Do you currently run or plan to run events that require co-ordinating bookings, such as seminars, community classes, charity fund-raisers, networking conferences, or even a big event like a community festival, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Managing event bookings can be a complicated and time-consuming process. You need to co-ordinate scheduling, event dates, registration numbers, data collection and admin, payments and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to event attendees.
There are a number of benefits to setting up an online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower costs, help you easily replicate previously-run events, give you more control, improve client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event registration system can be very expensive.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-based digital presence, you can easily set up an inexpensive and professional web-based event booking system.
Introducing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP lets you easily schedule your event and start accepting online bookings literally in a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and process online event bookings)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed software that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can use several event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up ticket sales, 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 updates.
View detailed information about event attendees
Note: Currently, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is significantly different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the platform has been revamped using a different structure to allow for future growth. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually phase out Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and advantages of using this plugin.
To learn more about the plugin go here:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just some of the many benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current web site into an automated and feature-rich event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by literally doing away with the chore of processing registrations and bookings manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating event attendees to enroll themselves.
Letting your participants to do all of the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you direct more attention on delivering a better event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover in a moment, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and booking process that you want your attendees to experience.
Additional plugin benefits include the following:
- Less Costs: Event Espresso is an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third-party service provider. This is made possible through a model where users buy the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then buy add-ons when you need new functionality.
- More Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept new event sign-ups 24/7. In addition, Event Espresso social and marketing features (see below) let people interested in registering for your event invite their friends who may also be interested in attending.
- Green And Paperless Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign-up process is performed wholly online, reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks related to enrollment.
- Own Your Information. You control all the data obtained from event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to end-users via built-in features (these come with the plugin) and optional features that users can buy for an additional cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many built-in to WP users. Here are just some of these:
- Fast and easy to install and configure. Be up and running in minutes.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso lets you configure multiple ticket types and specify unique pricing options, limits on ticket quantities, etc.
- Event Calendar. Customers can easily see your events and add these to their schedule using the calendar.
- Tax Administration. Event Espresso 4 gives you several options to handle taxes for an event and provide reports of tax fee components to registrants when purchasing tickets. You can configure taxes globally and on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration allows you to customize the display settings of Google Maps on the event listing and event details pages.
- Default Price Types. Price types let event managers create new prices that adjust the base ticket price for your default ticket.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system enables you to validate tickets, speed up door registrations, create various check-in “stations” and track attendees.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. EE 4 lets you gain a better understanding of who your customers are and how they have done business with you.
- Administrative Pre-approval. Be selective about who can and cannot register for your events.
- Public Commenting. Add “social proof” by allowing potential prospects to interact with you online via commenting and past attendees to post reviews that can help others choose whether or not to register. Moderation settings for commenting are specified in the WordPress default commenting section.
- Keyword Rich Event Page Web Links. Keyword-rich event page Web links leverage your WP Permalinks configuration settings. Search engine friendly web links with topic-relevant keywords enhance the context of your pages and improves your search rankings, helping you drive more visitors to your events.
- Easy Event Management. Event Espresso puts event managers in full control of all aspects of your event’s registration and ticketing, 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, wait lists, limits on attendees, print-ready tickets and more.
- Exportable Information. You can output all the information collected from event attendees into Excel or CSV format for creating advanced reports, planning marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, and so on.
- Multiple Participant Enrolments. EE 4 allows a single person or people to pay for multiple tickets and different types of tickets at the same time. Event managers specify how many people are allowed to register in a single booking session by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Automatic Plugin Installation Updates. Event Espresso offers easy 1-click updating to make sure that you have the latest features and to keep your plugin installation working with new versions of WordPress.
- Staff Member Manager. Save time and keep your data organized by reusing staff profiles for multiple events or displaying their profile using a shortcode in any event description.
- Accurate Participant Management. You have control of your attendees’ date; who has enrolled, for what event and how much they have paid. With the attendee manager, you can get a quick overview of registered participants and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export an attendee list to a CSV file for additional reports, send customized payment reminders and receipts and send messages to your customers on a person-by-person basis or as a group.
