Event Espresso WordPress Archives - WordPress For Non-Techies: Free WordPress Tutorials

Do you currently run or plan to run events that need managing bookings or registrations, such as workshops, community courses, charity fund raisers, networking functions, or even a big event such as a concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?

Co-ordinating event registrations can be a time-consuming process. You will probably need to co-ordinate event schedules, available dates and spaces, registration numbers, data entry, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders and alerts, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to attendees.

There are many advantages to setting up an automated web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower expenses, help you easily copy settings for similar events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable user experience and grow your sales.

The problem is that this can be expensive.

Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-powered digital presence, you can easily set up a very inexpensive and highly professional online event registration system.

Introducing …

Event Espresso

Plugin Description

The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin allows you to easily schedule multiple events and begin processing online bookings in a few minutes.

(Set up multiple events and receive online event registrations with Event Espresso)

Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed plugin that gives you full control of your event registration management process.

Create custom event registration forms

You can use several event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up ticket-selling, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your participants, or integrating your event registration forms with an autoresponder system for ongoing notifications.

View detailed information about event attendees

Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is impressively different than the older EE 3, as the software is being 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 price. The company plans to eventually transition completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and features of this plugin.

More info:

Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Management

Benefits Of Using Event Espresso

Here are just some of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:

Hands-Free Event Registration Management

Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current website into a feature-rich and professional event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple pricing options 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 increase your business productivity by literally doing away with the chore of processing registrations manually.

Essentially, you are making it easier for event attendees to enroll by themselves.

Allowing your customers to do the data themselves frees you up from doing admin work and lets you concentrate more attention on creating a more enjoyable event.

More Control Over The User Experience

As you will discover in a moment, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your customers to experience.

Some additional benefits of the plugin include the following:

Significantly Lower Costs: Event Espresso provides you with a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third-party service. The cost is kept to a minimum through a model where you pay for the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then buy optional addons only if you need new features.
Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online bookings any time of day or night. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing features (see below) let people interested in attending your event invite their friends who may also be interested.
Green Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign up process can be conducted entirely online, significantly reducing typical paper consumption from tasks related to enrollment.
Own Your Data. You own all the information gathered from your event participants.

Event Espresso Features

The Event Espresso plugin delivers functionality to end-users through standard features (these come with the software) and additional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.

Event Espresso offers a number of features to web site owners. Here are just some:

Quick and simple to install and set up. Ready to use in no time.
Customized Event Registration Form. Event Espresso lets you gather unique data using a custom event registration form on your web site to create a tailored experience for your attendees.
Customizable Event And Registration Page Designs. Match your website’s look and feel for your events and enrollments page using Event Espresso’s limitless template options and components, and HTML or CSS.
Tax Administration Options. Event Espresso 4 provides several options to manage taxes for an event and provide reports of tax fees to customers who purchase tickets. Event managers can configure taxes globally and on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
Google Maps. Google Maps integration enables you to customize the display of Google Maps on your event listing and event details sections.
Spam Protection. Eliminate the chance of spammers and bot software programs creating false registrations by using reCAPTCHA option to provide human authentication.
Discount And Promotional Codes. Offer promotion and discount codes to incentivize prospects to make a purchasing decision now, or make your offers more appealing for price-sensitive customers. This is also practical if you want to sell-out events close to deadlines.
Event Check-In List. Generate a list of participants and check in everyone who has attended.
Ticketless Events. List events without the requirement for registrants to book tickets. Event Espresso can be used for all kinds of events, not only when tickets are needed.
Private Contact Commenting. Keep observations about event participants on their profile. Private commenting allows you to keep records of when event registrants contacted you, your internal comments, and how you have helped them.
Keyword Rich Event Page URLs. Keyword rich URLs take advantage of your WordPress site’s Permalinks configuration settings. “Pretty” permalinks that have relevant keywords add to the context of your events and is favored by search engines, helping you bring more potential customers to your events.
Country-specific Settings. You can configure the country and currency settings that will be used to host your events, such as currency name, currency signs, decimal characters and places, country codes, regions, and so on.
Upload Event Information. Event Espresso 4 provides an advanced importing feature that enables you to quickly upload a lot of event data all at one time. You can export, edit and import data for events, datetimes, ticketing details, pricing, custom registration questions, venue info, terminology, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
Venue Management. The venue management feature in EE 4 lets details about venues to display throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front-end of your website to inform registrants of your event’s location. The venue record has many of the standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also lets you add details such as venue seating capacity, venue web address, telephone number, physical, maps, etc. You can also list all of your event venues throughout specific parts on your WP theme and on a venue archive page on your website where you can set up and display venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a particular venue.
Registrant Profiles. You can manage each customer’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their information organized.
Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential event customers who have not paid in full for their registration with a standard but personalized PDF invoice with one click of a button. Your invoices will reference pre-registered customers who have not paid their registration yet by name, display the balance they owe, and include links to the event, a payment url and a link where they can download the invoice.
Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post type features such as custom fields, post meta data, taxonomies, etc. You can also customize the page templates to display events in your own custom way.

