Do you currently run or plan to run events that require bookings or registrations, such as workshops, training classes, not-for-profit fund-raisers, corporate functions, or even a large-scale event such as a trade exhibit, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Co-ordinating event bookings can be a complicated and time-consuming process. You may need to co-ordinate event schedules, available dates and spaces, attendee numbers, data collection and storage, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders and alerts, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to event registrants.
There are a number of benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily copy settings for repeat events, give event managers more control, create a more enjoyable client 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 set up a very inexpensive and professional online event registration system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Registration Plugin
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WP software lets you easily create your event and start receiving bookings in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and take online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich software that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize registration forms
You can employ a number of event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up selling tickets, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event attendees, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing updates.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their software: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is impressively different than the older EE 3, as the platform is being revamped using a different structure to allow for future growth. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually transition completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
To learn more about the plugin go here:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages 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 existing online presence into an automated and feature-rich event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to attendee limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically doing away with the need to process registrations and bookings manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating participants to enroll by themselves.
Allowing your customers to do all of the data themselves frees up your time and lets you direct more of your time on delivering a more unique event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will see shortly, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your participants to experience.
Additional plugin benefits include the following:
- Less Costs: Event Espresso provides you with a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to developing your own solution or using a 3rd party service. The cost is kept to a minimum through a model where you buy the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and purchase add-ons only if you need extra features.
- Higher Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online event bookings any time of day or night. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social add-ons (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with their friends who may also be interested in attending.
- Green And Paperless Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign up process remains entirely in digital form, significantly reducing typical paper waste from tasks associated with administration.
- Own Your Information. You control all the data you obtain from event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
The Event Espresso software delivers functionality to its users through standard features (these come with the software) and optional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many unique features to web site owners. Here are just a few:
- Fast and simple to install and configure. Be up and running in minutes.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso allows you to set up as many kinds of tickets as you need and specify prices, limits on ticket quantities, and more.
- Customized Notification Emails. Easily configure customized automatic booking and payment notification emails to communicate with event registrants.
- Tax Admin & Reporting. Event Espresso 4 gives you several options to handle taxes for an event and report tax fee components to customers when purchasing tickets. You can configure taxes globally or on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your WP theme and display contact details throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow you to create new prices that adjust the base ticket price of the default ticket.
- Mobile Registration & Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system enables you to authenticate tickets, speed up door registrations, create multiple check-in “stations” and track participants.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. EE 4 lets you understand who your clients are and how you have done past business with them. The Contact Profile page records the name, biography, contact information, event registration information, comments, and more about each registrant.
- Waiting Lists. Prospective participants can join a waiting list if your event has reached capacity. Additionally, you can specify that waiting list registrants pre-pay if you plan to add more capacity for the event.
- Public Commenting. Add social a new level of social sharing to your events pages by encouraging potential prospects to ask questions about your event and previous participants to post comments that can help others decide whether or not to register. Moderation settings for public commenting are set in the WP built-in commenting admin area.
- Draft Events. Draft events enable you to develop your event over time without publishing it to your site. You can work on your events until you are ready to publish it to your website, or schedule your event page to publish at a future date and time.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your organization’s profile to be deployed throughout Event Espresso and your front-end templates. Your organization information include: company name, address, city, state, country, zip code, email, phone number, tax number, logo, Facebook URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ profile URL, Instagram URL.
- Default Tickets. If you find yourself creating identical tickets for your events, you can easily set up as your default ticket for the next event simply by checking a box.
- Multiple Attendee Enrolments. Event Espresso 4 allows a single person or people to order multiple tickets and different types of tickets at the same time. You decide how many people are able to enrol in a single registration by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Automatic Plugin Installation Upgrades. Event Espresso provides easy 1-click software updates to ensure that you have the latest features and to keep your plugin installation compatible with the latest version of WordPress.
- Staff Management. Save time and keep your information organized by reusing staff profiles for multiple events or displaying their profile using a shortcode in your event description.
- Attendee Reports. Event reports gives you information of all the registrations and transactions, allowing you to track the performance of your events with the aggregate number of people who have registered and amount of revenue you’ve collected.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows developers to have more control and options over your events and how your information displays to readers.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. EE 4 allows you to create a log file with debugging data that can be useful for developers who are troubleshooting.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And Value: According to the philosophy stated on their website, Event Espresso’s goal is to “empower business and organization leaders with the event registration, ticketing and management tools that maximize the success of events.” To achieve their goals, the company operates on a modular and highly effective model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium version of Event Espresso also includes 40+ additional features, including:
- Live-filtering when you search for events inside the Event Espresso admin.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse a group of questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page in the registration process.
Add-Ons
As well as an amazing number of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow customers to significantly enhance the capabilities of your event management process.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add-on: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display scheduled events by location. Four maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Template Addon: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes the events with multiple 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 be customized to show the event thumbnail instead of the date.
- Events Social Sharing Add-on: This add-on adds social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that lets your registrants to post a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after booking.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration addon lets you take full advantage of the WP user system. With the WP User Integration addon you can give users a special incentive by offering member prices and overriding event pricing when members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered users of the website can have access to these special events. Members can also store 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.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add-on Editions: This addon lets you involve your staff in your organization to help manage your events and give new users permission to create events or regional managers the capacity to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WordPress users roles and assign them different permissions with different capabilities, so your staff can 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 sections of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain parts of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to allow users to have geographic responsibilities for events and users, use the Roles and Permissions Pro add on.
- Event Ticketing Add-on: The Ticketing addon gives you the ability to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon adds the ability to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing addon includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode types are included for managing check-in scans at the venue door. Customers can either print out their tickets or display them on their mobile devices. The barcode scanner can be used for checking in or checking out registrants and to validate tickets.
- Events Calendar Addon: This add-on uses the WP calendar to display events and event categories via a nice graphical calendar.
- JSON API Add on: The Event Espresso JSON API add on allows other software applications, websites, mobile applications, etc… to access your Event Espresso information through an API (Application Programming Interface).
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, visit the plugin website:
Testimonials
Below are some of the many testimonials that satisfied users 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
”…it really does blow everything else that’s out there out of the water.” Chris Reynolds, Arcane Palette Creative Design
”Just bought an Event Espresso license for an upcoming conference website we are working on. The custom registration forms functionality rocks!” Eric Sopp, Inside Design
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, presenter, seminar planner, or event consultant, there are just countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, spend a little time going through the user forum for tips and practical ways to improve your event management and registration process and enhance the experience of your customers.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with most WordPress plugins and WordPress themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great support, as so many of its customers attest:
”No complaints here. Satisfied customer. You can teach us all few things about customer service. Thanks!” Charles
Event Espresso provides amazing support that includes access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, premium 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.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely software you can count on to run and manage your events.
Event Espresso Pricing
Event Espresso is available in different editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software functionality, however, you will want to consider downloading one of the ”Pro” plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This allows you to 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 – This enables you to set up Event Espresso on 1 site only. It includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Edition – This allows 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.
The cost to purchase the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Presently, the software is selling for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticketing Registration Software For WordPress
Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this review was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin seller when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Information
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the software’s online documentation pages for answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to your specific use-case, or to report bugs and leave feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WP event registration and ticketing management software, used and trusted by thousands of people.
If you own a WordPress-powered web site and you intend to run events that involve scheduling dates and venues, booking participants, and/or selling tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Manager Software
***