Do you currently run or plan to run events that require co-ordinating bookings or registrations, such as seminars, training courses, not-for-profit fundraisers, corporate functions, or even a large-scale event such as a festival, 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 most likely be required to manage scheduling, dates, attendee numbers, data administration, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders and notifications, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to attendees.
There are a number of advantages to setting up an online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower costs, help you easily copy settings for similar events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that this can be expensive.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-based site, you can easily install a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event registration solution.
Presenting …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily set up your event and begin processing bookings in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and take online event registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
Customize your event registration forms
You can use multiple event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up ticket-selling, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event participants, or integrating your event bookings with social media sites like Facebook.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Important: Currently, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their software: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is considerably different than the older Event Espresso 3, as it is being rebuilt using a different structure to accommodate future expansion. The EE 4 plugin platform 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 the benefits and features of using the plugin.
Go here to learn more about the plugin:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just some of the many benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current website or blog into an automated and feature-rich event management website … 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 system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by literally doing away with the chore of processing registrations manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating participants to enrol on their own.
Letting your attendees to do the data themselves frees up your time and lets you invest more resources on organizing a memorable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn shortly, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management and booking process that you want your participants to experience.
Some additional benefits of the plugin include the following:
- Less Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd-party service. The cost is kept to a minimum through a model where Event Espresso users start with the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then buy addons only when you need extra features.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept new registrations outside traditional business hours. In addition, Event Espresso social add-ons (see below) let people interested in attending your event invite other people they know who may also be interested.
- Paperless Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign up process can remain entirely in digital form, significantly reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks associated with admin and record-keeping.
- All Information Belongs To You. You control all the information gathered from event attendees.
Plugin Features
The Event Espresso software delivers functionality to its customers through standard features (these are included with the plugin) and additional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of features to WP users. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and simple to install and set up. Be up and running in no time.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In Event Espresso 4, events can have many dates and times (called datetimes), and these can be managed from one single event.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Registrants can easily see your upcoming events and add these to their schedule with a calendar.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso provides integration with payment gateways, enabling you to collect booking fees prior to running your events.
- Intelligent Single Page Checkout. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is smart, fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically copy the primary registrant’s details for any added registrants.
- Default Prices. Create events quickly and easily with pre-configured default ticket pricing.
- Discount & Promotional Codes. You can leverage promotion and discount codes to incentivize people to make a decision immediately, or simply make your offers more affordable for price-sensitive prospects. This is also practical if you want to increase sales of events close to deadlines.
- Manual Registration Option. you have the option of booking event participants at the door, or send in paper registration forms for manual processing later.
- Waiting Lists. Prospective attendees can join a waiting list if your event has reached capacity. You can also make it a requirement waiting list attendees pay for their spots if you plan to expand capacity for the event.
- Private Notes On Contacts. Record notes about a contact on their profile. Private notes lets you keep records of when event participants contacted you, your internal comments, and how you have helped them.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events let you develop your event page over time without publishing it to your website. You can work on your events until you are ready to publish it live to your site, or schedule to publish your event pages at a later date and time.
- Full Control Of Your Event Management. Event Espresso puts you in complete control of all aspects of an event’s registration and ticketing processes, and also allows you to automate this process with event management tools that include staff and venue management, custom event page designs, payment processing and handling, list waiting, attendee limits, print-ready tickets and more.
- Exportable Information. You can output all the data gathered from event participants into Excel or CSV format for producing reports, devising marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, and so on.
- WordPress Visual Editor. Event Espresso uses the standard WordPress Visual editor, allowing you to quickly and easily insert photos and stylize your event descriptions without knowing HTML or CSS, just like any other WP post.
- Registrant Records. Manage each attendee’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their information organized and easily within reach.
- Team Member Management. Save time and keep your data organized by reusing staff member profiles for multiple events or displaying profile information such as team member’s contact information, resume and photo using a shortcode in any event description.
- Categorize Events. If you have a number of types of events such as free and paid, conference speakers and breakout sessions, different types of programs and program modules, etc. you can categorize these to make it easier for event attendees to find what they’re searching for. You can display all the events in a category on a custom event category page, make the events searchable by category, and colour-code your events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make them easier to find, as well as suggesting other events in the categories that interest your visitors.
Extra features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for most users, and also extremely robust and customizable for higher end users and developers. The bottom line is that by using Object-oriented programming (OOP), Event Espresso 4 enables more complex developments and customizations to the plugin.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 lets you create a log file with debugging data which can be useful for developers who are diagnosing software errors.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & 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 objectives, the company operates on a modular and highly 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 includes 40+ added features, including:
- Live-filtering when searching for events inside the Event Espresso admin.
- Default surcharge (similar to adding a service fee to tickets).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Add-Ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow plugin users to further expand the functionality of events.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add-on: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display the upcoming events by location. 4 maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Manager Add-on: The Recurring Events management add-on lets you put your events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years ahead. You can schedule as many events in advance as you want. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close registrations for all recurring events.
- Events Date Range Template Add on: The Date Range custom event list template lets your users to search for events that take place in a certain date range.
- 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.
- Custom Files Add-on: The Custom Files add-on provides PHP files that allow you to override certain aspects of the Event Espresso plugin.
- Seating Chart Addon: The seating chart add-on is great for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is perfect for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart add on allows you to promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart add on lets you control the environment for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to each seat.
- Multi-Event Registration Add-on: The Multi-Event registration addon gives your potential attendees 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 add-on, attendees can register for several events at once and even add additional attendees to any of the same events in the same checkout process.
- EE4 Events Table View Template Addon: The Events Table Template add-on gives event managers an easy-to-use system that allows you to modify 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 allows developers to build custom templates using one of the templates included as a source template.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp add on allows you to automatically register participants to a specified mailing 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 addons.
For more details about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
Customer Feedback
Below are some of the many testimonials that customers have written about Event Espresso:
”Congratulations on an absolutely fantastic plugin. I’m really impressed with its functionality and add on features and will definitely upgrade my client’s production site to the premium version (when ready for launch) to incorporate all the features. As I have told another client “this plugin is the cat’s meow”.” Pete Mansel
”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
“Love the plugin, we only use it once a year for a race we have in February. This saved us tons of time in data entry. In addition, we had more runners register than any other year. We attribute that to the ease of registering online. Thanks for your work.” Ed, Friends of Oscar Scherer Park
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, teacher, festival promoter, or event management consultant, there are just countless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a licensed user, visit the support forum for tips and practical suggestions to streamline your event management workflow and improve the experience of your event customers.
Product Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with most WordPress plugins and themes that follow WP coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great end-user support, as so many of its end-users attest:
”By far, the customer service experience with Event Espresso has been the best of any WordPress Theme or Paid Plugin that I’ve used in the past two years!” Megan Murray, Boys & Girls Club of Lake Tahoe
The Event Espresso software provides comprehensive support with access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, priority 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 solid track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can count on to run your events.
Software Cost
Event Espresso is available in a range of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software features, however, you will want to consider downloading one of the premium plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This enables you to install Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This edition enables you to run Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License – This edition enables you to install Event Espresso on 5 domains. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Price details for the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Presently, the plugin sells for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest price: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Manager
Note: The pricing above was current when this review was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the site.
Additional Plugin Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the plugin’s online documentation pages for answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to a particular situation, or to report issues and leave feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event booking and ticketing management software, used and trusted by thousands.
If you own a WordPress web site and you plan to run events that involve scheduling dates and venues, enrolling attendees, and/or reserving tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
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