Do you currently run or plan to run events that need to accept registrations, such as workshops, training classes, not-for-profit fund raisers, marketing events, or even a big event such as a community fair, 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 will probably need to co-ordinate calendar schedules, event dates, attendee numbers, data collection and storage, collecting payments and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders and notifications, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and issuing 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 reduce costs, help you easily copy settings for recurring events, give event managers more control, create a better client experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be expensive.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-powered website or blog, you can set up a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event registration solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Manager System
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily set up your event and start processing online registrations literally in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and take online event bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich software that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize registration forms
You can employ a range of event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up selling tickets, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event participants, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing notifications.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Please Note: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 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 EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually transition completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just some of the many benefits and advantages 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 website or blog into an automated and feature-rich event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to attendee limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by virtually eliminating the chore of processing registrations and signups manually.
Essentially, you are enabling event attendees to enrol by themselves.
Allowing your enrollees to do the data entry frees up your time and lets you spend more of your attention on delivering a more unique event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon learn, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management process that you want your participants to experience.
Some additional benefits include the following:
- Less Costs: Event Espresso is a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to building your own solution or using a third-party service. This is made possible by using a model where users start with the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and purchase addons only if you need added functionality.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new event signups 24/7. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing add ons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event invite friends who may also be interested.
- Green Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign-up process is kept wholly in digital form, significantly reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks associated with administration.
- Own Your Information. You own all the data you collect from your event participants.
Features
The Event Espresso software delivers functionality to its customers through standard features (these are included with the software) and additional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of built-in to WP users. Here are just some:
- Fast and easy to install and set up. Be up and running in minutes.
- Customized Event Registration Forms. Event Espresso lets you gather specific data using custom event registration forms on your web site to create a tailored experience for your attendees.
- Event Calendar. Customers can easily find your events and add these to their schedule with a calendar.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso provides integration with leading payment gateways, allowing you to collect booking payments prior to running events.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your WP theme and reuse registrant information throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Prices. Set up events quickly by pre-configuring system-default ticket pricing.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 comes with 3 built-in in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. EE 4 lets you understand who your customers are and how you’ve done past business with your customers. Your Contact Profile page stores updated records such as the name, biography, contact information, event registration information, private comments, and more about each attendee.
- Admin Pre-approval. Control who can register for your events.
- RSS Feeds. Keep your customers updated about your events, bring in more visitors and reach a wider audience with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events enable you to build an event page at your own leisure without publishing it to your site. You can continue building your event pages until you are ready to publish it live on your website, or schedule to publish your event pages at a later time and date.
- Full Control Of Your Event Management. Event Espresso puts event managers in complete control of every aspect of an event’s registration and ticketing processes, and lets you automate the process with event management tools that include staff and venue management, customizable event designs, payment processing and handling, list waiting, attendee limits, printable ticketing and more.
- Exportable Information. You can output all of your information collected from event customers into Excel or CSV format for creating reports, implementing marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, etc..
- WP Visual Editor. Event Espresso uses the native WP WYSIWYG editor, so you can quickly and easily add graphic images and create your content without knowledge of HTML or CSS, just like any WP post.
- Registrant Records. You can manage each customer’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their records organized.
- Team Member Management. Save time and stay 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 an event description.
- Categorize Events. If you have a number of types of events such as free and paid, workshops and mastermind sessions, different kinds of exercise classes, etc. you can categorize these to help your participants to find what they’re searching for. You can display all events in a category on an event category page, make all events searchable by category, and colour-code your events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make these easier to find, as well as suggesting other events in the categories that interest your visitors.
Extra features include:
- Hooks, Actions And Filters. These features allow you to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso software that are compatible with WordPress.
- Control Box Management & Reorganization. Event Espresso leverages the WP user interface, which gives you the ability to reorder the user interface to suit your workflow process. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or entirely removed from your page.
- 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 as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also includes over 40 additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes that includes participant data in confirmation emails and email updates.
- Default surcharge (the same as adding a service tax to tickets).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Addons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow end-users to further expand the functionality 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 available, a default image will be used instead.
- Recurring Events Manager Add on: The Recurring Events manager add-on allows you to put your events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months … even years in advance. You can add as many future events as you want. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close registrations for all of these recurring events.
- 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 display the event thumbnail image instead of the date.
- Social Coupons Integration Add on: If your site uses Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can also specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration add-on allows you to take full 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 your members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered website users will have access to your special events. Members can also enter 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 previous events and make payment for future events.
- Seating Chart Add on: The seating chart add on is suitable 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 addon allows you to offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart addon lets you control the environment for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to every seat.
- Multi-Event Registration Add-on: The Multiple Event registration addon gives your potential customers the ability to register for 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 Addon: 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 allows web developers to design their own custom templates using one of the included templates as a base template.
- MailChimp Integration Addon: The MailChimp add on lets you automatically register attendees to a selected mailing autoresponder list or group within your MailChimp account.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software, including new add-ons.
For full details about the newest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
User Feedback
Here are a few of the many testimonials that satisfied customers 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
”This really is a hell of a plugin. For me, it’s probably the final nail in the coffin for Joomla, as WP can now pretty much do EVERYTHING Joomla does, but better. Love the simplicity of this plugin!” Sam, Web Contempo
”Hello. I wanted to say that I’ve purchased Event Espresso twice now for two different organizations and have had great success with the purchases. Outside of photography, I also build small websites with WordPress as the CMS. I built two websites for two different martial arts organizations who host yearly seminars and tournaments. The plug in has provided a way for attendees to sign up online from both Canada and the United States with ease, and also allowed the organizations to easily manage payments, attendee lists, and many other aspects of the events. Thanks to Seth for creating such a great plug in, and for your constant support!” James Zedd, James Zedd Photography
Useful Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, trainer, event promoter, or event consultant, there are simply unlimited possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
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 workflow or improve the experience of your participants.
Support
Event Espresso works with with other WordPress plugins and WordPress themes that follow WP coding standards. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great end-user support, as many of its satisfied clients confirm:
”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 Event Espresso plugin provides great support that includes access to a support forum, 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.
In addition, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can count on to run your events.
Event Espresso Price
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin options, however, you need to consider using one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This lets you configure Event Espresso on one site only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This enables you to set up Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License – This lets you configure Event Espresso on five sites. Pricing 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 specials being offered. Presently, the software sells for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticket Registration System For WordPress
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing when this article was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin author when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Plugin Information
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 for answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to your specific use-case, or to notify developers about issues and give feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event registration and ticketing management software, used by thousands of WordPress users.
If you own a WordPress-powered site and you currently run events that involve scheduling dates and venues, booking participants, and/or selling seating, then you will probably not find a better solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – Event Management And Registration Software For WordPress
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