Do you currently run or plan to run events that need to accept bookings or registrations, such as workshops, training classes, charity fund raisers, social functions, or even a big event such as a music festival, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Co-ordinating event bookings is a complex process. You will most likely need to co-ordinate scheduling, dates, attendee numbers, data collection, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders and notifications, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to event participants.
There are many advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower costs, help you easily reproduce similar events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that this can be quite costly.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-based website or blog, you can easily set up a very inexpensive and professional web-based event registration solution.
Presenting …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily schedule your event and start processing online registrations literally in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and receive online event bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed software that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
Customize event registration forms
You can use several event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your event participants, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing follow-ups.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is completely different than the older EE 3, as the software is being rebuilt using a different structure to accommodate future growth. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually migrate completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and advantages of using this plugin.
Learn more about the plugin here:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just a few 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 into a feature-rich and professional event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple pricing options 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 eliminating the chore of processing registrations manually.
Basically, you are enabling event attendees to perform the registration on their own.
Allowing your participants to do the data entry frees you up from doing admin work and lets you concentrate more time on planning a more enjoyable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will see in a moment, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management process that you want your attendees to experience.
Additional benefits of the plugin include:
- Reduced Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd party service provider. This is made possible through a model where Event Espresso users buy the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then purchase add-ons only when you need extra features.
- Higher Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new event sign-ups outside normal business hours. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing add-ons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event invite others who may be interested.
- Green And Paperless Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign up process remains wholly in digital form, significantly reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks related to enrollment.
- Own Your Information. You control all the information gathered from your event participants.
Plugin Features
The Event Espresso software provides functionality to end-users via built-in features (these come with the software) and optional features that you can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many great built-in to WordPress users. Here are just some:
- Fast and easy to install and set up. Ready to start accepting registrations in minutes.
- Custom Event Registration. With Event Espresso you can collect unique information using custom event registration forms on your web site to prepare a customized experience for your event participants.
- Custom Notification Emails. Set up automated registration and payment notification emails to communicate with your attendees.
- Ticket Selector. Present several ticket options to prospective registrants so they can choose the ticket(s) that will best fit their needs.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your WordPress theme and display registrant information throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow you to create new prices that adjust the base ticket pricing for the system-default ticket.
- Discount & Promotional Codes. Offer promotional and multiple discount codes to incentivize prospects to take action now, or simply make your offers more appealing for price-sensitive prospects. Also useful if you want to sell out events close to timelines.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of event registrants and check-in those who attend.
- No-Ticket Events. You can set up events without the requirement for attendees to get tickets. Use Event Espresso for all types of events, not only when tickets are needed.
- Public Commenting. Add social interactivity to your events by allowing potential attendees to interact with you online via commenting and previous attendees to post feedback that can help others decide whether or not to register. Moderation settings for commenting are set using the WordPress commenting section.
- Search Engine Friendly Event Page Web Links. Keyword rich event page Web links take advantage of your WordPress site’s Permalinks configuration settings. SEO-friendly web links that include topic-relevant keywords enhance the context of your events and is favored by search engines, helping you drive a more targeted audience to your events.
- Country Settings. Event managers can configure the country and currency settings to be used to host events, including currency, currency signs, decimal signs, characters and places, country codes, regions, and so on.
- Import Events. EE 4 provides a CSV-based importing capability that allows you to easily upload a lot of event data at once. You can export, edit and import information about events, datetimes, tickets, prices, custom registration questions, venues, terminology, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Venue Manager. The venue manager in EE 4 lets details about venues to appear throughout the Event Espresso admin and the public areas of your site to inform attendees of the location of your event. The venue profile displays many standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also includes details such as venue capacity, venue site URL, venue phone number, venue location details, maps, etc. You can also list venues on specific sections on your WP theme and on a venue listing page on your site where you can set up and reuse venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have booked for a given venue.
- Event Espresso Community. Event Espresso provides users with access to an expert community of experienced event managers and other plugin users. You can network with other Event Espresso users through their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Social Sharing. Event participants and site visitors can help spread the word about your event using social sharing buttons.
- Accurate Event Participant Manager. You control your attendees’ records; who has registered, for what event and what amount they’ve paid. With the attendee manager, you can get a quick overview of registered participants and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export an event attendee list to a spreadsheet for additional uses, send customized payment reminders and receipts and send messages to your attendees individually or all at once.
Additional features include:
- Hooks, Actions And Filters. These features allow developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso application that are compatible with the WordPress software platform.
- Metabox Management & Reorganization. Event Espresso leverages the WP user interface, which gives you the ability to reconfigure the user interface to match your workflow process. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or removed from your workflow configuration.
- Autonomy, Flexibility And Value For Money: 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 goals, 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 40+ added features, including:
- Duplicating events – eliminates the need to re-enter event details when creating new events.
- Default surcharge (the same as applying a service fee to every ticket).
- Default payment status.
Add ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow customers to further enhance the functionality of events.
Some of these add ons include:
- EE4 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 drop-down list.
- Events Date Range Template Addon: The Date Range custom event list template lets your users to browse for events that take place within a certain date range.
- Social Coupons Integration Add on: 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 event lists in a variety of visually exciting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add on Editions: This add on lets you include other users in your organization to help manage your events 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 WordPress users roles and allow them different permissions with different privileges, 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 parts of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to allow users to control factors geographically for events and users, use the Roles and Permissions Pro add-on.
- Multi-Event Registration Add-on: The Multiple Event registration addon gives potential customers the ability to book 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 shopping cart. With the Multi-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.
- 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 allows web developers to design custom templates using one of the included templates as a base template.
- MailChimp Integration Add-on: The MailChimp add-on lets you automatically register attendees to a chosen mailing autoresponder list or group within MailChimp.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software, including new addons.
For more information about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, visit the plugin website:
User Feedback
Below are a few of the testimonials that users have written about Event Espresso:
”My clients have used Event Espresso for Transportation (Cadet Bus for leave), Parties (tailgates and brewery tours), and Horse-back riding lessons and camps. What a terrific plug-in and fantastic support from Seth!” Nina, Blue Iris Web Design
”Customizing an Event Registration plugin for WordPress by @EventEspresso. Love the pro version. Highly Recommended!” Joshua Garity
”Loving the functions and support from Event Espresso. One of the best plugins I’ve ever bought!” Nathan
Useful Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, trainer, conference promoter, or event professional, there are just endless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, go through the forums for inspiration and practical ways to improve your event management and registration process and enhance the experience of your registrants.
Product Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with all WordPress plugins and WP themes that follow standard WordPress coding rules. If you do need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great user support, as many of its users attest:
”By far, the customer service experience with Event Espresso has been the best of any WordPress Theme or Paid Plugin that I’ve used in the past two years!” Megan Murray, Boys & Girls Club of Lake Tahoe
Event Espresso provides amazing support including access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase 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 an established team of experienced WordPress web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can count on to run and manage your events.
Software Pricing
Event Espresso is available in different plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software options, however, you should consider using one of the ”Pro” plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This lets you configure Event Espresso on one domain only. It includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This enables you to configure Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This option allows you to run Event Espresso on 5 sites. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Pricing details of the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Presently, the plugin is selling for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest price: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this article was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin seller when you visit the site.
Additional Plugin 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.
Look up the software’s documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to your specific situation, or to report problems and give feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product information pages.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event registration and ticketing manager software, used and trusted by thousands of companies.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you plan to run an event that involves managing dates and venues, enrolling attendees, and reserving tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
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