one of the ”Pro” plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This enables you to set up Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License – This edition allows you to configure Event Espresso on 1 site only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This edition lets you set up Event Espresso on 5 domains. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Pricing details of the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the plugin sells for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Management & Registration System For WordPress
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this review was written. This may or 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 its plugin. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the plugin’s online documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to your particular use-case, or to notify developers about bugs and share feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product web site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event registration and ticketing management plugin, used and trusted by thousands of users.
If you own a WordPress web site and you intend to run an event that requires scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), registering participants, and/or booking tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – Event Manager And Registration Software For WordPress
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