Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that need handling bookings, such as seminars, group courses, not-for-profit fund-raisers, networking events, or even a big event such as a school concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Managing event registrations can be a complex process. You have to manage event schedules, dates, attendee numbers, data collection, collecting payments and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to event registrants.
There are a number of advantages 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 recurring events, give event managers more control, improve user experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that this can be costly.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-powered digital presence, you can easily set up a very inexpensive and professional online event registration solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress allows you to easily set up your event and start receiving online registrations in just minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and accept online bookings)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
Customize registration forms
You can use a number 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 attendees, 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 article, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their software: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is fundamentally different than the older EE 3, as the plugin has been redeveloped using a different structure to enable future expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually retire Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and advantages of this plugin.
Learn more here:
Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website or blog into a fully-featured and automated event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by literally eliminating the chore of processing registrations manually.
Essentially, you are enabling attendees to register themselves.
Letting your enrollees to do all of the data themselves frees you up from doing admin work and lets you invest more attention on delivering a memorable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn shortly, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management process that you want your clients to experience.
Additional plugin benefits include:
- Significantly Lower Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third party provider. This is made possible through a model where Event Espresso users pay for the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and buy addons only if you need new features.
- More Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept new registrations outside traditional business hours. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social features and add ons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event invite friends who may be interested.
- Green Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign up process can be completed entirely online, significantly reducing typical paper waste from tasks associated with enrollment.
- All Information Belongs To You. You own all the information you acquire from your event participants.
Plugin Features
The Event Espresso software delivers functionality to end-users through standard features (these come with the plugin) and additional features that you can buy for an added cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many features to WP users. Here are just some of these:
- Quick and simple to install and implement. Ready to start accepting registrations in very little time.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In Event Espresso 4, events can have many dates and times (datetimes), that these can be managed from one single event.
- Event Calendar. Attendees can easily see your upcoming events and add these to their schedule using a WordPress calendar.
- Ticket Selector. Present several ticket options to prospects so they can choose the ticket(s) that will best fit their needs.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration allows you to configure the settings of Google Maps on your event listing and event details pages.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow event managers to create new prices that adjust the default ticket price of your default ticket.
- Discount Codes. Provide promotion and multiple discount codes to incentivize people to make a decision now, or make your offerings more appealing for others. Also useful if you want to increase sales of events close to deadlines.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of attendees and check in everyone who attends.
- Waiting Lists. Prospective participants can join a waiting list if your event has reached the limit of attendees. Additionally, you can specify that waiting list attendees pre-pay if you plan to expand capacity for the event.
- Public Commenting. Add “social proof” by allowing potential prospects to ask questions about your event and past participants to post reviews that can help others choose whether or not to register. Moderation settings for public commenting are specified using the WP default commenting settings.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events let you build an event at your own leisure without displaying it live on your site. You can keep editing your event pages until you are ready to publish it live to your site, or schedule your event pages to publish at a future date and time.
- Your Organization Settings. Configure your profile to be used throughout the software and your WP themes. Organization information include: company name, street address, city, state, country, zip/postal code, email address, phone, tax number, business logo, Facebook profile URL, Twitter URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ URL, Instagram URL.
- Upload Event Data. EE 4 provides a CSV-based importing feature that enables you to quickly upload bulk event data all at one time. You can export, edit and import data for events, datetimes, tickets, pricing, custom registration questions, venues, terminology, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Venue Manager. The venue manager in Event Espresso 4 allows details about venues to be made available throughout the Event Espresso admin and the public areas of your website to inform attendees of your event’s location. The venue record displays many standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also displays details such as venue seating capacity, venue website, phone number, physical, map, etc. You can also display all of your venues in different parts of your WordPress theme and 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 particular venue.
- Attendee Profiles. You can manage each registrant’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their data organized and easily accessible.
- Team Member Management. Save time and keep your data organized by reusing staff member profiles for multiple events or displaying profile information such as team member’s contact information, resume and photo using a shortcode in your event description.
- Categorize Events. If you have several different event types like free and paid, conference speakers and mastermind sessions, different types of courses, etc. you can categorize them to help event registrants to locate what they’re searching for. You can list all the events in a category on a custom event category page, make the events searchable by category, and colour-code your events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make them easier to find, in addition to suggesting new events in the categories that appeal to your visitors.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows developers to have more control and options over your events and how the information displays to prospects.
- Control Box Management And Reorganization. Event Espresso lets you leverage the WordPress user interface, which brings the ability to reconfigure the user interface to match your workflow. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or deleted from your workflow configuration.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & Value For Money: According to the philosophy stated on their web site, 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 mission, the company operates on 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 comes with over 40 additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes for including customer data in emails and email updates.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse commonly asked questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As well as a very large number of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow end-users to further enhance the functionality of managing your event.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display your scheduled events by location. 4 maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Manager Addon: The Recurring Events management addon allows you to put events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months … even years in advance. You can add as many future events as you like. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close bookings for all recurring events.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add-on: The Category Accordion template displays categories as a simple list. Clicking a category name displays the events related to that category and closes any previously open categories.
- Social Coupons Integration Add on: If your website 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 provides PHP files that let you bypass certain aspects of the plugin.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Addon Versions: This add-on lets you involve your staff in the event management process and give new users the capacity to create events or regional managers the capacity 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 others to help you manage your events or events that others create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain areas of your WP dashboard and/or certain sections 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 addon gives potential attendees the ability to register for multiple events at once. In each event listing registrants 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.
- Events Table View Template Add on: The Events Table Template addon provides event managers with an 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 enables developers to design their own custom templates using one of the templates provided as a source template.
- JSON API Add-on: The Event Espresso JSON API addon enables other applications, websites, mobile applications, etc… to access your Event Espresso data through an API (Application Programming Interface).
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add-ons.
For more information about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
Testimonials
Here are just some of the many great testimonials that plugin users have posted about Event Espresso:
”My clients have used Event Espresso for Transportation (Cadet Bus for leave), Parties (tailgates and brewery tours), and Horse-back riding lessons and camps. What a terrific plug-in and fantastic support from Seth!” Nina, Blue Iris Web Design
”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
”Just bought an Event Espresso license for an upcoming conference website we are working on. The custom registration forms functionality rocks!” Eric Sopp, Inside Design
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, teacher, seminar promoter, or event management professional, there are simply endless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered owner, go through the user forum for useful ideas and practical ways to improve your event management and registration process and improve the experience of your participants.
Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with most WP plugins and WordPress themes that follow standard WordPress coding rules. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive user support, as many of its satisfied end-users attest:
”No complaints here. Satisfied customer. You can teach us all few things about customer service. Thanks!” Charles
Event Espresso provides incredible support with access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledge base 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 an established team of experienced web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can depend on to run your events.
Plugin Price
Event Espresso is available in different editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin options, however, you should consider purchasing one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal License Edition – This allows you to configure Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This option lets you run Event Espresso on 1 site only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Edition – This edition enables you to install Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Price details for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Presently, the software is being retailed for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticket Registration System For WordPress
Please Note: The pricing above was current at the time this review was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin developer when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Info
Event Espresso regularly adds 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.
Search the software’s online documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to your particular use-case, or to notify developers about bugs and give feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product web site.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the leading WP event booking and ticketing manager plugin, used by thousands of event managers.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you plan to run events that involve scheduling dates, times and venues (offline and online), enrolling attendees, or booking tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better software for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
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