Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that require bookings, such as workshops, group classes, non-profit fundraisers, networking functions, or even a big event such as a music festival, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups is a time-consuming process. You may need to co-ordinate event schedules, date availability, participant numbers, data collection and storage, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to event attendees.
There are a number of advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower costs, help you easily reproduce previously-run events, give event managers more control, create a better client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event booking system can be very expensive.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-based web site, you can easily install an inexpensive and highly professional web-based event booking system.
Introducing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily create your event and start processing online registrations literally in a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and receive online event bookings)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can employ various event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your attendees, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing notifications.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Note: Currently, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is fundamentally different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the platform is being redeveloped using a different structure to accommodate future growth and expansion. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually transition completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
Go here to learn more about the plugin:
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:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website or blog into a fully-featured and automated event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to attendee limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by literally doing away with the need to process registrations manually.
Basically, you are enabling event attendees to enroll themselves.
Letting your clients to do all of the data themselves frees you up from doing admin work and lets you direct more energy 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 process that you want your users to experience.
Some additional benefits and advantages include the following:
- Reduced Costs: Event Espresso gives you an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third party service. This is made possible through a model where Event Espresso users purchase the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and buy optional add ons only if you need new features.
- More Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept new sign-ups outside normal business hours. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social features (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with others who may also be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event registration process is conducted entirely in digital form, significantly reducing traditional paper waste from tasks associated with enrollment.
- All Information Belongs To You. You control all the information you obtain from event participants.
Features
The Event Espresso plugin provides functionality to its customers through standard features (these are included with the software) and optional features that users can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many unique built-in to website owners. Here are just a few of these:
- Fast and simple to install and use. Ready to start using in minutes.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso allows you to set up multiple ticket types and specify prices, number of tickets, and more.
- Customized Notification Email Message. Configure automated registration and payment notification email messages to communicate with event participants.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso provides integration with leading payment gateways, allowing you to collect money before running events.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration allows you to configure the display settings of Google Maps on the event listing and event details pages.
- Spam Protection. Reduce the likelihood of spammers and bot software programs making fake registrations with reCAPTCHA features that provide human validation.
- In-App Documentation Systems. Event Espresso 4 provides 3 detailed in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Event Check-In List. Generate an exportable list of attendees and confirm everyone who has attended.
- Admin Pre-approval. Control who can and can’t participate in your events.
- Public Commenting. Add “social proof” by encouraging potential prospects to interact with you online via commenting and past attendees to post comments that can help others choose whether or not to register. Moderation settings for public comments are set up in the WP commenting admin area.
- Search Engine Friendly Page URLs. Keyword rich event page URLs leverage your WP site’s Permalinks configuration settings. Search engine friendly urls with topic-relevant keywords add to the context of your events and improves your search rankings, helping you drive a more targeted audience to your website.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your profile to display throughout Event Espresso and your front-end templates. The organization fields include: organization name, street address, city, state, country, zip/postal code, primary contact email address, telephone, tax number, logo, Facebook profile URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest profile URL, Google+ URL, Instagram profile URL.
- Default Tickets. If you create similar tickets for your events, you can set up as your default ticket for the next event simply by ticking a checkbox.
- Event Venue Profiles. The venue manager in Event Espresso 4 allows information about a venue to appear throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front-end of your website to inform registrants of the location of your event. The venue profile has many of the standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also displays information like venue seating capacity, venue web address, phone number, physical, Google map, etc. You can also list venues on different areas in your theme and on a venue listing page on your website where you can set up and publish venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have booked for a given venue.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso provides users with access to an expert community of event managers and plugin users. You can network with other Event Espresso users via their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential attendees who have not paid yet for their registration with a standard but personalized invoice with one click. Your invoices will reference pre-registered customers who have not paid their registration in full by name, display the amount they owe, and include a link to the event information, 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 the page templates to display events in your own unique way.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows you to have more control and options over the content of your events and how the information displays to your prospective customers.
- Control Box Management & Organization. Event Espresso leverages the WP user interface, which gives you the ability to reorder the user interface to suit your workflow process. Each control box can be collapsed, re-arranged or entirely removed from your workflow configuration.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & 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 mission, the company operates on 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 comes with 40+ additional features, including:
- Live-filtering when searching for events inside the Event Espresso admin.
- Default surcharge (the same as adding a service fee to every ticket).
- Default payment status.
Add ons
As well as an incredible array of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow customers to significantly enhance the capabilities of events.
Some of these add ons include:
- EE4 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, a default image will be used instead.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Template Addon: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize multiple datetime events into a drop-down list.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add-on: The Category Accordion template shows event categories in a simple list. Clicking a category name displays all 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 lets 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 lets you override certain aspects of the plugin.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add on Editions: This add on lets you include others in the event management process and give new users the capacity to create events or regional managers the ability to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WP users roles and assign them different permissions with different privileges, allowing others to 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 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 add on.
- EE4 Event Ticketing And Bar Scanning Addon: The Ticketing addon gives you the capacity to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon adds the capacity to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing addon includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode types are included for managing check-in scans at the 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 registrants and to validate tickets.
- Events Table Template Add on: The Events Table Template addon gives event managers a simple and easy-to-use system that allows you to modify the design 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 included as a source template.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp addon allows you to auto-register attendees to a chosen mailing autoresponder list or group within your MailChimp account.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software, including new add ons.
For complete details about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, visit the plugin website here:
User Testimonials
Below are a few of the many testimonials that users have posted about Event Espresso:
”EventEspresso saves us money, saves our secretary 16-24 hours and looks so professionally done that people ask us how we do it; which we happily tell them, “Event Espresso, and be sure to get the ticketing add-on.”” David, House of Prayer
”…it really does blow everything else that’s out there out of the water.” Chris Reynolds, Arcane Palette Creative Design
”At first we looked at CVENT for one of our clients and they wanted $16,000 per year for 3000 event attendees + fees totaling $22k. That is before Staff and Webinar fees. Worst of all we had to prepay the $16k amount even if we never used all 3000 attendees. That was when we looked at Event Espresso and we realized we could build our own event system for less than 16K. For the most part we have been very satisfied with our decision. The real ROI will come next year when they don’t have to pay another 16k-22K! Over the next 5-6 years we should be able to claim that we saved the company over $100,000 – Thanks Event Espresso!” David Waterman (Long Version), KT Benefits & InkItDigital.com
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, presenter, event planner, or event consultant, there are just endless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered owner, go through the user forum for useful ideas and practical ways to streamline your event management process or improve the experience of your event customers.
Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with most WP plugins and WordPress themes that follow standard WordPress development guidelines. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive customer support, as so many of its plugin clients attest:
”It’s magical. Support is amazing, plugin is simple to use, a 3 year old could use the iPhone app…it all is very impressive and professional.” David, House of Prayer
The software provides comprehensive support that includes access to support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, email 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 an established team of experienced WordPress web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can depend on to run your events.
Software Price
Event Espresso is available in different editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin features, however, you should consider purchasing one of the ”Pro” plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This option allows you to set up Event Espresso on one domain only. It includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This enables you to configure Event Espresso on 1 site only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This allows you to run Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Pricing details of the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Presently, the software sells for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Management & Registration System For WordPress
Please Note: The pricing above was current at the time this review was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the website.
Additional Plugin Info
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.
Use the plugin’s documentation tools for answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to your particular use-case, or to notify developers about problems and leave feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event booking and ticketing manager software, used by thousands.
If you are a WordPress user and you plan to run an event that involves scheduling dates and venues, booking attendees, or booking tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticketing Registration System For WordPress
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