Do you currently run or plan to run events that require handling bookings or registrations, such as workshops, group classes, charity fundraisers, corporate conferences, or even a large-scale event such as an art exhibition, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event bookings is a complex process. You have to co-ordinate scheduling, available dates and spaces, participant numbers, data processing and storage, payments and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders and notifications, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to participants.
There are many benefits to setting up an automated web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily duplicate similar events, give event managers more control, improve client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that this can be very costly.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-based digital presence, you can easily set up a very inexpensive and professional web-based event registration system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress software allows you to easily set up your event and start accepting online registrations literally in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and receive online event registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich application that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize registration forms
You can use a range of event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up ticket sales, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media sites like Facebook.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Note: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is fundamentally different than the older EE 3, as the platform is being revamped using a different structure to allow for future expansion. The Event Espresso 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 learn more about this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current web site into an automated and fully featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by virtually doing away with the need to process registrations manually.
Basically, you are facilitating attendees to perform the registration by themselves.
Allowing your customers to do the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you direct more of your energy on planning a better event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will see in a moment, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and registration process that you want your attendees to experience.
Some additional benefits and advantages include the following:
- Reduced Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own solution or using a 3rd party provider. The cost is kept low by using a model where you pay for the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and purchase add ons only if you need additional features.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online event signups any time of day or night. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social and marketing features and add ons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event share your information with others who may also be interested in attending.
- Green Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, the event signup process can be performed wholly online, reducing traditional paper waste from tasks associated with administration.
- All Data Belongs To You. You control all the information you obtain from your event participants.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to end-users through built-in features (these come with the plugin) and optional features that customers can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many great features to website owners. Here are just some of these:
- Fast and easy to install and use. Ready to start accepting registrations in no time.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In Event Espresso 4, events can have many dates and times (called datetimes), which these can be managed from one single event.
- Customizable Event & Registration Page Designs. You can customize your events and registrations page using Event Espresso’s limitless template options and parts, plus HTML or CSS.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso seamlessly integrates with leading payment gateways, enabling you to collect money before running the events.
- Intelligent Single Page Checkout. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically copy the primary attendee’s registration details for any additional participants.
- Default Prices. Create events quickly with pre-configured default pricing.
- In-App Documentation Systems. Event Espresso 4 comes with 3 detailed in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of participants and check in those who attend.
- No-Ticket Events. Promote events without making it necessary for participants to book tickets. Use Event Espresso for any type of event, not just those that require tickets.
- XML RSS Event Feeds. Keep your users updated about your events, bring in more visitors and reach a wider audience with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Draft Events. Draft events let you develop your event at your own leisure without displaying it live on your website. You can continue developing your event pages until you are ready to publish it live to your website, or schedule your event page to publish at a later time and date.
- 15+ Languages. Event Espresso can be run in more than 15 languages, and more translations are being added all the time.
- Default Tickets. If you find yourself creating identical tickets for many of your events, you can set up as your default ticket for the next event simply by checking a box.
- Multiple Participant Registration. EE 4 allows a single person or people to book multiple attendees simultaneously. You can control how many attendees are allowed to register in one registration by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso lets you interact with a community of experienced event managers, programmers, designers, digital marketers and businesses who also use the software. You can interact with other members of the Event Espresso community via their community chat room, support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Social Sharing. Event registrants and website visitors can help spread the word about your events using social sharing buttons.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post types. You can even customize your templates to display event information in your own custom way.
Additional features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for most WP users, and also extremely robust and customizable for enterprise-level users and web developers. The bottom line is that by using Object-oriented programming (OOP), EE 4 makes possible more complex developments and customizations to the application.
- Maintenance Mode. Pause registration capabilities for regular website traffic when you need to make changes on your website. You can continue to work on your content during maintenance mode.
- 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 objectives, the software has been built using a modular and highly efficient model 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 additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes that includes attendee data in confirmation emails and email newsletters.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse a series of questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page during registration.
Add-Ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow end-users to significantly enhance the capabilities of managing your event.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add-on: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display upcoming events by location. There are four maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Management Addon: The Recurring Events manager add-on allows you to put your events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years ahead. You can add as many future events as you like. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close bookings for all recurring events.
- Events Category Accordion Template Addon: The Category Accordion template shows categories as a simple list. Clicking on a category name shows the events related to that category and closes any previously open categories.
- Social Coupons Integration Add on: If your web site uses Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can even specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- Custom Template Addon: The Custom Template add on can display your event lists in a range of exciting and interesting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add-on Editions: This addon lets you include staff in your organization to help manage your events and give new users permission to create events or regional managers the ability to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WordPress users roles and give them different permissions with different capabilities, allowing staff 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 parts of your WP dashboard and/or certain areas of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to allow users to control factors geographically for events and users, use the Roles and Permissions Pro add on.
- Multiple Event Registration Addon: The Multiple Event registration add-on gives your potential customers 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 add on uses the WP calendar to display events and categories of events using a nice graphical calendar.
- EE4 Infusionsoft Integration Add-on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and marketing software addon, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture customer data, track registrations, and accept payments from your web site.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin, including new addons.
For more information about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website here:
User Feedback
Below are just some of the testimonials that users have written about Event Espresso:
”Event Espresso rocks! I use it for my dance class registrations. Unlike most dance studios where people have to call or send an email in advance, Event Espresso puts a registration form right there in front of the user and allows me to collect valuable information from the user during the registration process with custom questions such as “Do you have previous dance experience?” or “How did you hear about us?”. It also gives my site a professional look and feel.” Ral, Ral’eau Salsa Dance Company
”I have to say that it has been the right choice for me…I’ve been extremely pleased with the way my site is working.” Robin, RobinTime
”I’m so excited to fire Eventbrite! Event Espresso has an amazing WP plugin for event management. We’re testing it now & are very impressed! In a nutshell Event Espresso saves us money & does everything Eventbrite did before. :)” Dustin Nay
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, presenter, seminar planner, or event consultant, there are just countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a registered user, spend a little time visiting the forums for useful ideas and practical suggestions to streamline your event management and registration workflow or enhance the experience of your event customers.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with all WP plugins and themes that follow WP coding standards. If you find that you need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive support, as so many of its satisfied plugin users attest:
”No complaints here. Satisfied customer. You can teach us all few things about customer service. Thanks!” Charles
The plugin provides comprehensive support with 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.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts an established team of experienced WordPress web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely software you can count on to 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 paid plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This allows you to configure 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 enables you to run Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This option allows you to install Event Espresso on 5 domains. 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. Currently, the software retails for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management
Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this review was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin author when you visit the website.
Additional 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.
Look up the software’s online documentation tools for answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to a specific situation, or to report bugs and give feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event booking and ticketing management plugin, used by thousands.
If you own a WordPress-powered web site and you plan to run any event that requires scheduling dates, times and venues, enrolling participants, and/or selling seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
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