Does your company currently run or plan to run events that require co-ordinating bookings or registrations, such as seminars, community classes, charity fund-raisers, social events, or even a big event such as a show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event registrations is a time-consuming process. You will most likely have to manage scheduling, date availability, attendee numbers, data collection and admin, payments and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to event attendees.
There are a number of advantages to setting up an online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower costs, help you easily copy settings for repeat events, give event managers more control, improve client experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be costly.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-powered website or blog, you can set up an inexpensive and highly professional online event booking solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress allows you to easily create multiple events and begin processing registrations literally in minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and accept online bookings)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed application that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
Customize registration forms
You can employ a range of event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up ticket sales, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your participants, or integrating your event registration forms with social media sites like Facebook.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Note: Currently, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is fundamentally different than the older Event Espresso 3, as it has been rebuilt using a different structure to allow for future growth and expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually phase out Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and features of using this plugin.
To learn more about the plugin go here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just some of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current website or blog into a fully-featured event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by practically doing away with the need to process registrations manually.
Basically, you are enabling event attendees to register themselves.
Letting your participants to do the data entry frees up your time and lets you invest more of your resources on planning a memorable event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover shortly, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and booking process that you want your customers to experience.
Additional benefits include the following:
- Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own software or using a third-party service provider. The cost is kept low through a model where users purchase the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then buy add-ons only if you need added features.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new registrations outside traditional business hours. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing features (see below) let people interested in attending your event invite their friends who may also be interested in attending.
- Green Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign up process remains entirely in digital form, eliminating typical paper consumption from tasks associated with administration.
- All Information Belongs To You. You control all the data you collect from event participants.
Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to users through standard features (these come with the software) and optional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many features to WP users. Here are just some:
- Fast and easy to install and configure. Ready to start accepting registrations in very little time.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso lets you create as many types of tickets as you need and specify separate prices, limits on ticket quantities, and more.
- Customizable Event And Registration Page Designs. Match your web site’s look and feel for your events and signup page using Event Espresso’s limitless template options and components, plus HTML or CSS.
- Ticket Selector. Present several ticket options to prospects so they can purchase the ticket(s) that best fits their needs.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your WordPress theme and display venue details throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types let event managers create new prices that adjust the base ticket price of your system-default ticket.
- Discount And Promotional Codes. Provide promotion and discount codes to incentivize people to make a decision now, or simply make your events more attractive for price-sensitive customers. This is also practical if you want to sell out events close to timelines.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. EE 4 lets you know who your clients are and how you’ve done past business with them. The Contact Profile page stores updated records such as the name, biography, contact information, event registration history, private comments, etc. about each customer.
- Waiting Lists. Prospective attendees can subscribe to a waiting list if your event has reached capacity. You can also specify that waiting list registrants pre-pay if you plan to add more capacity for the event.
- XML RSS Event Feeds. Automatically update site readers, bring in more visitors and widen your content reach with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Keyword-Rich URLs. Keyword rich event page Web links take advantage of your WordPress site’s Permalinks configuration settings. Search engine friendly permalinks that use relevant keywords add to the context of your pages and is favored by search engines, helping you bring a more targeted audience to your website.
- Easy Event Management. Event Espresso puts event managers in full control of all aspects of an event’s registration and ticketing processes, and also lets you automate the process with event management tools that include staff and venue management, custom event page designs, payment processing and handling, list waiting, attendee limits, print-ready tickets and more.
- Default Tickets. If you create identical tickets for your events, you can set one of those tickets as your default ticket for any new events simply by ticking a checkbox.
- Venue Manager. The venue manager feature in Event Espresso 4 allows information about a venue to appear throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front-end of your site to inform users of the location of your event. The venue record has many of the standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also displays venue details such as venue seating capacity, venue site URL, venue phone number, physical and virtual location, directions map, etc. You can also display all of your venues on different areas on your theme as well as on a venue archive page on your site where you can set up and reuse venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a specific venue.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso gives you access to a community of experienced event managers, programmers, web designers, marketers and business owners who also use the plugin. You can engage with other members of the Event Espresso community using their community chat room, support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Social Sharing. Event participants and your site visitors can spread the word about your event using social sharing buttons.
- Accurate Event Participant Manager. You control your attendees’ information; who has enrolled, which event they have booked and how much they paid. With the attendee manager, you can get an overview of registered participants and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export an event attendee list to Excel for additional reports, send customized payment reminders and receipts and send messages to your attendees individually or all at once.
