Do you currently run or plan to run events that require co-ordinating registrations, such as seminars, training classes, not-for-profit fundraisers, networking functions, or even a big event such as a trade exhibit, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event bookings can be a time-consuming process. You have to manage scheduling, available dates and seating, registration numbers, data processing and storage, payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to attendees.
There are a number of benefits to setting up an automated web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower costs, help you easily duplicate previously-run events, give you more control, improve client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that this can be costly.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-powered site, you can set up a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event registration system.
Presenting …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily set up your event and start accepting registrations literally in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and take online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich application that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can employ various event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your event participants, or integrating your event bookings with social media and autoresponders.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso provides 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 platform has been revamped using a different structure to accommodate future expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually migrate completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
To learn more about the plugin go here:
Benefits
Here are just some of the many benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current online presence into a fully-featured event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by virtually doing away with the need to process registrations and bookings manually.
Basically, you are facilitating event participants to complete the enrollment process themselves.
Allowing your clients to do the data entry frees you up from doing admin work and lets you direct more of your energy on delivering a more unique event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon learn, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management process that you want your customers to experience.
Additional plugin benefits include:
- Less Costs: The Event Espresso plugin is a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own solution or using a 3rd-party service provider. The cost is kept low by using a model where users start with the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and buy optional addons when you need added functionality.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept online registrations any time of day or night. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing addons (see below) let people interested in attending your event invite friends who may also be interested.
- Green Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, your event registration process can be completed wholly online, eliminating typical paper consumption from tasks associated with administration.
- Own Your Data. You own all the information you obtain from event participants.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to users through built-in features (these come with the plugin) and optional features that users can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers a number of features to WordPress users. Here are just some of these:
- Fast and easy to install and configure. Be up and running in no time.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso lets you create as many kinds of tickets as you want and set prices, number of tickets, and more.
- Customizable Event Designs. Customize your events and registrations page using Event Espresso’s unlimited template options and parts, plus HTML and/or CSS.
- Ticket Selector. Present several ticket options to registrants so they can choose the ticket(s) that best suits their needs.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your theme and display contact details throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Prices. Set up events quickly with pre-configured default prices.
- Discount And Promotional Codes. Offer promotional and discount codes to incentivize visitors to make a purchasing decision now, or simply make your offers more appealing for price-sensitive customers. This is also practical if you want to sell-out events close to timelines.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of booking event attendees at the door, or sending in paper-based forms for manual processing later.
- No-Ticket Events. You can list events without requiring participants to book tickets. Event Espresso can be used for any form of event, not just those that require tickets.
- Private Contact Notes. Keep comments about contacts on their profile and how you have helped them. Private notes helps you keep a record of when users contacted you, your internal observations, and how you have helped your customers.
- Draft Events. Draft events let you develop an event at your own leisure without publishing it to your site. You can continue developing your event pages until you are ready to publish it live on your site, or schedule your event to publish at a future date and time.
- 15+ Languages. Event Espresso is being translated into over 15 languages, with more languages planned.
- Default Tickets. If you create identical tickets for most of your events, you can set one of those tickets as your default ticket for the next event simply by ticking a checkbox.
- Multiple Participant Enrolments. Event Espresso 4 allows an individual or people to buy multiple tickets and different ticket types simultaneously. Event managers specify how many attendees are able to enrol in a single registration by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Attendee Records. Manage each attendee’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their information organized.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential event clients who have not fully paid for their booking with a standard but personalized invoice with just one click. Your invoices will address registered participants who have not paid their registration yet by name, give them the amount they owe, and include a link to the event, a payment link and a link where they can download a PDF invoice.
- Attendee Reports. Event reports provides you with data of the registrations and transactions, allowing you to track the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and how much money you have collected.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows web developers to have more control and options over your events and how the information displays to visitors.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 lets you create a log file with debugging data which can be helpful for developers who are troubleshooting.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And Value: 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 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 includes over 40 added features, including:
- Live-filtering when searching for events inside the Event Espresso admin.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing a series of questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page in registration.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
In addition to an incredible array of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow customers to further enhance 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 the event does not have a featured image, a default image will be used instead.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Template Add-on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize 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 also be customized to display an event thumbnail image instead of the date.
- Social Coupons Integration Addon: If your site is featured on Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can also specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- Custom Template Add on: The Custom Template add-on can display your events in a variety of exciting and interesting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Addon Editions: This add on lets you include other staff in your organization to help manage your events 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 give them different permissions with different privileges, allowing others to help you manage your events or events that other people create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain sections of your WordPress 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 Multiple Event registration add-on gives your 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 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.
- EE4 Events Table View Template Addon: The Events Table Template add-on provides event managers with a simple and easy-to-use system that lets you change the design 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 their own custom templates using one of the included templates as a source template.
- MailChimp Integration Addon: The MailChimp addon lets you auto-register attendees to a particular mailing list or group within MailChimp.
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 add-ons, check out the plugin here:
Testimonials
Below are some of the many great testimonials that plugin users have posted 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
”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’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 an education services provider, teacher, event planner, or event management professional, there are simply countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered owner, search the user forum for inspiration and practical ways to streamline your event management workflow and improve the experience of your event attendees.
Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with all 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 highly responsive end-user support, as so many of its satisfied users confirm:
“I’m really impressed with not only the application itself but the support. I have rarely seen such a responsive support staff than at EE. They rock…I highly recommend this plugin!” sock2me
Event Espresso provides robust support including access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, email 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 software you can count on to run your events.
Product Cost
Event Espresso is available in various editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin options, however, you should consider using one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This enables you to configure Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This license option lets you install Event Espresso on one domain only. It includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This allows you to run Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Pricing details of the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. When we last checked, the software is selling for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Management
Please Note: The pricing above was current when this review was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin author when you visit the website.
Additional Info
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up 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 your particular use-case, or to report errors and share feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event booking and ticketing management plugin, used and trusted by thousands of people.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you plan to run events that require managing dates, times and venues, booking participants, and/or selling tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Ticket Registration Plugin
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