Additional features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for most WordPress users, and also robust and customizable for enterprise-level users and web-based software developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, EE 4 permits more complex developments and customizations to the plugin.
- Control Box Management And Reorganization. Event Espresso lets you leverage the WP user interface, which gives you the ability to reconfigure the user interface to suit your workflow. Each control box can be collapsed, re-arranged or completely removed from your page.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & Value For Money: According to the mission statement on their web site, Event Espresso’s objective 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 over 40 added features, including:
- Email shortcodes for including registrant data in emails and newsletters.
- Default surcharge (the same as applying a service tax to each ticket).
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As well as an amazing array of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow plugin users to significantly expand the capabilities of your event management system.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Grid Template Addon: 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.
- Recurring Events Management Addon: The Recurring Events manager addon enables you to put events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months ahead. You can schedule as many future events as you need. Event Espresso will automatically open and close bookings for all recurring events.
- Events Category Accordion Template Addon: The Category Accordion template shows event categories in a simple list. Clicking the category name shows all events associated with that category and closes previously open categories.
- Social Coupons Integration Add on: If your website is featured on 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 lets you take advantage of the WP user system. With the WP User Integration addon 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 website users will have access to your special events. Members can also input personal details 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 previous events and pay for future events.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Addon Versions: This add-on lets you involve other staff in the event management process and give new users permission to create events or regional managers permission 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 capabilities, allowing others to help you manage your events or the events that other people create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain sections of your WP dashboard and/or certain parts of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to create geographic regions for other people to manage events, use the Roles and Permissions Pro add-on.
- Multiple Event Registration Add-on: The Multi-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 Multi-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 Template Addon: The Events Table Template add on gives you an easy-to-use system that lets you edit the design of your event lists. It comes with a simple table template with category filters, table search, table paging and more. It also enables developers to build custom templates using one of the templates included as a source template.
- MailChimp Integration Add on: The MailChimp add-on lets you automatically register participants to a specified mailing autoresponder list or group within your MailChimp account.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin, including new add ons.
To learn more about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website here:
User Testimonials
Here are some of the many testimonials that customers have written about Event Espresso:
”It’s been very comprehensive and covers exactly the aspects of event registration that we needed for our site plus some features that we didn’t even need but could still use in the future. Very Excellent Plugin!” Tristan Hall, Area 12:2 Youth Group
”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
”You guys have done an AWESOME job with this system…promise me to keep up the excellent work you guys are doing, for as long as you can… Respect!” Robert Jarnroth, Jarnroth Digital Productions
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, presenter, seminar planner, or event professional, there are just unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, search the user forum for inspiration and practical ways to improve your event management and registration process and enhance the experience of your attendees.
Event Espresso Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with other WP plugins and WordPress themes that follow WP coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great support, as many of its customers confirm:
”Thank you Seth for being so responsive and going above and beyond the call of duty with your app! I highly recommend Event Espresso for its functionality and for the stellar support. Seth has a deep knowledge and understanding of WordPress and has built a tool that is seamless to use for both organizer and attendee alike! After looking at a bunch of alternatives, Event Espresso far surpasses the other apps that are available.” Wendy Troupe, ICS North Pole Express
Event Espresso provides robust support with access to support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, premium 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 proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can rely on to run and manage your events.
Event Espresso Cost
Event Espresso is available in a range of editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin features, however, you need to consider downloading one of the premium plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This option enables you to set up Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This edition lets you set up Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This enables you to set up Event Espresso on five domains. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Current pricing for the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. When we last checked, the plugin retails for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this review was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin developer when you visit the website.
Additional Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the plugin’s online documentation tools for answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to your particular situation, or to notify developers about bugs and leave feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WP event registration and ticketing manager software, used by thousands of users.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you plan to run events that involve scheduling dates and venues, registering attendees, or booking tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better WordPress plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – Event Manager & Registration System For WordPress
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