Does your business currently run or plan to run events that require managing bookings or registrations, such as seminars, community classes, non-profit fund-raisers, marketing events, or even a large-scale event such as a rave party, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event bookings is a complex process. You have to manage event schedules, available dates and spaces, attendee numbers, data collection and admin, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and issuing tickets to event attendees.
There are many advantages to setting up an automated online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower expenses, help you easily copy settings for previous events, give event managers more control, improve customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be very expensive.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-based website or blog, you can download and install an inexpensive and highly professional web-based event registration system.
Introducing …
Contents
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Manager
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily create an event and start processing online bookings in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and take online event registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize event registration forms
You can use a number of event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up selling tickets, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your participants, or integrating your event registration forms with an autoresponder system for ongoing follow-ups.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is impressively different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the plugin has been redeveloped using a different structure to accommodate future growth. The Event Espresso 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 read more about this plugin.
Learn more about the plugin here:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current online presence into a fully-featured and automated event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to attendee limits, multiple price 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 literally eliminating the chore of processing registrations and signups manually.
Basically, you are facilitating attendees to enrol by themselves.
Allowing your participants to do the data entry frees up your time and lets you spend more of your resources on organizing a more unique event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn shortly, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and registration process that you want your attendees to experience.
Additional benefits of the plugin include:
- Significantly Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin is an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own solution or using a 3rd-party service provider. The cost is kept to a minimum through a model where users start with the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then purchase optional addons when you need added functionality.
- More Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept new event bookings outside normal business hours. In addition, Event Espresso social add ons (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event invite other people they know who may be interested in attending.
- Green Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event registration process is conducted wholly in digital form, eliminating typical paper consumption from tasks related to enrollment.
- Own Your Data. You own all the information you collect from event attendees.
Features
The Event Espresso software delivers functionality to users through standard features (these are included with the software) and additional features that customers can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many unique built-in to WordPress users. Here are just a few:
- Fast and simple to install and configure. Be up and running in minutes.
- Customized Event Registration Form. Event Espresso lets you gather unique information using custom event registration forms on your site to create a great experience for your users.
- Event Calendar. Attendees can easily see your upcoming events and add these to their schedule with a calendar.
- Tax Administration. Event Espresso 4 provides a number of ways to manage taxes for your event and report tax fee components to customers when purchasing tickets. Event managers can administer taxes globally or on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
- 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 registrant’s details for any added participants.
- Spam Protection. Prevent the likelihood of spamming and robots creating fake registrations by using reCAPTCHA option to authenticate human activity.
- Discount & Promotional Codes. Provide promotion and multiple discount codes to incentivize visitors to register immediately, or simply make your offerings more affordable for others. This is also practical if you want to increase sales of events close to timelines.
- Manual Registration Option. you have the option of registering event participants at the door, or send in paper-based forms for manual processing later.
- No Ticket Events. Create events without the requirement for registrants to book tickets. Use Event Espresso for all types of events, not just those that accept tickets.
- Public Commenting. Add social engagement to your event by allowing potential customers to interact with you online via commenting and past participants to post comments that can help others consider whether or not to enroll. Moderation settings for public comments are specified in the WP commenting settings.
- Keyword-Rich Event Page Web Links. Keyword-rich event page URLs leverage your Permalinks configuration settings. SEO-friendly permalinks that have relevant keywords add to the context of your pages and is favored by search engines, helping you get more traffic to your site.
- Your Organization Settings. Configure your organization’s profile to display throughout Event Espresso and your front-end templates. Organization information include: organization name, street address, city, state, country, zip code, email address, phone, VAT/tax number, logo, Facebook profile URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn URL, Pinterest profile URL, Google+ profile URL, Instagram profile URL.
- Import Event Data. Event Espresso 4 provides an advanced importing capability that enables you to import a lot of event data at once. You can export, edit and import information about events, datetimes, ticketing details, prices, registration questions, venues, terminology, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- WYSIWYG Editor. Event Espresso uses the built-in WP WYSIWYG editor, so you can quickly and easily insert images and write your event descriptions without knowing HTML or CSS, just like any other WordPress post.
