Do you currently run or plan to run events that require handling registrations, such as seminars, training classes, charity fund raisers, networking conferences, or even a large-scale 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 sign-ups can be a time-consuming process. You may be required to co-ordinate scheduling, event dates, registration numbers, data administration, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders and notifications, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to attendees.
There are a number of advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower expenses, help you easily replicate previous events, give event managers more control, improve client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that this can be very costly.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-based website or blog, you can install an inexpensive and highly professional online event registration system.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – Event Manager & Registration System For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WP software enables you to easily schedule multiple events and start accepting online bookings in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and accept online event registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can use a range of event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up selling tickets, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your event attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media and email marketing applications.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Note: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their software: EE 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is impressively different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the software has been revamped using a different structure to accommodate future expansion. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually transition completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
Learn more about the plugin here:
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 or blog:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current digital presence into a feature-rich and professional event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by literally doing away with the need to process registrations manually.
Basically, you are enabling participants to enrol on their own.
Allowing your customers to do the data entry frees up your time and lets you concentrate more of your energy on creating a more enjoyable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will see in a moment, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management and booking process that you want your clients to experience.
Some additional benefits of the plugin include the following:
- Reduced Costs: Event Espresso is a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd-party service. This is made possible through a model where Event Espresso users purchase the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then purchase optional add-ons only if you need added features.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept new event registrations 24/7. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing add-ons (see below) let people interested in registering for your event share your information with others who may also be interested in attending.
- Green Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event signup process remains wholly online, significantly reducing traditional paper waste from tasks related to enrollment.
- All Data Belongs To You. You control all the information obtained from your event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
The Event Espresso software provides functionality to its users via built-in features (these come with the plugin) and optional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers a number of great features to WordPress users. Here are just some of these:
- Quick and simple to install and configure. Ready to start accepting registrations in minutes.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In EE 4, events can have multiple dates and times (datetimes), that these can be managed from one single event.
- Customizable Event Page Designs. You can customize your events and registrations page using Event Espresso’s limitless template options and parts, as well as HTML or CSS.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso seamlessly integrates with leading payment gateways, allowing you to collect booking fees prior to running events.
- Intelligent Single Page Checkout. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is smart, fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically duplicate the primary registrant’s details for any added registrants.
- Spam Protection. Prevent the likelihood of spamming and bots creating bogus registrations on your web site by using reCAPTCHA settings to authenticate human activity.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 includes 3 built-in in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Event Check-In List. Generate an exportable list of participants and check in those who have attended.
- Event Manager Pre-approval. Be selective about who can and can’t register for your events.
- XML RSS Feeds. Keep your users updated about your events, bring in more visitors and expand your content distribution with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Keyword-Rich Page URLs. Keyword rich URLs leverage your WP site’s Permalinks configuration settings. SEO-friendly permalinks that have relevant keywords enhance the context of your events and improves your search rankings, helping you get more visitors to your events.
- Country Settings. Event managers can configure the country and currency settings that will be used throughout Event Espresso, such as currency name, currency symbols, decimal characters and places, country codes, regions, and so on.
- Bulk Import Event Information. Event Espresso 4 provides a CSV-based importing capability that enables you to upload a lot of event data all at one time. You can export, edit and upload details about events, datetimes, ticketing information, pricing, custom registration questions, venue info, terms, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- WYSIWYG Editor. Event Espresso uses the native WordPress Visual editor, allowing you to quickly and easily add images and compose and edit your content without knowing HTML or CSS, just like any other WordPress post.
- Automatic Plugin Installation Upgrades. Event Espresso offers simple 1-click updating to make sure that you have the latest features and to keep your software installation working with the latest version of WordPress.
- Social Sharing. Event attendees and site visitors can tell others about your event using social sharing buttons.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post types. You can also customize the templates to display events in your own custom way.
Extra features include:
- Hooks, Actions & Filters. These features allow developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso plugin that are 100% compatible with WordPress.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registration capabilities for normal website visitors when site maintenance is needed. You can still work on the back-end of your site during maintenance mode.
- Autonomy, Flexibility And Value For Money: According to the mission statement on their web 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 software has been built using a modular that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium version of Event Espresso also comes with over 40 added features, including:
- Email shortcodes that includes attendee data in notification 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.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow end-users to significantly expand the capabilities of the event management system.
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 an event does not have a featured image available, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize multiple datetime events 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 the event thumbnail instead of a date.
- Events Social Sharing Add-on: Add social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that allows your registrants to share a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after registration.
- Custom Template Add-on: The Custom Template add on is capable of displaying your event lists in a number of visually exciting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add-on Versions: This add on lets you involve other users in the event management process and give new users permission 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 assign them different permissions with different capabilities, allowing others to help you manage your events or the events that other people create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain parts of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain sections 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 addon.
- EE4 Event Ticketing Add on: The Ticketing addon gives you the ability to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add-on gives you the capacity to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing add on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode 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 mobile app can be used for checking in or checking out registrants and to validate tickets.
- Events Table Template Addon: The Events Table Template addon provides you with a simple and easy-to-use system that allows you to edit 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 lets developers build custom templates using one of the included templates as a source template.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp addon lets you auto-register attendees to a particular mailing list or group within your MailChimp account.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software, including new addons.
To learn more about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website:
Testimonials
Below are a few of the testimonials that plugin users have written about Event Espresso:
”It’s been very comprehensive and covers exactly the aspects of event registration that we needed for our site plus some features that we didn’t even need but could still use in the future. Very Excellent Plugin!” Tristan Hall, Area 12:2 Youth Group
”Event Espresso event management plugin for WordPress is really an awesome plugin.” Cheryl Smithem, Charleston PR & Design
”I played around with the free version for a couple hours then purchased the Pro for a client. Love it and so do they! Sweetest Event plugin I have tried.” Bill Chambers, Bill Chambers Design
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, teacher, event promoter, or event professional, there are just unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a registered user, go through the support forum for new ideas and practical ways to streamline your event management and registration process and enhance the experience of your registrants.
Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with other WP plugins and themes that follow WP coding standards. If you find that you need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent customer support, as so many of its satisfied plugin 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
The software provides robust support with access to support forums, comprehensive 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.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can count on to run your events.
Event Espresso 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 need to consider purchasing one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This enables you to run Event Espresso on one site only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This enables you to install Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This lets you set up Event Espresso on 5 domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one 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 special offers. Presently, the plugin retails 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 not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin seller when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin. 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 tools to find answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to your specific situation, or to report problems and leave feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event booking and ticketing management software, used by thousands of WordPress users.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you intend to run events that involve scheduling dates, times and venues (offline and online), registering attendees, and/or selling tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable WordPress plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticketing Registration Plugin For WordPress
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