Do you currently run or plan to run events that need to accept registrations, such as workshops, training classes, non-profit fund raisers, social events, or even a big event such as a dance party, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Co-ordinating event registrations can be a complicated and time-consuming process. You may need to manage scheduling, event dates, registration numbers, data processing, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders and notifications, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and providing tickets to event 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 reduce costs, help you easily duplicate similar events, give you more control, improve user experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be quite costly.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-powered website, you can install a very inexpensive and highly professional online event registration solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily set up your event and begin accepting registrations in just a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and take online event bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize registration forms
You can use several event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up ticket-selling, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your event attendees, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing follow-ups.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Note: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is significantly different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the platform is being revamped using a different structure to enable future growth. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually phase out Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
More info:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just a few of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Automated Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing digital presence into an automated and fully featured event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to attendee limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by virtually doing away with the chore of processing registrations manually.
Basically, you are enabling event participants to register on their own.
Allowing your customers to do all of the data themselves frees up your time and lets you invest more energy on delivering a more enjoyable event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn in a moment, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and booking process that you want your participants to experience.
Some additional benefits and advantages include:
- Lower Costs: Event Espresso is a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to building your own solution or using a 3rd party service. The cost is kept to a minimum through a model where you buy the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then buy add ons only when you need new features.
- More Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept online event sign-ups 24 hrs a day. In addition, Event Espresso social and marketing features and addons (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event invite others who may also be interested in attending.
- Green & Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, the event signup process remains entirely in digital form, reducing traditional paper waste from tasks associated with administration.
- All Information Belongs To You. You control all the information you acquire from event participants.
Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to users via built-in features (these are included with the software) and optional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many great features to WP users. Here are just a few:
- Fast and simple to install and configure. Ready to start using in no time.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso lets you configure as many different types of tickets as you need and specify prices, limits on ticket quantities, etc.
- Customizable Event And Registration Page Designs. You can customize your events and enrollments page using Event Espresso’s limitless template options and parts, as well as HTML and CSS.
- Tax Administration. Event Espresso 4 gives you a number of ways to handle taxes for your event and report tax fees to customers when purchasing tickets. You can administer taxes globally and on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your WP theme and reuse venue details throughout other areas of your site.
- Spam Protection. Reduce the likelihood of spamming and bot software programs making fake registrations on your web site by using reCAPTCHA tools to authenticate human activity.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 provides three comprehensive in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Event Check-In List. Generate an exportable list of participants and check-in everyone who attends.
- Ticketless Events. You can set up events without the requirement for registrants to select tickets. Use Event Espresso for all forms of events, not just those that require tickets.
- Public Commenting. Add social a new level of social sharing to your events by encouraging potential registrants to ask questions about your event and previous participants to post reviews that can help others consider whether or not to sign up. Moderation settings for commenting are configured via the WP commenting settings.
- SEO Friendly Page URLs. Keyword rich event page URLs take advantage of your WordPress Permalinks configuration settings. Search engine friendly urls with relevant keywords enhance the context of your events and improves your search rankings, helping you drive more visitors to your website.
- Country-specific Settings. You can configure the country and currency settings to be used when hosting events, including currency, currency signs, decimal characters and places, country codes, regions, etc.
- Upload Event Information. Event Espresso 4 provides an advanced importing feature that lets you import a lot of event data at once. You can export, edit and upload data for events, datetimes, tickets, prices, registration questions, venues, terminology, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Register Multiple Participants. Event Espresso 4 allows a single person or an organization to register multiple attendees at once. Event managers decide how many people are able to enroll in one session by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Attendee Profiles. You can manage each registrant’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their information organized.
- Staff Member Manager. Save time and keep your information organized by reusing staff member profiles for multiple events or displaying profile information such as staff member’s contact information, resume and photo using a shortcode in an event description.
- Categorize Events. If you have multiple types of events such as free and paid, conference speakers and breakout sessions, different types of courses, etc. you can categorize these to make it easier for event attendees to find what they’re looking for. You can display all events in a category on a custom event category page, make events searchable by category, and colour-code events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make them easier to find, as well as suggesting new events in the categories that appeal to your visitors.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows you to have more control and options over the content of your event pages and how your information displays to your prospects.
- Maintenance Mode. Pause registration capabilities for normal website visitors whenever you need to make changes on your website. You can still work on the back-end of your site during maintenance mode.
- Autonomy, Flexibility And Value: According to the mission statement on their web site, 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 mission, the software has been built using a modular and efficient model 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:
- Duplicating events – limits the need to re-enter event information when creating new events.
- Default surcharge (the same as adding a service fee to every ticket).
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As well as a comprehensive number of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow you to significantly enhance the functionality of your event management system.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add-on: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display scheduled events by location. 4 maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Template Addon: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes events with many datetimes into a dropdown list.
- 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 be customized to show the event thumbnail 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 add on comes free with any of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration addon allows you to take advantage of the WP user system. With the WP User Integration add-on you can give users a special incentive by offering member prices and overriding event prices when members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered site users can have access to your special events. Members can also store personal information 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 look up previous events and make payment for events.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Addon Versions: This add on lets you involve others in the event management process and give new users the ability to create events or regional managers the ability to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WordPress users roles and assign them different permissions with different capabilities, so others can help you manage your events or events that others create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain parts of your WP dashboard and/or certain sections of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to allow users to have geographic responsibilities for events and users, use the Roles and Permissions Pro addon.
- Event Ticketing Addon: The Ticketing addon adds the capacity to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add-on adds the capacity to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing addon includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode types are included for managing check-in scans at the venue door. Customers 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.
- Events Calendar Add on: This WordPress events calendar displays events and event categories in a nice graphical calendar.
- JSON API Add on: The new Event Espresso JSON API add on gives permission for other applications, websites, mobile apps, etc… to access your Event Espresso details through an Application Programming Interface (API).
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software, including new addons.
For more details about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
User Feedback
Here are some of the testimonials that satisfied customers have written about Event Espresso:
”I can’t even imagine what I would want the plugin to do that it doesn’t already do. I’m really happy with the features.” Jim Harmer
”I recently downloaded it to add to a nonprofit site for a Boy Scout troop and the features work wonderfully with what we wanted to accomplish for the site. It allows us to set up calendar, events, and even take payments for trips. At first, I thought that it would be overkill for such a small site, but now I see the possibilities and will definitely be offering Event Espresso to my clients that need an event organization system for their web sites.” Lucy Conn, Troop 462
”Event Espresso plugin still rocks. Saw you guys were up for the WP Honors too. Glad I paid for it! If you need event management on your WordPress site I recommend Event Espresso.” Patrick Allmond, Focus Consulting
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, teacher, festival promoter, or event professional, there are simply unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, search the forums for tips and practical ways to streamline your event management process and enhance the experience of your event customers.
Event Espresso Support
Event Espresso works with with all WordPress plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress development rules. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive support, as many of its clients 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 great support with 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.
In addition, Event Espresso boasts an established team of experienced WordPress developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely software you can count on to organize and manage your events.
Product License Price
Event Espresso is available in various editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software features, however, you need to consider downloading one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal Edition – This allows you to run Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This option lets you set up Event Espresso on 1 domain only. It includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This option allows you to install Event Espresso on 5 sites. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 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 sells for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager
Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this article was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin author when you visit the site.
Additional Plugin Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding 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 plugin’s online documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to a particular use-case, or to report errors and give feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WP event registration and ticketing manager software, used and trusted by thousands of businesses.
If you own a WordPress site and you plan to run events that involve managing dates, times and venues (offline and online), booking attendees, or reserving seating, then you will probably not find a better software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
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