Do you currently run or plan to run events that require handling bookings, such as seminars, group courses, non-profit fund-raisers, social conferences, or even a large-scale event like a concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups is a time-consuming process. You will probably have to co-ordinate calendar schedules, event dates, registration numbers, data collection, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders and notifications, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to attendees.
There are many benefits to setting up an automated web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower expenses, help you easily reproduce similar events, give you more control, create a better customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event booking system can be very expensive.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-powered website, you can easily set up an inexpensive and professional web-based event booking system.
Presenting …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress software allows you to easily set up an event and begin processing registrations literally in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and take online 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 employ various event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up selling tickets, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event attendees, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing updates.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Note: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is considerably different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the platform is being rebuilt using a different structure to accommodate future expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually migrate completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
More info:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just some of the many benefits 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 current website or blog into an automated and fully featured event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by literally eliminating the need to process registrations and bookings manually.
Basically, you are facilitating event attendees to enrol by themselves.
Allowing your customers to do all of the data entry frees you up from doing administration and lets you invest more of your resources on planning a better event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will see shortly, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management and booking process that you want your clients to experience.
Additional benefits and advantages include:
- Reduced Costs: The Event Espresso plugin provides you with a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own solution or using a 3rd-party provider. This is made possible by using a model where you buy the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then purchase add ons only when you need additional features.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new sign-ups 24 hours a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social features and add ons (see below) let people interested in attending your event invite others who may be interested in attending.
- Green Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign-up process can be completed entirely in digital form, reducing typical paper waste from tasks related to enrollment.
- Own Your Information. You control all the data you acquire from event attendees.
Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to users via built-in features (these are included with the plugin) and optional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many unique features to WP users. Here are just some:
- Fast and simple to install and implement. Ready to use in minutes.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso allows you to create multiple ticket types and specify different pricing options, limits on ticket quantities, etc.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Participants can easily see your upcoming events and add these to their schedule with a WordPress calendar.
- Tax Administration Options. Event Espresso 4 gives you a number of ways to handle taxes for your event and provide reports of tax fees to customers who purchase tickets. You can administer taxes globally and on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration allows you to customize the settings of Google Maps on your event listing and event details pages.
- Default Prices. Set up events quickly by pre-configuring default ticket pricing.
- In-App Documentation Systems. Event Espresso 4 comes with three detailed in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Manual Registration Option. you have the option of booking event participants at the door, or sending in paper-based registration forms for manual processing later.
- Waiting Lists. Prospective attendees can subscribe to a waiting list if your event is full. You can also specify that wait-list members pre-pay if you plan to expand numbers for the event.
- Private Commenting On Contacts. Keep comments about a contact on their profile. Private notes lets you keep a record of when event participants contacted you, your internal notes, and how you have assisted them.
- SEO Friendly Event Page URLs. Keyword-rich URLs take advantage of your WP site’s Permalinks configuration settings. SEO-friendly web links with relevant keywords add to the context of your pages and improves your search rankings, helping you get more traffic to your website.
- 15+ Languages. Event Espresso can be set up in more than 15 languages, and more are being added all the time.
- Default Tickets. If you create identical tickets for many of your events, you can set up as your default ticket for any new events simply by checking a box.
- Event Venue Management. The venue manager in EE 4 lets details about a venue to be published throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front-end of your site to inform users of your event’s location. The venue profile displays many of the standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also includes venue information such as venue seating capacity, venue website, telephone number, physical and virtual location, location map, etc. You can also display all of your venues throughout specific sections on your WP theme and on a venue archive page on your website where you can set up and display venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a specific venue.
- Registrant Profiles. You can manage each attendee’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their information organized.
- Social Sharing. Event attendees and website visitors can help publicize your events using social media share buttons.
- Attendee Reports. Quick-view event reports provides you with data of all of your registrations and transactions, enabling you to track the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and amount of revenue has been collected.
Extra features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming. Event Espresso is simple enough for non-technical users, and also extremely robust and customizable for enterprise-level users and developers. The bottom line is that by using Object-oriented programming (OOP), EE 4 makes possible more complex extensions and customizations to the application.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. EE 4 lets you create a log file with debugging data that can be helpful for developers who are diagnosing application problems.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And 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 software has been built using a modular that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also includes 40+ additional features, including:
- Live-filtering when searching for events within the Event Espresso admin.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse commonly asked questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Add-Ons
In addition to an incredible range of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow users to significantly expand the capabilities of events.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display the scheduled events by location. There are four maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Manager Add-on: The Recurring Events management addon lets you put events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years in advance. You can create as many events in advance as you want. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close registrations for all of these recurring events.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add on: The Category Accordion template shows categories in a simple list. Clicking on a category name shows the events related to that category and closes any previously open categories.
- EE4 Events Social Sharing Addon: This add on adds social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that allows your attendees to post a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after registration.
- Custom Files Add on: The Custom Files add on allows you to override certain aspects of the Event Espresso plugin.
- Seating Chart Add-on: The seating chart add-on is suitable for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart add on lets you offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart add-on lets you control the experience for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to every seat.
- Event Ticketing Addon: The Ticketing add-on gives you the capacity to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add on adds 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 door. People can either print out their tickets or display them on their mobile devices. The barcode scanner can be used for checking in or checking out attendees and to validate tickets.
- EE4 Events Table View Template Add-on: The Events Table Template add on provides you with an easy-to-use system that lets you 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 web developers design custom templates using one of the included templates as a source template.
- MailChimp Integration Addon: The MailChimp addon lets you auto-register attendees to a specific mailing autoresponder list or group within MailChimp.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software, including new add ons.
For more information about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website here:
Customer Feedback
Below are some of the many great testimonials that satisfied users have posted about Event Espresso:
”Broadcasting my support for Event Espresso will be a pleasure. I recently helped the Webmaster at a sister church configure your event manager for their site, so I can say with confidence and from experience, that Event Espresso is the best Event Manager plugin ever!” Philip Simpson, The Charlotte Church
”Probably the best event management plugin available.” Materia Inspiration Centre
”Event Espresso is very nice and functional plugin. Set it up is not very easy for a beginner like me, but you have one of the best support team in your side. They answer all questions in a timely manor. I didn’t know anything about setting up the plugins, Thanks to Event Espresso Support team that now I can find my way around this plugin. Event Espresso helps our company to manage the workshops, keep track of our students, manage the emails, and much more. We upgrade from personal License to Business license in just two weeks of using Personal license. I strongly recommend the Business license.” Ted Karlsalr, Omnilargess
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, presenter, workshop promoter, or event management professional, there are simply unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, go through the support forum for useful ideas and practical ways to improve your event management and registration workflow or improve the experience of your event registrants.
Support
Event Espresso works with with other WordPress plugins and themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you do need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent end-user support, as many of its clients attest:
”These guys are right on any problem or issue or even general questions. You can’t really put a value high enough on the kind of support these guys offer.” Mark Wigston, Muskoka Graphics
The plugin provides comprehensive support including access to support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, email 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 a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can count on to run your events.
Plugin Pricing
Event Espresso is available in a number of editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you should consider downloading one of the ”Pro” plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This license allows you to install Event Espresso on one domain only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This option lets you install Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This allows you to configure Event Espresso on 5 domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 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. Currently, the software is selling for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management
Note: The pricing above was current when this review was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin seller when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding 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.
Look up the plugin’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 report errors and give feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event registration and ticketing management plugin, used and trusted by thousands of companies.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you intend to run events that require managing dates, times and venues, registering participants, and selling tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management
***