Does your business currently run or plan to run events that require co-ordinating registrations, such as seminars, group classes, not-for-profit fund-raisers, marketing functions, or even a large-scale event like a trade exhibit, 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 complex and time-consuming process. You need to manage scheduling, available dates and seating, participant numbers, data administration, payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders and notifications, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to event participants.
There are lots of benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower costs, help you easily duplicate repeat events, give you more control, improve user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event registration system can be quite costly.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-powered web site, you can easily install an inexpensive and highly professional online event booking system.
Presenting …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily schedule your event and begin accepting registrations in minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and accept online event bookings)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can employ a number of event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up selling tickets, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your event attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media and autoresponders.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is fundamentally different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the plugin has been revamped 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 company plans to eventually retire EE 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
More info:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just a few 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 current website or blog into a feature-rich and professional event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by practically eliminating the need to process registrations manually.
Basically, you are enabling event participants to perform the registration on their own.
Allowing your customers to do all of the data themselves frees you up from doing admin work and lets you direct more time on delivering a more unique event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will see in a moment, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management process that you want your customers to experience.
Additional plugin benefits include:
- Reduced Costs: The Event Espresso plugin is a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd-party service. This is made possible by using a model where users pay for the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then buy add-ons when you need new functionality.
- Higher Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online event registrations 24 hrs a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social and marketing add-ons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event share your information with their friends who may also be interested in attending.
- Green Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign-up process can be performed entirely in digital form, eliminating traditional paper waste from tasks related to admin and record-storage.
- All Data Belongs To You. You own all the information acquired from your event participants.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to its customers via built-in features (these are included with the plugin) and additional features that users can buy for an additional cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many unique built-in to site owners. Here are just a few:
- Quick and simple to install and use. Be up and running in no time.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso allows you to set up as many different types of tickets as you need and set different pricing options, maximum number of tickets, etc.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Participants can easily find your events and add these to their schedule with the calendar.
- Ticket Selector. Present multiple ticket options to registrants and let them choose the ticket(s) that best suits their needs.
- Smart Single Page Checkout. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is smart, fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically duplicate the primary attendee’s registration details for any added attendees.
- Default Price Types. Price types let event managers create new prices that adjust the default ticket price of the default ticket.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system allows you to validate tickets, speed up in-venue registrations, create various check-in “stations” and track participants.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of registering event attendees when they show up, or send in paper-based forms for manual processing later.
- Event Manager Pre-approval. Be selective about who can and cannot register for your events.
- Private Notes On Contacts. Keep observations about users on their profile and how you’ve assisted them. Private notes helps you keep a record of when users contacted you, your internal observations, and how you’ve interacted with them.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events enable you to build an event over multiple sessions without displaying it live on your site. You can continue working on your event until you are ready to publish it on your site, or schedule to publish your event pages at a later time and date.
- Full Control Of Your Event Management. Event Espresso puts event managers in complete control of every aspect of your event’s registration and ticketing processes, and allows you to automate this process with event management tools that include staff and venue manager, customizable event designs, payment processing, list waiting, limits on attendees, print-ready tickets and more.
- Import Events. Event Espresso 4 provides a CSV-based importing capability that allows you to quickly upload a lot of event data at once. You can export, edit and import information about events, datetimes, ticketing details, pricing, custom registration questions, venue info, terms, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Venue Profiles. The venue manager in EE 4 lets details about venues to appear throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front-end of your website to inform visitors of the location of your event. The venue profile has many of the standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also lets you add details such as venue capacity, venue website, phone number, physical, directions map, etc. You can also list venue profiles in various sections on your WordPress 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 every event you have booked for a given venue.
- Registrant Profiles. Manage each registrant’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their data organized and easily within reach.
- Staff Management. Save time and keep your business organized by reusing staff profiles for multiple events or displaying profile information such as team member’s contact information, resume and photo using a shortcode in any event description.
- Categorize Events. If you have several different event types such as free and paid, conference speakers and breakout sessions, different kinds of courses, etc. you can categorize these to help your registrants to locate what they’re looking for. You can display all events in a category on a custom event category page, make the events searchable by category, and color-code your events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make them easier to find, in addition to suggesting other events in the categories that interest your existing customers.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows web-based software developers to have more control and options over your content and how the information displays to your site visitors.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 allows you to generate a log file with debugging data that can be useful for web developers who are potential software problems.
- Autonomy, Flexibility And Value: According to the philosophy stated 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 mission, the company operates on 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 over 40 additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – streamlines the need to re-enter event details when creating new events.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing a group of questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page in registration.
Addons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow customers to significantly expand the capabilities of the event management process.
Some of these addons 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 Dropdown Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes events with many datetimes into a dropdown list.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add on: The Category Accordion template displays event categories in a simple list. Clicking a category name shows the events associated with that category and closes any previously open categories.
- Social Media Buttons Addon: The social media add-on displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media addon comes free with all of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration add-on allows you to take full advantage of the WordPress user system. With the WP User Integration add-on you can give users a special incentive by offering member pricing and overriding event prices when your members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered users of the website can have access to these special events. Members can also store personal details into their profile page allowing them to quickly register for events by auto-filling in their personal information on the event registration form. Your users can also look up event history and pay for events.
- Seating Chart Add-on: The seating chart add-on is suitable for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is perfect for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart addon lets you offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues right from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart add-on lets you control the environment for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to each seat.
- EE4 Event Ticketing And Bar Scanning Add on: The Ticketing add on adds the ability to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add-on gives you the ability to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing addon 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 mobile app can be used for checking in or checking out registrants and to validate tickets.
- Events Table View Template Addon: The Events Table Template addon provides event managers 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 enables developers to build their own custom templates using one of the included templates as a base template.
- JSON API Addon: The new Event Espresso JSON API add-on permits other applications, web tools, mobile apps, etc… to access your Event Espresso data through an Application Programming Interface (API).
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 add-ons, visit the plugin website here:
User Testimonials
Here are just some of the many great testimonials that plugin users have posted about Event Espresso:
”Tri-South, Inc is using Event Espresso to manage the course catalog, event ticketing, and class registration. [As their developer] I have customized a few items to make the site and plugin a seamless integration. The client is very pleased!” Jenifer Design
“I just completed my first event using Event Espresso. I really believe without Event Espresso my event would not have been the success it was.” Cathy Earle, Women Only Weekend
”Event Espresso plugin still rocks. Saw you guys were up for the WP Honors too. Glad I paid for it! If you need event management on your WordPress site I recommend Event Espresso.” Patrick Allmond, Focus Consulting
Plugin Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, presenter, conference promoter, or event management consultant, there are just endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, go through the support forum for tips and practical ways to streamline your event management process or improve the experience of your attendees.
Support
Event Espresso works with with other WP plugins and themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great support, as so many of its plugin 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 comprehensive support that includes access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase 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 an established team of experienced WordPress web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can count on to run your events.
Software Price
Event Espresso is available in a range of editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software features, however, you need to consider purchasing one of the ”Pro” plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This edition allows you to run Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This license lets you install Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License – This lets you set up Event Espresso on five sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Current pricing for the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the software is selling for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing when this review was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the site.
Additional Plugin Information
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.
Use the software’s documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to your specific situation, or to report errors and share feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WP event registration and ticketing manager plugin, used and trusted by thousands of WP users.
If you own a WordPress-powered site and you plan to run any event that requires scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), enrolling participants, or booking tickets, then you will probably not find a better solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
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