Does your company currently run or plan to run events that need managing bookings or registrations, such as workshops, community classes, not-for-profit fund-raisers, marketing events, or even a big event like an art exhibition, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Co-ordinating event registrations can be a complex process. You have to co-ordinate scheduling, dates, participant numbers, data administration, collecting payments and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders and notifications, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and issuing tickets to event registrants.
There are many advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower expenses, help you easily copy settings for repeat events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be costly.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-powered website, you can set up a very inexpensive and highly professional online event registration solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Ticketing Registration System
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress lets you easily set up an event and start processing registrations in 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 of your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can employ a range of event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your event participants, or integrating your event bookings with social media sites like Facebook.
View detailed information about event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is considerably different than the older Event Espresso 3, as it is being revamped 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 retire Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
More info:
Plugin Benefits
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 online presence into a fully-featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to attendee limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and 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 practically eliminating the chore of processing registrations and bookings manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating participants to enroll by themselves.
Letting your participants to do the data entry frees you up from doing administration and lets you invest more energy on delivering a memorable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will see shortly, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and booking process that you want your attendees to experience.
Additional benefits include:
- Less Costs: Event Espresso gives you an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third-party service provider. The cost is kept to a minimum through a model where Event Espresso users pay for the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then buy add-ons only if you need extra functionality.
- More Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept new event sign-ups outside traditional business hours. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event share your information with their friends who may be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, your event signup process can be performed entirely in digital form, reducing typical paper waste from tasks related to administration.
- Own Your Data. You control all the information acquired from your event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
The Event Espresso plugin delivers functionality to its customers through built-in features (these come with the plugin) and additional features that customers can buy for an additional cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many unique features to web site owners. Here are just some of these:
- Fast and easy to install and use. Ready to start using in very little time.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In Event Espresso 4, events can have multiple dates and times (called datetimes), which these can be managed from a single event.
- Customized Confirmation Emails. Easily configure custom automatic registration and payment confirmation emails to communicate with event registrants.
- Ticket Selector. Present multiple ticket options to prospective attendees so they can purchase the ticket(s) that best suits their needs.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your WP theme and reuse contact information throughout other areas of your site.
- Spam Protection. Prevent the chance of spammers and robots creating bogus registrations on your website by using reCAPTCHA features that validate human activity.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 provides three comprehensive in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. EE 4 lets you gain a better understanding of who your clients are and how you have previously done business with your customers. The Contact Profile section records the name, biography, contact information, event registration details, private comments, etc. about each attendee.
- Waiting Lists. Latecomers can subscribe to a waiting list if your event is full. You can also specify that waiting list attendees pay for their spots if you plan to expand numbers for the event.
- RSS Event Feeds. Automatically update your customers, bring in more visitors and reach a wider audience with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Keyword-Rich URLs. Keyword-rich Web links leverage your WP site’s Permalinks configuration settings. Search engine friendly permalinks with topic-relevant keywords enhance the context of your pages and is favored by search engines, helping you get a more targeted audience to your website.
- Easy Event Management. Event Espresso puts you in full control of all aspects of an event’s registration and ticketing processes, and allows you to automate the process with event management tools that include staff and venue management, custom event page designs, payment processing and handling, wait lists, limits on attendees, print-ready tickets and more.
- Import Events. Event Espresso 4 provides a CSV-based importing capability that allows you to upload bulk event data at once. You can export, edit and upload details about events, datetimes, ticketing details, pricing, registration questions, venue info, terms, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Event Venue Manager. The venue manager in Event Espresso 4 allows details about venues to appear throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front end of your website to inform visitors of the location of your event. The venue record has many standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also lets you republish venue details like venue seating capacity, venue site URL, telephone number, physical, Google map, etc. You can also list venues on specific areas on your WP theme and on a venue archive page on your site where you can set up and publish venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a particular venue.
- Registrant Profiles. You can manage each registrant’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their information organized.
- Social Sharing. Event registrants and your site visitors can help increase exposure for your events using social media sharing buttons.
- Attendee Reporting. Quick-view event reports gives you information of all the registrations and transactions, enabling you to track the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and how much money you’ve collected.
Additional features include:
- Hooks, Actions & Filters. These features allow developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso plugin that are fully compatible with the WordPress software platform.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. EE 4 lets you output a log file with debugging data which can be helpful for developers when diagnosing errors.
- Autonomy, Flexibility And Value For Money: 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 company operates on a 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 40+ added features, including:
- Live-filtering when you search for events within the Event Espresso admin.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing a group of questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Addons
In addition to a comprehensive array of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow users to further expand the capabilities of managing your 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, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Template Addon: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes the events with many datetimes into a dropdown list.
- Events Calendar Table Template Addon: 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 an event thumbnail image instead of a date.
- Social Media Buttons Addon: The social media addon displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media add-on is included free with any of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration addon lets you take advantage of the WP user system. With the WP User Integration add-on you can give your users a special incentive by offering member prices and overriding event prices 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 your special events. Members can also enter personal data into their profile page allowing them fast registration for events by auto-filling in the personal information on the event registration form. Your users can also view event history and make payment for events.
- Seating Chart Add-on: The seating chart addon is 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 lets you 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 Add on: The Multiple Event registration addon gives potential attendees the ability to register for multiple events at once. In each event listing attendees 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 Calendar Add on: This addon uses the WP calendar to display events and categories of events using an attractive graphical calendar.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp add-on allows you to automatically register participants to a particular autoresponder list or group within your MailChimp account.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add ons.
For complete details about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, visit the plugin website here:
User Feedback
Below are some of the many testimonials that users have posted 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
”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, KT Benefits & InkItDigital.com
”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
Useful Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, presenter, conference planner, or event management professional, there are simply unlimited possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a licensed user, search the user forum for tips and practical suggestions to improve your event management and registration workflow and improve the experience of your event customers.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with other WordPress plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress development guidelines. If you do need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great support, as many of its clients confirm:
”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 exceptional support including access to support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, custom development 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 web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely software you can rely on to run and manage your events.
Software Cost
Event Espresso is available in a number of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software features, however, you should consider purchasing one of the paid plugin editions below:
- Personal License Edition – This license lets you configure Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This license option lets you set up Event Espresso on one site only. It includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Edition – This enables you to set up Event Espresso on five sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The price of the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Presently, the software is being retailed for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Management And Registration System For WordPress
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing when this review was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin seller when you visit the website.
Additional Information
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the software’s documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to a specific use-case, or to notify developers about errors and leave feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WP event booking and ticketing management plugin, used and trusted by thousands of event promoters.
If you are a WordPress user and you intend to run events that require scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), registering participants, and/or reserving seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Ticketing Registration Plugin
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