Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that require bookings, such as seminars, group courses, not-for-profit fund raisers, marketing functions, or even a large-scale event such as a show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event bookings is a complicated and time-consuming process. You will most likely need to manage event schedules, dates, registration numbers, data collection and storage, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to attendees.
There are lots of advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily replicate recurring events, give event managers more control, create a better customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be quite expensive.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-based digital presence, you can install a very inexpensive and professional web-based event booking system.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Registration Software
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily create your event and start processing registrations in just minutes.
(Set up multiple events and accept online bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can use various event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your event attendees, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing notifications.
View detailed information about event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is considerably different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the plugin is being redeveloped using a different structure to enable future expansion. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually move completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your site:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing digital presence into a fully-featured and automated 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 system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by virtually doing away with the need to process registrations manually.
Basically, you are facilitating event attendees to enroll by themselves.
Allowing your participants to do all of the data entry frees up your time and lets you concentrate more energy on creating a better event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover shortly, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and registration process that you want your participants to experience.
Some additional benefits include:
- Lower Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd party provider. This is made possible through a model where users start with the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then purchase optional addons when you need extra features.
- Higher Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new bookings 24/7. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social and marketing add ons (see below) let people interested in registering for your event share your information with friends who may be interested in attending.
- Green Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event signup process is completed entirely online, reducing typical paper consumption from tasks associated with administration.
- All Data Belongs To You. You control all the data you collect from event attendees.
Features
The Event Espresso plugin delivers functionality to end-users through built-in features (these come with the plugin) and additional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers a number of built-in to web site owners. Here are just some of these:
- Quick and easy to install and implement. Be up and running in no time.
- Customized Event Registration. Event Espresso lets you gather unique data using a custom event registration form on your web site to create a unique experience for your event participants.
- Customizable Event Page Designs. Match your web site’s look and feel for your events and bookings page using Event Espresso’s limitless template options and parts, and HTML or CSS.
- Ticket Selector. Present several ticket options to prospective registrants and let them purchase the ticket(s) that best suits their needs.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your theme and display attendee data throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow you to create new prices that adjust the base ticket pricing of your system-default ticket.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 includes three useful in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Event Check-In List. Generate an exportable list of event attendees and check-in those who have attended.
- Waiting Lists. Prospective attendees can subscribe to a waiting list if your event has reached maximum attendance. You can also specify that wait-list members pay for their spots if you plan to expand numbers for your event.
- RSS Event Feeds. Provide automatic updates to customers, drive quality traffic and widen your content distribution with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events let you build your event page over time without displaying it live on your site. You can work on your events until you are ready to publish it on your website, or schedule your event to publish at a future date and time.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your profile to be used throughout the software and your front-end templates. Organization information include: company name, street address, city, state, country, zip/postal code, primary contact email address, telephone, tax number, business logo, Facebook URL, Twitter URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest profile URL, Google+ URL, Instagram URL.
- Bulk Import Event Data. EE 4 provides an advanced 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, tickets, prices, registration questions, venue info, terminology, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Venue Profiles. The venue manager in Event Espresso 4 lets information about venues to display throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front end of your site to inform potential participants of your event’s location. The venue record displays many of the standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also includes information such as venue capacity, venue web address, telephone number, physical, location map, etc. You can also list all of your event venues in various locations of your WP 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 every event you have listed for a specific venue.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso lets you engage with a community of experienced event managers, software programmers, designers, marketers and business owners who also use the plugin. You can engage with other members of the Event Espresso community using their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Team Member Manager. Save time and keep your information organized by reusing staff member profiles for multiple events or displaying their profile using a shortcode in an event description.
- Accurate Participant Management. You control your attendees’ records; who has registered, for what event and how much they have 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 a list of attendees to a spreadsheet for additional uses, send customizable payment reminders and receipts and send messages to your registrants on a person-by-person basis or collectively.
Additional features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming. Event Espresso is simple enough for most users, and also extremely robust and customizable for enterprise-level users and web-based software developers. The bottom line is that by using Object-oriented programming (OOP), EE 4 facilitates more complex enhancements and customizations to the application.
