Do you currently run or plan to run events that require handling registrations, such as seminars, group classes, non-profit fund raisers, marketing events, or even a large-scale event such as an art exhibition, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Managing event bookings can be a complex process. You will probably have to co-ordinate event schedules, date availability, registration numbers, data processing and storage, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to event registrants.
There are many benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce costs, help you easily duplicate recurring events, give event managers more control, create a more enjoyable customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that this can be very expensive.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-based site, you can easily set up an inexpensive and professional web-based event booking system.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Manager Plugin
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress enables you to easily set up multiple events and begin receiving bookings in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and receive online event bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize registration forms
You can employ a number of event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media sites like Facebook.
View detailed information about event attendees
Note: Currently, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is fundamentally different than the older Event Espresso 3, as it is being revamped using a different structure to accommodate future expansion. The EE 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 read more about the benefits and features of using this plugin.
Go here to learn more about the plugin:
Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Automated Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current online presence into a fully-featured and automated event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to attendee limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by virtually eliminating the need to process registrations and bookings manually.
Basically, you are enabling event participants to register themselves.
Letting your clients to do all of the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you focus more attention on delivering a memorable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn shortly, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management process that you want your clients to experience.
Some additional benefits and advantages include:
- Less Costs: Event Espresso provides you with a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third party service. The cost is kept low through a model where users pay for the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then purchase optional addons only if you need new functionality.
- Higher Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online registrations 24 hours a day. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features (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, the event registration process can remain wholly in digital form, eliminating typical paper consumption from tasks related to enrollment.
- Own Your Data. You control all the information acquired from your event attendees.
Plugin Features
The Event Espresso plugin delivers functionality to its users through built-in features (these are included with the software) and optional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many unique features to web site owners. Here are just some:
- Quick and simple to install and configure. Be up and running in very little time.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In EE 4, events can have many dates and times (called datetimes), and these can be managed from one single event.
- Event Calendar. Attendees can easily see your events and add these to their schedule with a calendar.
- Ticket Selector. Present several ticket options to registrants and let them purchase the ticket(s) that will best fit their needs.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your theme and reuse venue information throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Prices. Create events quickly and easily with pre-configured default pricing.
- Discount & Promotional Codes. Set up promotional and discount codes to encourage people to make a decision immediately, or simply make your events more appealing for price-sensitive prospects. This is also practical for helping to sell-out events close to deadlines.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of booking event participants at the door, or send in paper-based forms for manual registration later.
- Waiting Lists. Prospective attendees can join a waiting list if your event has reached capacity. Additionally, you can make it a requirement wait-list registrants pre-pay if you plan to expand capacity for the event.
- Private Notes On Contacts. Keep notes about event registrants on their profile and how you have assisted your contacts. Private commenting enables you to keep records of when event participants contacted you, your internal notes, and how you’ve helped them.
- SEO Friendly Event Page Web Links. Keyword-rich Web links take advantage of your Permalinks configuration settings. Search engine friendly permalinks with topic-relevant keywords enhance the context of your events and improves your search rankings, helping you get more traffic to your events.
- Full Control Of Your Event Management. Event Espresso puts event managers in complete control of all aspects of your event’s registration and ticketing, and also allows you to automate this process with event management tools that include staff and venue manager, customizable event page designs, payment processing and handling, list waiting, attendee limits, print-ready ticketing and more.
- Bulk Upload Events. Event Espresso 4 provides a CSV-based importing feature that enables you to easily upload bulk event data all at one time. You can export, edit and upload information about events, datetimes, tickets, prices, registration questions, venue info, terms, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Event Venue Manager. The venue manager in EE 4 lets information about a venue to be published throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front-end of your website to inform attendees of your event’s location. The venue profile has many standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also lets you add venue details such as venue capacity, venue web address, telephone number, venue location details, Google map, etc. You can also display all of your venues throughout different areas of your WordPress theme as well as on a venue listing page on your site where you can set up and publish venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a particular venue.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso lets you network with a community of experienced event managers, software programmers, designers, marketers and business owners who also use the plugin. You can network with other members of the Event Espresso community through their community chat room, support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential registrants who have not paid yet for their enrollment with a standard but personalized invoice with one click of a button. Your invoices will address registered customers who have not paid their registration yet by name, give them the amount they owe, and include links to the event, a payment url and a url where they can download the invoice.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post types. You can also customize your page templates to display events in your own unique way.
