Does your business currently run or plan to run events that need handling bookings or registrations, such as workshops, community courses, not-for-profit fund-raisers, marketing events, or even a large-scale event such as an exhibition, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups can be a complicated and time-consuming process. You will most likely need to co-ordinate scheduling, dates, participant numbers, data processing and storage, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders and alerts, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to event attendees.
There are many advantages to setting up an online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily copy settings for previously-run events, give you more control, improve client experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that this can be quite costly.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-based digital presence, you can easily set up an inexpensive and professional web-based event booking system.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Manager
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily schedule multiple events and start accepting online registrations literally in a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and process online event bookings)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed application that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize registration forms
You can use several event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up ticket sales, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event participants, or integrating your event registration forms with social media sites like Facebook.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: 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 considerably different than the older EE 3, as the platform is being redeveloped using a different structure to accommodate future growth. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually retire Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
For more details go here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just some of the many benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing digital presence into a feature-rich and professional event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by literally doing away with the need to process registrations manually.
Essentially, you are making it easier for participants to enroll by themselves.
Allowing your participants to do all of the data entry frees you up from doing administration and lets you focus more of your energy on planning a more unique event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon see, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and booking process that you want your customers to experience.
Some additional benefits and advantages include the following:
- Less Costs: The Event Espresso plugin is a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to building your own system 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 requirements of most users) and then buy optional addons when you need new functionality.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept new registrations 24 hrs a day. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features and addons (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with their friends who may also be interested in attending.
- Green Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign up process remains entirely online, reducing typical paper waste from tasks related to admin and record-keeping.
- All Information Belongs To You. You own all the data gathered from event attendees.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to users via built-in features (these are included with the software) and optional features that customers can buy for an additional cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many features to WP users. Here are just a few:
- Quick and simple to install and set up. Be up and running in minutes.
- Customized Event Registration Form. With Event Espresso you can gather specific information using custom event registration forms on your website to plan a tailored experience for your users.
- Customizable Event Designs. Create a unique look and feel for your events and enrollments page using Event Espresso’s template options and parts, and HTML or CSS.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso provides integration with leading payment gateways, allowing you to collect money before running the events.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your WordPress theme and display contact data throughout other areas of your site.
- Spam Protection. Eliminate the risk of spamming and bots creating false registrations with reCAPTCHA settings that validate human activity.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 comes with three useful in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. Event Espresso 4 lets you know who your customers are and how they’ve done business with you.
- Waiting Lists. Latecomers can subscribe to a waiting list if your event has reached maximum capacity. You can also make it a requirement waiting list attendees pre-pay if you plan to add more capacity for the event.
- Public Commenting. Add social interactivity to your events by encouraging potential attendees to interact with you online via commenting and previous participants to post comments that can help others decide whether or not to register. Moderation settings for public commenting are configured via the WordPress commenting section.
- Keyword-Rich Event Page URLs. Keyword-rich event page Web links leverage your WP Permalinks configuration settings. SEO-friendly web links that use topic-relevant keywords add to the context of your events and is favored by search engines, helping you bring a more targeted audience to your events.
- Country-specific Settings. Event managers can configure the country and currency settings to be used throughout Event Espresso, such as currency, currency symbols, decimal signs, characters and places, country codes, regions, and so on.
- Import Event Information. EE 4 provides an advanced importing capability that allows you to easily upload a lot of event data at once. You can export, edit and import data for events, datetimes, ticketing details, prices, custom registration questions, venue info, terminology, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Event Venue Management. The venue manager feature in Event Espresso 4 allows details about venues to display throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front-end of your website to inform potential participants 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 includes venue information like venue capacity, venue web address, phone number, venue location details, map, etc. You can also display venue profiles on specific areas in your theme and on a venue listing page on your site where you can set up and display venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a particular venue.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso provides users with access to a community of experienced event managers, web developers, web designers, marketers and business owners who also use the software. You can interact with other Event Espresso users via their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media pages on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Staff Member Manager. Save time and keep your data organized by reusing team member profiles for multiple events or displaying profile information such as staff member’s contact information, resume and photo using a shortcode in your event description.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post type features such as custom fields, post meta data, taxonomies, etc. You can even customize the templates to display event information in your own unique way.
Extra features include:
- Hooks, Actions & Filters. These features allow you to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso software that are fully compatible with the WordPress development platform.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registrations for normal website traffic when you need to perform maintenance on your site. You can continue to work on the back-end of your site during maintenance mode.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & Value: Event Espresso states on their website that their mission 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 in the process.
The premium version of Event Espresso also includes 40+ added features, including:
- Duplicating events – streamlines the work of re-entering event information when creating new events.
- Default surcharge (similar to applying a service fee to all tickets).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
In addition to a comprehensive number of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow users to significantly expand the functionality of events.
Some of these add-ons include:
- EE4 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 Management Addon: The Recurring Events management addon allows you to put your events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years in advance. You can add as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in the future as you need. Event Espresso will automatically open and close registrations for all recurring events.
- Events Date Range Template Add on: The Date Range custom event list template enables your users to browse for events that occur in a certain date range.
- Social Media Buttons Add on: The social media add-on displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media add-on is included free with any of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- Custom Files Addon: The Custom Files add-on allows you to override certain aspects of the plugin.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Addon Editions: This addon lets you include staff in your organization to help manage your events and give new users the capacity to create events or regional managers the ability to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WordPress users roles and give them different permissions with different privileges, allowing others to help you manage your events or the events that others create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain sections of your WP dashboard and/or certain areas of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to allow users to have geographic responsibilities for events and users, use the Roles and Permissions Pro add-on.
- Event Ticketing Addon: The Ticketing addon adds the capacity 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 handling check-in scans at the 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 Template Add on: The Events Table Template addon gives you a simple and easy-to-use system that lets you 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 design custom templates using one of the included templates as a base template.
- 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 customer data, track registrations, and accept payments from your web site.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add-ons.
For more information about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, visit the plugin website here:
Customers – Feedback
Here are some of the many testimonials that satisfied 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
”…it really does blow everything else that’s out there out of the water.” Chris Reynolds, Arcane Palette Creative Design
”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
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, trainer, conference planner, or event management consultant, there are just unlimited possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a licensed user, spend a little time researching the user forum for new ideas and practical ways to streamline your event management workflow and enhance the experience of your event customers.
Product Support
Event Espresso works with with most WordPress plugins and themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent customer support, as many of its end-users attest:
”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 Event Espresso plugin provides great support that includes access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, premium 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 proven track record of support, so this is definitely software you can rely on to run your events.
Plugin Price
Event Espresso is available in different editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software functionality, however, you need to consider downloading one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This option enables you to set up Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This license allows you to install Event Espresso on one site only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This license allows you to run Event Espresso on five domains. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The cost to purchase the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. When we last checked, the software is selling for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Please Note: The pricing above was current when this review was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin developer when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Plugin 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.
Look up the software’s online documentation pages for answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to your specific use-case, or to notify developers about bugs and leave feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product web site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event booking and ticketing manager plugin, used and trusted by thousands.
If you are a WordPress user and you currently run events that involve scheduling dates and venues, booking attendees, and selling tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Management Software
***