Extra features include:
- Hooks, Actions & Filters. These features allow you to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso application that are compatible with WordPress.
- Control Box Management & Organization. Event Espresso leverages the WP user interface, which brings the ability to reorder the user interface to suit your workflow process. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or deleted from your page.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value: According to the mission statement on their 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 and highly effective model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also comes with 40+ added features, including:
- Duplicating events – streamlines the need to re-enter event information when adding new events.
- Default surcharge (the same as adding a service tax to each ticket).
- Option to skip the confirmation page in the registration process.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As well as a comprehensive array of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow end-users to significantly enhance the capabilities of events.
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, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Management Add-on: The Recurring Events management add on lets you put your events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months ahead. You can create as many events in the future as you like. Event Espresso will automatically open and close bookings for all recurring events.
- Events Category Accordion Template Addon: The Category Accordion template shows categories in a simple list. Clicking the category name shows all events associated with that category and closes any previously open categories.
- EE4 Events Social Sharing Add on: This addon adds social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that lets your attendees to share a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after registration.
- Custom Files Add-on: The Custom Files addon allows you to override certain aspects of the plugin.
- Seating Chart Addon: The seating chart add on is great 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 allows you to offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart addon lets you manage the environment for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach single prices to every seat.
- EE4 Event Ticketing And Bar Scanning Add on: The Ticketing addon adds the ability to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add on adds the capacity 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. Registrants can either print out their tickets or display them on their mobile devices. The barcode scanner can be used for checking in or checking out attendees and to validate tickets.
- EE4 Events Table View Template Addon: The Events Table Template add-on gives event managers a simple and easy-to-use system that allows you to edit 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 templates provided as a source template.
- JSON API Add on: The Event Espresso JSON API add-on allows other software applications, online tools, mobile apps, etc… to access your Event Espresso data through an API (Application Programming Interface).
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin, including new add ons.
To learn more about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
Testimonials
Here are a few of the testimonials that satisfied users have written about Event Espresso:
”EventEspresso saves us money, saves our secretary 16-24 hours and looks so professionally done that people ask us how we do it; which we happily tell them, “Event Espresso, and be sure to get the ticketing add-on.”” David, House of Prayer
”This really is a hell of a plugin. For me, it’s probably the final nail in the coffin for Joomla, as WP can now pretty much do EVERYTHING Joomla does, but better. Love the simplicity of this plugin!” Sam, Web Contempo
”At first we looked at CVENT for one of our clients and they wanted $16,000 per year for 3000 event attendees + fees totaling $22k. That is before Staff and Webinar fees. Worst of all we had to prepay the $16k amount even if we never used all 3000 attendees. That was when we looked at Event Espresso and we realized we could build our own event system for less than 16K. For the most part we have been very satisfied with our decision. The real ROI will come next year when they don’t have to pay another 16k-22K! Over the next 5-6 years we should be able to claim that we saved the company over $100,000 – Thanks Event Espresso!” David Waterman (Long Version), KT Benefits & InkItDigital.com
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, trainer, workshop promoter, or event management consultant, there are just countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, go through the forums for inspiration and practical suggestions to improve your event management and registration process or improve the experience of your customers.
Product Support
Event Espresso is compatible with other WordPress plugins and themes that follow WP coding standards. If you find that you need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent user support, as many of its plugin end-users confirm:
”It’s magical. Support is amazing, plugin is simple to use, a 3 year old could use the iPhone app…it all is very impressive and professional.” David, House of Prayer
The software provides robust support including access to support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, custom development 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 a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely software you can count on to run and manage your events.
Software Price
Event Espresso is available in a number of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software functionality, however, you need to consider purchasing one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This lets you set up Event Espresso on one site only. It includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This license option allows you to set up Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This option enables you to set up Event Espresso on five sites. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Current pricing for the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Presently, the software sells for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing: Event Espresso – Event Manager & Registration Software For WordPress
Note: The above reflects the pricing 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 plugin. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the plugin’s documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to a particular use-case, or to notify developers about bugs and leave feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event booking and ticketing manager plugin, used by thousands of businesses.
If you own a WordPress website and you currently run events that involve scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), booking participants, and/or selling seating, then you will probably not find a better solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Manager
***
