Do you currently run or plan to run events that require handling registrations, such as seminars, training courses, charity fund-raisers, networking functions, or even a large-scale event like a concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event bookings can be a time-consuming process. You will most likely need to manage event schedules, dates, attendee numbers, data collection, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and providing tickets to event attendees.
There are many advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower expenses, help you easily replicate previously-run events, give event managers more control, improve client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that this can be very expensive.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-powered website, you can download and install an inexpensive and professional web-based event booking solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Management System
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin lets you easily set up an event and begin accepting bookings in just minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and take online event registrations)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize your event registration forms
You can employ a range of event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up selling tickets, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your event participants, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing notifications.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their software: EE 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is completely different than the older Event Espresso 3, as it has been revamped 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 migrate completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
For more details go here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just some of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Automated Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing digital presence into a feature-rich and professional event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by literally eliminating the need to process registrations and signups manually.
Essentially, you are enabling attendees to complete the sign-up process on their own.
Letting your enrollees to do the data entry frees up your time and lets you direct more time on planning a memorable event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover in a moment, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and booking process that you want your attendees to experience.
Additional benefits and advantages include the following:
- Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd party provider. The cost is kept to a minimum through a model where users pay for the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and buy optional add ons when you need extra functionality.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept new bookings 24 hrs a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social features (see below) let people interested in registering for your event invite their friends who may also be interested in attending.
- Green & Paperless Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign up process can remain wholly in digital form, reducing typical paper consumption from tasks associated with admin and record-keeping.
- Own Your Data. You control all the data you obtain from event attendees.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to users via built-in features (these are included with the software) and additional features that customers can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many unique features to WP users. Here are just some:
- Quick and simple to install and set up. Ready to use in minutes.
- Customized Event Registration Form. Event Espresso lets you collect specific information using custom event registration forms on your website to prepare a tailored experience for your clients.
- Customized Notification Emails. Easily configure customized automatic registration and payment confirmation emails to communicate with event registrants.
- Ticket Selector. Present several ticket options to registrants so they can purchase the ticket(s) that best suits their needs.
- Intelligent Single Page Checkout Process. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is smart, fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically copy the primary attendee’s registration details for any added attendees.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow event managers to create new prices that adjust the default ticket price for your default ticket.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 comes with three comprehensive in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of booking event participants at the door, or sending in paper forms for manual inputting later.
- Waiting Lists. Interested persons can subscribe to a waiting list if your event has reached maximum capacity. Additionally, you can make it a requirement waiting list attendees pay for their spots if you plan to add more capacity for your event.
- Private Commenting On Contacts. Record notes about event attendees on their profile and how you’ve helped your customers. Private notes helps you keep records of when event registrants contacted you, your internal observations, and how you have assisted them.
- Search Engine Friendly Page URLs. Keyword rich Web links take advantage of your Permalinks configuration settings. Search engine friendly permalinks that include topic-relevant keywords enhance the context of your pages and is favored by search engines, helping you get a more targeted audience to your site.
- Complete Control Of Your Event Management. Event Espresso puts event managers in full control of every aspect of your event’s registration and ticketing processes, and lets you automate the process with event management tools that include staff and venue management, custom event page designs, payment processing and handling, wait lists, limits on attendees, printable tickets and more.
- Import Events. EE 4 provides an advanced importing capability that lets you easily import bulk event data at once. You can export, edit and upload information about events, datetimes, tickets, prices, custom registration questions, venue info, terms, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Event Venue Management. The venue manager feature in Event Espresso 4 allows 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 record displays many standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also displays details like venue capacity, venue website, venue phone number, physical, directions map, etc. You can also display venues on various parts on your theme as well as on a venue listing page on your website where you can set up and reuse venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a given venue.
- Event Espresso Community. Event Espresso gives you access to a community of experienced event managers, developers, web designers, digital marketers and businesses who also use the plugin. You can engage with other members of the Event Espresso community using their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Social Sharing. Event registrants and site visitors can tell others about your event using social sharing buttons.
- Transaction Reporting. Quick-view event reports gives you information of all registrations and transactions, allowing you to analyze the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and amount of revenue has been collected.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows developers to have more control and options over your event pages and how your information displays to your prospective event participants.
- Control Box Management And Organization. Event Espresso lets you leverage the WordPress user interface, which brings the ability to reconfigure the user interface to match your workflow processes. Each control box can be collapsed, re-arranged or entirely deleted from the workflow configuration.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & 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 goals, the software has been built using a modular and effective model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also provides you with 40+ additional features, including:
- Live-filtering when searching for events inside the Event Espresso admin.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse a group of questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
In addition to an amazing number of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow software users to significantly enhance 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 the event does not have a featured image available, it will use a default image.
- 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 image instead of a date.
- 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 any of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- Custom Files Addon: The Custom Files add-on allows you to override certain aspects of the Event Espresso plugin.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Addon Editions: This addon lets you involve other staff in the event management process and give new users the capacity 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 capabilities, allowing staff to 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 WordPress dashboard and/or certain parts of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to allow users to control factors geographically for events and users, use the Roles and Permissions Pro add-on.
- Event Ticketing And Bar Scanning Add on: The Ticketing add on adds the capacity 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 handling check-in scans at venues. 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 registrants and to validate tickets.
- Events Table Template Add-on: The Events Table Template addon provides you with an easy-to-use system that allows you to modify the look and feel of your event lists. It comes with a simple table template with category filters, table search, table paging and more. It also lets developers build custom templates using one of the included templates as a source template.
- JSON API Add-on: The new Event Espresso JSON API addon gives permission for other applications, web tools, mobile apps, etc… to access your Event Espresso details through an API (Application Programming Interface).
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software, including new add-ons.
For full details about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
User Feedback
Below are some of the many testimonials that satisfied users have written about Event Espresso:
”Congratulations on an absolutely fantastic plugin. I’m really impressed with its functionality and add on features and will definitely upgrade my client’s production site to the premium version (when ready for launch) to incorporate all the features. As I have told another client “this plugin is the cat’s meow”.” Pete Mansel
”Event Espresso event management plugin for WordPress is really an awesome plugin.” Cheryl Smithem, Charleston PR & Design
”I’m using it on multiple sites and enjoying it. It’s simple and as others have stated… fast service and real help.” Arlen Nagata
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, presenter, show promoter, or event management consultant, there are just endless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed user, search the support forum for tips and practical suggestions to streamline your event management and registration workflow or improve the experience of your attendees.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with most 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 great end-user support, as many of its satisfied end-users attest:
”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 exceptional support including access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, priority 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.
In addition, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can depend on to run and manage your events.
Plugin Price
Event Espresso is available in different editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software features, however, you may want to consider purchasing one of the paid plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This lets you install Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This allows you to install Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License – This option allows you to install Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The cost of purchasing the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the software retails for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Please Note: The pricing above was current when this review was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin seller when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the software’s documentation tools for answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to your specific situation, or to notify developers about problems and give feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event booking and ticketing management software, used and trusted by thousands of WP users.
If you own a WordPress website and you currently run any event that requires managing dates and venues (offline and online), enrolling attendees, and/or booking tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable WordPress plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticketing Registration System For WordPress
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