Additional 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 prospective customers.
Full Logging & Remote Logging. EE 4 lets you output a log file with debugging data which can be helpful for web developers who are diagnosing software problems.
Flexibility, Autonomy And 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 that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.

The premium edition of Event Espresso also includes 40+ additional features, including:

Email shortcodes that includes registrant data in confirmation emails and email newsletters.
Question groups that simplify the process of reusing the same group of questions for similar events.
Default payment status.

Addons

As well as a comprehensive range of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow users to further expand the capabilities of events.

Some of these addons include:

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 the event does not have a featured image available, it will use a default image.
Recurring Events Dropdown Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize many datetime events into a drop-down list.
Events Category Accordion Template Addon: The Category Accordion template shows categories in a simple list. Clicking the category name shows all events associated with that category and closes any previously open categories.
Social Media Buttons Addon: The social media addon displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media addon comes free with any of the Event Espresso support licenses.
WP User Integration: The WP User Integration add-on lets you take full advantage of the WordPress user system. With the WP User Integration add-on 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 users of the website will have access to these special events. Members can also add 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 view previous events and make payment for events.
Seating Chart Add-on: The seating chart addon is for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart add-on lets you offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues right from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart addon lets you control the environment for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to each seat.
Multi-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 shopping 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.
Events Calendar Add-on: This WordPress events calendar displays events and event categories via a nice graphical calendar.
JSON API Add-on: The Event Espresso JSON API addon gives permission for other software applications, web sites, mobile applications, etc… to access your Event Espresso details through an API (Application Programming Interface).

Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software, including new addons.

For complete details about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:

Event Espresso

Customer Feedback

Below are just some of the many testimonials that satisfied plugin users have posted about Event Espresso:

”I want to commend you on a fabulous product which is just the right price for a small non-profit. People are happy with the registration process, as are we! …Thank you SO much for a great product.” Sandra Forero Bush, World Trade Center Tacoma

”I have been using Event Espresso to run my festival and have been very happy with how it has worked out. They have provided tremendous support and their iPhone app is amazing and easy to use. I suggest using it for your event.” Alex Grant, Byron Spirit Festival

”At first we looked at CVENT for one of our clients and they wanted $16,000 per year for 3000 event attendees + fees totaling $22k. That is before Staff and Webinar fees. Worst of all we had to prepay the $16k amount even if we never used all 3000 attendees. That was when we looked at Event Espresso and we realized we could build our own event system for less than 16K. For the most part we have been very satisfied with our decision. The real ROI will come next year when they don’t have to pay another 16k-22K! Over the next 5-6 years we should be able to claim that we saved the company over $100,000 – Thanks Event Espresso!” David Waterman (Long Version), KT Benefits & InkItDigital.com

Useful Tips

Whether you are an education services provider, teacher, workshop planner, or event management professional, there are just endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.

After purchasing the plugin and becoming a registered owner, go through the forums for inspiration and practical suggestions to improve your event management and registration process and improve the experience of your customers.

Support

Event Espresso works with with other WP plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress coding guidelines. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive customer support, as so many of its end-users confirm:

”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

Event Espresso provides exceptional support with access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, priority 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 a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely software you can rely on to manage your events.

Plugin Price

Event Espresso is available in a number of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software features, however, you should consider purchasing one of the premium plugin versions below:

Personal License – This option allows you to run Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
Everything License – This enables you to set up Event Espresso on one site only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
Developer Licensing – This license option allows you to configure Event Espresso on five sites. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.

Pricing details of the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Presently, the software is being retailed for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current price: Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticketing Registration System For WordPress

Please 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 site.

Event Espresso – Additional Information

The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.

Search the plugin’s online documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to a particular use-case, or to report errors 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 WordPress event registration and ticketing manager software, used by thousands of event managers.

If you are a WordPress user and you intend to run events that require managing dates, times and venues (offline and online), registering attendees, and/or booking tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.