Does your business currently run or plan to run events that need co-ordinating bookings, such as workshops, group classes, not-for-profit fund raisers, social events, or even a large-scale event like an arts & crafts, 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 process. You may be required to manage scheduling, availability, participant numbers, data collection and storage, payments and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to attendees.
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 copy settings for recurring events, give event managers more control, create a more enjoyable client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that this can be quite expensive.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-powered website or blog, you can install an inexpensive and professional web-based event booking system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily create your event and start receiving online bookings in just a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and process online bookings)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can use a number of event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up ticket-selling, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media sites like Facebook.
View detailed information about event attendees
Note: Currently, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is fundamentally different than the older EE 3, as the plugin has been redeveloped using a different structure to enable future growth. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually phase out Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and features of using this plugin.
More info:
Benefits
Here are just some of the many benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website into a feature-rich and professional event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by literally eliminating the chore of processing registrations manually.
Basically, you are facilitating event attendees to enroll themselves.
Allowing your customers to do all of the data entry frees up your time and lets you focus more of your attention on organizing a more unique event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover shortly, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and registration process that you want your users to experience.
Additional benefits of the plugin include the following:
- Reduced Costs: Event Espresso gives you an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own software or using a 3rd party service provider. The cost is kept to a minimum by using a model where Event Espresso users buy the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and purchase add ons when you need additional features.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept online event signups 24/7. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social add ons (see below) let people interested in attending your event invite their friends who may also be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign-up process remains entirely in digital form, reducing traditional paper waste from tasks related to administration.
- All Information Belongs To You. You control all the data collected from event attendees.
Plugin Features
The Event Espresso software delivers functionality to its customers through built-in features (these come with the software) and optional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of great built-in to site owners. Here are just some:
- Fast and simple to install and implement. Ready to start using in no time.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso lets you create multiple ticket types and specify unique pricing options, number of tickets, etc.
- Customizable Event Page Designs. Create a unique look and feel for your events and enrollments page using Event Espresso’s template options and parts, and HTML and/or CSS.
- Ticket Selector. Present multiple ticket options to prospective registrants and let them purchase the ticket(s) that best fits their needs.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your WordPress theme and reuse venue data throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types let you create new prices that adjust the default ticket price of your default ticket.
- In-App Documentation Systems. Event Espresso 4 includes 3 useful in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. EE 4 provides you with the tools to gain a better understanding of who your clients are and how they have done business with you.
- Waiting Lists. Latecomers can join a waiting list if your event has reached maximum attendance. You can also make it a requirement wait-list members pay for their spots if you plan to add more capacity for your event.
- Private Contact Notes. Keep comments about users on their profile. Private commenting lets you keep records of when event registrants contacted you, your internal comments, and how you’ve helped your contacts.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events let you build an event at your own leisure without displaying it live on your website. You can work on your events until you are ready to publish it live on your site, or schedule your event page to publish at a future date and time.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your profile to display throughout the software and your WP themes. Your organization data include: business name, address, city, state, country, zip/postal code, email address, phone number, VAT/tax number, logo, Facebook URL, Twitter URL, LinkedIn URL, Pinterest profile URL, Google+ URL, Instagram URL.
- Default Tickets. If you create similar tickets for your events, you can easily set one of those tickets as your default ticket for any new events simply by checking a box.
- WYSIWYG Editor. Event Espresso uses the built-in WP Visual editor, so you can quickly and easily insert graphic images and format your content without knowledge of HTML or CSS, just like any WordPress post or page.
- Registrant Records. Manage your attendee’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their records organized and easily within reach.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential attendees who have not paid in full for their enrollment with a standard but personalized PDF invoice with one click of a button. Your invoices will address registered customers who have not paid their registration in full by name, display the amount they owe, and include a link to the event, a payment link and a link to download a PDF invoice.
- Accurate Participant Management. You control your participants’ records; who has registered, 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 customizable payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your attendees on a person-by-person basis or collectively.
Extra features include:
- Hooks, Actions & Filters. These allow web-based software developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso software that are compatible with the WordPress development platform.
- Maintenance Mode. Pause registrations for normal site traffic whenever you need to make changes on your website. You can continue to work on the back-end of your site during maintenance mode.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & 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 objectives, the company operates on a model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium version of Event Espresso also provides you with over 40 additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes that includes attendee data in confirmation emails and updates.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing a series of questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Add-Ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow you to significantly enhance the functionality of managing an event.
Some of these add-ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Addon: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display upcoming events by location. There are four maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Management Add-on: The Recurring Events management add on allows you to put your events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months in advance. You can add as many future events as you need. 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 the category name shows the events related to that category and closes 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 also specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration addon allows you to take full 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 these special events. Members can also add 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 past events and make payment for events.
- Seating Chart Add on: 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 add on lets you offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart addon lets you control the experience for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to every seat.
- EE4 Event Ticketing Addon: The Ticketing add on gives you the capacity to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add on adds the ability to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing add-on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode types are included for managing check-in scans at the 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.
- Events Calendar Add-on: This add on uses the WP calendar to display events and categories of events using a nice graphical calendar.
- EE4 Infusionsoft Integration Add-on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft integration all-in-one sales and marketing software add-on, you can completely automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture registrant data, track registrations, and accept payments from your website.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin, including new addons.
For more details about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, visit the plugin website here:
Customers – Feedback
Here are a few of the testimonials that satisfied users have posted about Event Espresso:
”Event Espresso rocks! I use it for my dance class registrations. Unlike most dance studios where people have to call or send an email in advance, Event Espresso puts a registration form right there in front of the user and allows me to collect valuable information from the user during the registration process with custom questions such as “Do you have previous dance experience?” or “How did you hear about us?”. It also gives my site a professional look and feel.” Ral, Ral’eau Salsa Dance Company
”…it really does blow everything else that’s out there out of the water.” Chris Reynolds, Arcane Palette Creative Design
”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
Useful Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, trainer, concert planner, or event consultant, there are just unlimited possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, spend a little time visiting the forums for new ideas and practical suggestions to streamline your event management process or enhance the experience of your customers.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with other WordPress 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 support, as so many of its satisfied plugin end-users confirm:
”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 great support that includes access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, one-on-one 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.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts an established team of experienced web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely software you can rely on to run your events.
Event Espresso Pricing
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you should consider using one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This license enables you to set up Event Espresso on one site only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This enables you to configure Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Edition – This option allows you to configure Event Espresso on 5 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 depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. When we last checked, the plugin retails for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticketing Registration System For WordPress
Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this review was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin developer when you visit the site.
Additional Information
Event Espresso regularly adds 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.
Search the plugin’s documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to a specific use-case, or to report issues and share feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event registration and ticketing manager plugin, used and trusted by thousands.
If you are a WordPress user and you currently run an event that requires managing dates and venues (offline and online), enrolling participants, and/or reserving tickets, then you will probably not find a better WordPress plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Manager
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