- One-Click Upgrades. Event Espresso provides simple one-click plugin upgrading to ensure that you have the latest features and to keep your plugin installation up-to-date with the latest version of WordPress.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential participants who have not fully paid for their registration with a standard but personalized PDF invoice with one click. Your invoices will address pre-registered participants who have not paid their registration in full by name, display the amount they owe, and include links to the event details, a payment url and a link to download the invoice.
- Transaction Reports. Quick-view event reporting provides you with information of your registrations and transactions, allowing you to measure the performance of your events with the aggregate number of people who have registered and how much money has been collected.
Extra features include:
- Hooks, Actions & Filters. These allow you to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso application that are compatible with the WordPress software platform.
- Control Box Management & Organization. Event Espresso leverages the WP user interface, which gives you the ability to organize the user interface to match your workflow. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or entirely removed 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 that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also includes over 40 additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes for including customer data in emails and newsletters.
- Default surcharge (the same as adding a service fee to every ticket).
- Default payment status.
Addons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow software users to further enhance the capabilities of events.
Some of these add ons include:
- EE4 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, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Management Add-on: The Recurring Events manager addon enables you to put your events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months in advance. You can add as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in advance as you want. Event Espresso will automatically open and close registrations for all recurring events.
- Events Date Range Template Add on: The Date Range custom event list template allows your users to browse for events that take place in a certain date range.
- Events Social Sharing Add on: Add social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that lets your registrants to share a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after registration.
- Custom Template Add-on: The Custom Template addon is capable of displaying your events in a number of visually exciting ways.
- Seating Chart Addon: The seating chart add-on is for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart add-on allows you to promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues directly from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart add-on lets you control the experience for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach single prices to each seat.
- Multiple Event Registration Addon: The Multiple Event registration add-on gives potential customers the ability to book 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 shopping cart. With the Multi-Event Registration addon, attendees can register for several events at once and even add additional attendees to any of the same events in the same checkout process.
- EE4 Events Table Template Addon: The Events Table Template add-on gives event managers a simple and easy-to-use system that lets you edit 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 web developers build custom templates using one of the included templates as a source template.
- MailChimp Integration Addon: The MailChimp addon lets you automatically register participants to a chosen mailing autoresponder list or group within your MailChimp account.
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 latest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
User Feedback
Here are a few of the testimonials that satisfied plugin users have posted about Event Espresso:
”Event Espresso is one of the nicest Event Managers (WP Plugin) I have come across.” Joe Distefano, Citizen Joe
”You can tell that the Event Espresso team is really passionate about their work, and that they care and spend a lot of time helping people work with their plugin and use it with their events – it’s something every WordPress service should aim for.” Ryan Imel, WPCandy
”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 a motivational speaker, presenter, event planner, or event management professional, there are simply unlimited possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, search the user forum for tips and practical ways to streamline your event management process and enhance the experience of your attendees.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with most WP plugins and themes that follow standard WP development guidelines. If you do need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive end-user support, as so many of its satisfied clients confirm:
”No complaints here. Satisfied customer. You can teach us all few things about customer service. Thanks!” Charles
The plugin provides exceptional support that includes access to support forums, comprehensive 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.
In addition, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can depend on to run your events.
Plugin Pricing
Event Espresso is available in a range of editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software functionality, however, you should consider downloading one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This enables you to set up Event Espresso on one domain only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This edition enables you to run Event Espresso on 1 site only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Edition – This enables you to configure Event Espresso on five domains. 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 depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the software sells for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Management
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this review was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the site.
Additional Plugin Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding 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 online documentation pages 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 report bugs and share feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event booking and ticketing management plugin, used by thousands of people.
If you own a WordPress-powered web site and you intend to run any event that requires managing dates, times and venues (offline and online), enrolling participants, and reserving tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso
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