Does your company currently run or plan to run events that require bookings, such as workshops, community classes, not-for-profit fund raisers, networking functions, or even a large-scale event like an arts & crafts, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event registrations is a complex process. You may need to co-ordinate scheduling, dates, attendee numbers, data processing, payments and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders and notifications, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to event registrants.
There are a number of advantages to setting up an automated web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily replicate previous events, give you more control, improve client experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be costly.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-powered web site, you can install an inexpensive and highly professional online event registration system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily create your event and begin accepting online bookings literally in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and accept online event bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich application that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
Customize registration forms
You can employ a number of event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up ticket sales, 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 event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their software: EE 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is considerably different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the plugin is being revamped using a different structure to allow for future growth and expansion. 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 Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
For more details go here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just some of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Automated Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current web site into a feature-rich and professional event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by literally doing away with the chore of processing registrations and sign-ups manually.
Basically, you are facilitating attendees to enroll themselves.
Allowing your clients to do all of the data entry frees you up from doing administration and lets you direct more of your energy on delivering a better event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon discover, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management process that you want your participants to experience.
Some additional benefits include the following:
- Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin provides you with a very 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 users buy the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then purchase add ons only if you need added features.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new bookings 24 hrs a day. In addition, Event Espresso social and marketing features and add ons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event invite their friends who may also be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, your event booking process is kept wholly in digital form, reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks associated with administration.
- Own Your Information. You own all the information you collect from event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to end-users via standard features (these are included with the plugin) and additional features that customers can buy for an additional cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers a number of features to WordPress users. Here are just some of these:
- Fast and simple to install and implement. Be up and running in very little time.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In Event Espresso 4, events can have many dates and times (datetimes), that these can be managed from one single event.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Participants can easily find your events and add these to their schedule with the calendar.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso seamlessly integrates with several payment gateways, allowing you to collect registration payments before running your events.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your WordPress theme and reuse registrant details throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow you to create new prices that adjust the default ticket pricing for the default ticket.
- In-App Documentation Systems. Event Espresso 4 includes 3 detailed in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of registrants and check-in those who have attended.
- Waiting Lists. Latecomers can subscribe to a waiting list if your event is full. Additionally, you can specify that waiting list members pay for their spots if you plan to add more capacity for your event.
- Private Comments On Contacts. Record observations about users on their profile and how you’ve helped your contacts. Private commenting allows you to keep records of when users contacted you, your internal observations, and how you’ve assisted your contacts.
- Keyword Rich URLs. Keyword rich event page Web links take advantage of your Permalinks configuration settings. “Pretty” urls that use relevant keywords enhance the context of your content and is favored by search engines, helping you drive a more targeted audience to your website.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your organization’s profile to display throughout the software and your front-end templates. Organization fields include: business name, street address, city, state, country, zip code, primary contact email address, phone number, VAT/tax number, logo, Facebook profile URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ profile URL, Instagram profile URL.
- Exportable Data. You can export all the data gathered from your event customers into Excel or CSV format for compiling advanced reports, implementing marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, etc..
- Multiple Participant Enrolments. EE 4 allows one person or an organization to enroll multiple participants at the same time. You specify how many people can enroll in a single session by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Automatic Updating. Event Espresso provides simple one-click upgrades to make sure that you have the latest features and to keep your installation working with new versions of WordPress.
- Staff Member Management. Save time and keep your information organized by reusing team member profiles for multiple events or displaying profile information such as team member’s contact information, resume and photo using a shortcode in an event description.
- Accurate Event Attendee Management. You control your customers’ records; who has enrolled, which event they have booked and how much they’ve paid. With the attendee manager, you can get an overview of registered participants and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export an attendee list to Excel for additional uses, send customizable payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your participants on a person-by-person basis or as a group.
Extra features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming. Event Espresso is simple enough for non-technical users, and also robust and customizable for higher end users and developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, Event Espresso 4 allows for more complex extensions and customizations to the software.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. EE 4 lets you create a log file with debugging data that can be useful for web developers who are diagnosing problems.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & 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 company operates on a modular and efficient model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also comes with over 40 additional features, including:
- Live-filtering when you search for events within the Event Espresso admin.
- Default surcharge (similar to adding a service tax to every ticket).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Add ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow customers to further expand the functionality of the event management system.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Addon: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display your upcoming events by location. There are four maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Custom Template Add-on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes the events with many datetimes into a dropdown list.
- Events Date Range Template Add-on: The Date Range custom event list template allows your users to search for events that occur within a certain date range.
- Social Coupons Integration Add-on: If your website is featured on Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can even specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration add-on lets you take advantage of the WordPress user system. With the WP User Integration add-on you can give users a special incentive by offering member prices and overriding event pricing when members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered users of the website will have access to your special events. Members can also input personal data into their profile page allowing them to quickly register for events by auto-filling in the personal information on the event registration form. Your users can also look up event history and make payment for events.
- Seating Chart Addon: The seating chart addon is great for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is ideal for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart add-on allows you to offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart addon lets you control the environment for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach single pricing to every seat.
- Multiple Event Registration Addon: The Multiple Event registration addon gives your potential customers the ability to book 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 addon, 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 add-on gives you a simple and easy-to-use system that allows you to change 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 build their own custom templates using one of the templates provided as a source 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 event attendee data, track enrollments, and accept payments from your Event Espresso powered website.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin, including new addons.
To learn more about the latest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
User Testimonials
Here are some of the many testimonials that plugin users have written about Event Espresso:
“It is a very, very slick plugin. It’s one of those plugins where you install it, change a couple of settings, and boom you’re selling tickets.” Brad Williams, WebDevStudios
”You can tell that the Event Espresso team is really passionate about their work, and that they care and spend a lot of time helping people work with their plugin and use it with their events – it’s something every WordPress service should aim for.” Ryan Imel, WPCandy
”I’m so excited to fire Eventbrite! Event Espresso has an amazing WP plugin for event management. We’re testing it now & are very impressed! In a nutshell Event Espresso saves us money & does everything Eventbrite did before. :)” Dustin Nay
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, presenter, seminar planner, or event professional, there are simply endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, go through the user forum for tips and practical suggestions to streamline your event management process or enhance the experience of your registrants.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with other WP plugins and WordPress themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive support, as many of its users 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, 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.
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 depend on to organize and manage your events.
Plugin Cost
Event Espresso is available in a number of editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin options, however, you should consider using one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal Edition – This lets you install Event Espresso on 1 site only. It includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This license allows you to configure Event Espresso on one domain only. It includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This edition lets you configure Event Espresso on five sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The price of the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Presently, the software is selling for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Please Note: The pricing above was current at the time this review was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the website.
Additional Information
Event Espresso regularly adds 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 plugin’s documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to your particular use-case, or to report issues and leave feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event booking and ticketing manager software, used and trusted by thousands of WordPress website owners.
If you are a WordPress user and you intend to run any event that involves scheduling dates, times and venues, booking participants, and booking seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – Event Manager & Registration Software For WordPress
***