- Maintenance Mode. Pause registration capabilities for normal website visitors whenever you need to make changes on your site. You can continue to work on your content during maintenance mode.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And Value For Money: 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 goals, the company operates on a modular that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium version of Event Espresso also includes over 40 added features, including:
- Email shortcodes for including attendee data in notification emails and updates.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing a group of questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Addons
In addition to an amazing range of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow customers to further expand the capabilities of managing an event.
Some of these add ons include:
- 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 an event does not have a featured image available, a default image will be used instead.
- Recurring Events Management Addon: The Recurring Events management add on allows you to put events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months … even years ahead. You can add as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in advance as you want. Event Espresso will automatically open and close registrations for all recurring events.
- 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 show the event thumbnail image instead of a date.
- Social Media Buttons Add on: The social media add-on displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media addon is included free with any of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration add-on lets you take advantage of the WP user system. With the WP User Integration addon you can give users a special incentive by offering member pricing and overriding event pricing when your members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered users of the site will have access to these special events. Members can also enter personal data into their profile page allowing them to quickly register for events by auto-filling in the personal information on the event booking form. Users can also view event history and pay for future events.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Addon Versions: This add on lets you involve staff in your organization to help manage your events and give new users the ability to create events or regional managers the capacity 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, so your staff can help you manage your events or the events that other people create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain areas of your WP dashboard and/or certain parts 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.
- Multi-Event Registration Add on: The Multiple Event registration add-on gives potential customers the ability to register for multiple events at once. In each event listing registrants will be given the option to either register for a single event or add multiple events to their cart. With the Multiple 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 Template Add on: The Events Table Template addon gives you a simple and easy-to-use system that allows you to 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 web developers to design custom templates using one of the templates included as a source template.
- JSON API Add on: The Event Espresso JSON API add-on lets other software applications, web sites, mobile applications, etc… to access your Event Espresso information through an API (Application Programming Interface).
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:
User Feedback
Below are some of the many great testimonials that users have written about Event Espresso:
”Thanks to you and the rest of the team for Event Espresso – Every time I get a signup for an event, I think about how much time EE saves me – and signups happen while I’m out on the water teaching kayaking, not answering the phone. :-)” Tue Brems Olesen, OnAdventure
”I have been using Event Espresso to run my festival and have been very happy with how it has worked out. They have provided tremendous support and their iPhone app is amazing and easy to use. I suggest using it for your event.” Alex Grant, Byron Spirit Festival
”Just bought an Event Espresso license for an upcoming conference website we are working on. The custom registration forms functionality rocks!” Eric Sopp, Inside Design
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, presenter, show planner, or event management consultant, there are just unlimited possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, search the forums for useful ideas and practical ways to streamline your event management and registration process and improve the experience of your event participants.
Support
Event Espresso works with with most WordPress plugins and themes that follow WP coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great support, as many of its plugin customers attest:
”Your plugin saved our client nearly $9000 in development costs because it handled the majority of the functionality we were looking for at a much lower cost. EventEspresso’s staff have been very responsive to our needs when we have them (which has been rare, because the plugin is so well coded). Great job on a great plugin!” Brandon P., Experience Farm
Event Espresso provides robust support including access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, priority 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 WordPress developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can rely on to manage your events.
Product Pricing
Event Espresso is available in different plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin options, however, you should consider using one of the ”Pro” plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This lets you install Event Espresso on one site only. It includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This lets you install Event Espresso on one site only. It includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This license enables you to install Event Espresso on five sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Pricing for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. When we last checked, the software is being retailed for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager
Note: The above reflects the pricing when this article was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin developer when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Plugin Information
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the software’s documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to your particular situation, or to notify developers about issues and leave feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event booking and ticketing manager software, used and trusted by thousands of event managers.
If you own a WordPress web site and you currently run events that involve managing dates, times and venues, booking participants, and/or reserving tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Manager System
***