Do you currently run or plan to run events that need to accept bookings or registrations, such as workshops, community classes, non-profit fundraisers, corporate functions, or even a big event like a music show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups is a complicated and time-consuming process. You will probably need to manage event schedules, dates, attendee numbers, data collection, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders and notifications, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to event participants.
There are lots of benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily replicate previous events, give event managers more control, improve user experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event booking system can be costly.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-based site, you can easily install a very inexpensive and highly professional online event booking solution.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Registration Plugin
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP allows you to easily schedule multiple events and begin accepting online registrations in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and accept online bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can employ various event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up ticket sales, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your event attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media and email marketing software.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is impressively different than the older EE 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 pricing. The company plans to eventually retire Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and features of using this plugin.
Learn more about the plugin here:
Benefits
Here are just some of the many 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 online presence into a fully-featured and automated 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 even 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 chore of processing registrations manually.
Basically, you are enabling event participants to complete the enrollment process by themselves.
Allowing your enrollees to do the data themselves frees up your time and lets you focus more of your attention on planning a memorable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon learn, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and registration process that you want your clients to experience.
Some additional plugin benefits include:
- Significantly Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin is a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third-party service provider. This is made possible by using a model where users pay for the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and purchase optional addons when you need extra functionality.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept new signups 24 hours a day. In addition, Event Espresso social and marketing addons (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with others who may be interested.
- Green Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign-up process can be conducted wholly online, significantly reducing typical paper consumption from tasks related to enrollment.
- Own Your Data. You own all the information you collect from your event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
The Event Espresso software delivers functionality to its customers via standard features (these are included with the software) and optional features that you can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers a number of built-in to web site owners. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and easy to install and set up. Ready to use in no time.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In EE 4, events can have multiple dates and times (datetimes), and these can be managed from a single event.
- Custom Notification Email Message. Easily set up customized automated registration and payment notification emails to communicate with event attendees.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso provides integration with several payment gateways, allowing you to collect payments prior to running your events.
- Smart Single Page Checkout. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically copy the primary registrant’s information for any additional participants.
- Default Prices. Set up events quickly by pre-configuring default pricing.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 comes with three useful in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Event Check-In List. Generate an exportable list of event participants and check in everyone who has attended.
- Ticketless Events. You can set up events without the requirement for attendees to select tickets. Event Espresso can be used for all kinds of events, not only when tickets are for sale.
- RSS Event Feeds. Automatically update your users, bring in more visitors and reach a wider number of prospects with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Works With The Most Recent Version Of WP. The EE 4 user interface follows the WordPress guidelines to help you build visually attractive event pages that are responsive and mobile-friendly.
- Country Settings. You can configure the country and currency settings to be used throughout Event Espresso, including currency, currency symbols, decimal characters and places, country codes, regions, etc.
- Default Tickets. If you create similar tickets for many of your events, you can set up as your default ticket for all new events simply by ticking a checkbox.
- WYSIWYG Editor. Event Espresso uses the default WordPress WYSIWYG editor, allowing you to quickly and easily add graphic images and create your event descriptions without having to know HTML or CSS, just like any WordPress post.
- Automatic Updating. Event Espresso provides simple one-click plugin installation updating to ensure that you have the latest features and to keep your installation compatible with new versions of WordPress.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential attendees who have not fully paid for their admission with a standard but personalized invoice with one click of a button. Your invoices will address registered customers who have not paid their registration in full by name, give them the balance owing, and include a link to the event information, a payment link and a url where they can download a PDF invoice.
- Accurate Attendee Manager. You have control of your participants’ details; who has enrolled, for what event and how much they’ve paid. With the attendee manager, you can get an overview of registered attendees and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export an attendee list to a CSV file for additional reports, send customized payment reminders and receipts and send messages to your attendees individually or as a group.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows developers to have more control and options over your content and how the information displays to your prospective event participants.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. EE 4 allows you to generate a log file with debugging data which can be helpful for developers who are troubleshooting.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And Value For Money: According to the mission statement on their website, Event Espresso’s aim 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 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+ added features, including:
- Email shortcodes that includes registrant data in emails and newsletters.
- Default surcharge (similar to adding a service fee to all tickets).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Add ons
In addition to a very large array of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow end-users to further expand the capabilities of managing an event.
Some of these add-ons include:
- Events Grid Template Addon: 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 available, a default image will be used instead.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Template Addon: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize events with multiple datetimes into a drop-down list.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add on: The Category Accordion template displays event categories as a simple list. Clicking the category name displays all events related to that category and closes previously open categories.
- Events Social Sharing Addon: This add-on adds 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.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration add-on lets you take advantage of the WordPress user system. With the WP User Integration addon you can give your 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 users of the website will have access to your special events. Members can also enter personal details into their profile page allowing them to quickly register for events by auto-filling in their personal information on the event booking form. Users can also view event history and make payment for new events.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add-on Versions: This add-on lets you involve other users 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 WordPress users roles and assign them different permissions with different privileges, so your staff can help you manage your events or the events that other people create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain sections of your WP dashboard and/or certain areas 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 Add-on: The Multi-Event registration add-on gives 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 shopping 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 Addon: This WordPress events calendar displays events and categories of events in a nice graphical calendar.
- JSON API Add on: The Event Espresso JSON API add on allows other software applications, web sites, mobile apps, etc… to access your Event Espresso information through an API (Application Programming Interface).
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin, including new add-ons.
For complete details about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, visit the plugin website:
Customer Feedback
Below are some of the many great testimonials that satisfied customers have written 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 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
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, teacher, show promoter, or event professional, there are simply endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a registered owner, go through the support forum for useful ideas and practical ways to streamline your event management process or improve the experience of your event registrants.
Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with most WP plugins and WordPress themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent technical support, as so many of its users confirm:
”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 support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase 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 a well-staffed team of experienced web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can depend on to run your events.
Product Cost
Event Espresso is available in a number of editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin options, however, you should consider downloading one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This edition allows you to run Event Espresso on one domain only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This lets you set up Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This allows you to install Event Espresso on five domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The price of the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. When we last checked, the plugin sells for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Manager
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing when this article was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin seller when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Plugin Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the plugin’s documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to a specific situation, or to report issues and share feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event booking and ticketing management plugin, used by thousands of companies.
If you own a WordPress-powered website and you intend to run events that require managing dates, times and venues, registering participants, and reserving tickets, then you will probably not find a better software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
***