Additional features include:
- Hooks, Actions And Filters. These allow you to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso application that are 100% compatible with WordPress.
- Control Box Management And Reorganization. Event Espresso leverages the WordPress user interface, which brings the ability to reconfigure the user interface to match your workflow. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or entirely removed from the page.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And Value For Money: According to the mission statement on their website, 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 goals, the company operates on a modular and highly efficient model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium version of Event Espresso also provides you with over 40 additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes that includes participant data in emails and email newsletters.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing commonly asked questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Add ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow software users to significantly enhance the functionality of your event management process.
Some of these addons 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 the event does not have a featured image, a default image will be used.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize the events with multiple datetimes into a drop-down list.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add on: The Category Accordion template shows categories as a simple list. Clicking a category name shows all events related to that category and closes previously open categories.
- Social Coupons Integration Add-on: If your web site uses Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can even specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- Custom Template Add-on: The Custom Template addon is capable of displaying your event lists in a number of exciting and interesting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Addon Versions: This add-on lets you involve others in your organization to help manage your events and give new users permission to create events or regional managers the capacity to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WP users roles and allow them different permissions with different privileges, so others can help you manage your events or events that other people create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain sections of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain areas 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.
- Event Ticketing And Bar Scanning Add-on: The Ticketing add-on gives you the ability to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon gives you the capacity to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing add-on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for managing check-in scans at the venue door. People 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 View Template Add-on: The Events Table Template addon gives you an easy-to-use system that lets you 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 allows developers to design their own custom templates using one of the templates included as a base template.
- EE4 Infusionsoft Integration Add-on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and business marketing software add-on, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture registrant data, track bookings, and accept payments from your website.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software, including new add ons.
To learn more about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, visit the plugin website here:
Testimonials
Below are some of the many great testimonials that satisfied customers have posted about Event Espresso:
”Event Espresso is so easy to use yet feature rich and stable. It is a cornerstone of our site and our success.” Fraser Barner, Speaker’s Lab
”When you can get a company to expend more money switching systems just to use your plugin…you’ve really accomplished something.” David, House of Prayer
”Thank you, we just did 2 sell out seminars of 50 attendees in 48 hours using Event Espresso and it was awesome. My wife was able to pick up on the processing backend with ease. You have done a great job on getting this system together – very simple, clear and well laid out With powerful functionality. I am so glad I dumped the old booking application we had and gave Event Espresso a go. Just wanted to say thanks, and thanks for the very patient, friendly and speedy assistance in helping me to get it all set up at the start. Many thanks to you and your team. A grateful customer.” Nicholas de Castella, Emotional Intelligence Trainings
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, trainer, festival promoter, or event professional, there are just countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, search the forums for tips and practical ways to improve your event management process and enhance the experience of your customers.
Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with all WP plugins and WordPress themes that follow standard WP coding rules. If you find that you need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent customer support, as many of its satisfied plugin users confirm:
”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
The software provides comprehensive support including access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledge base 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.
In addition, Event Espresso boasts an established team of experienced WordPress web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can depend on to run and manage your events.
Event Espresso Price
Event Espresso is available in a range of editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software options, however, you need to consider purchasing one of the ”Pro” plugin editions below:
- Personal Edition – This option lets you run Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This allows you to install Event Espresso on one site only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Edition – This lets you run Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons 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. When we last checked, the plugin is being retailed for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
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 website.
Event Espresso – Additional Info
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the software’s documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to a particular use-case, or to notify developers about problems and give feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WP event booking and ticketing management software, used and trusted by thousands of WordPress users.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you intend to run an event that requires scheduling dates and venues, enrolling participants, or selling tickets, then you will probably not find a better software for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticketing Registration Software
***