Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that require registrations, such as workshops, group classes, non-profit fund-raisers, marketing events, or even a large-scale event like a show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups is a time-consuming process. You will probably have to co-ordinate event schedules, available dates and seating, participant numbers, data entry, collecting payments and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to event registrants.
There are a number of advantages to setting up an automated online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower expenses, help you easily reproduce previous events, give you more control, improve customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be quite expensive.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-based website or blog, you can install an inexpensive and professional online event registration solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily set up multiple events and start accepting bookings in just minutes.
(Set up multiple events and accept online event bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed application that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can employ several event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your participants, or integrating your event registration forms with social media and autoresponders.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is significantly different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the platform has been redeveloped using a different structure to accommodate future growth and expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually transition completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and advantages of using this plugin.
Learn more about the plugin here:
Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits 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 website into an automated and fully featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by literally doing away with the chore of processing registrations and signups manually.
Basically, you are facilitating participants to complete the enrolment process on their own.
Letting your participants to do all of the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you focus more of your resources on planning a better event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon learn, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and registration process that you want your attendees to experience.
Additional benefits of the plugin include:
- Reduced Costs: The Event Espresso plugin is a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd party service. This is made possible through a model where you start with the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then purchase optional add ons when you need added features.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept online sign-ups any time of day or night. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social and marketing features and add-ons (see below) let people interested in attending your event invite others who may also be interested in attending.
- Green Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign up process can be conducted wholly online, eliminating traditional paper consumption from tasks associated with administration.
- Own Your Information. You control all the data collected from your event attendees.
Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to its users via built-in features (these are included with the software) and optional features that customers can buy for an additional cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many great features to WP users. Here are just a few of these:
- Fast and easy to install and configure. Ready to start using in minutes.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso lets you configure multiple ticket types and set unique pricing options, maximum number of tickets, etc.
- Customizable Event & Registration Page Designs. You can customize your events and signup page using Event Espresso’s template options and elements, as well as HTML and CSS.
- Tax Administration. Event Espresso 4 provides a number of options to manage taxes for your event and provide reports of tax fee components to customers who purchase tickets. You can administer taxes globally or on a per-ticket basis.
- Intelligent Single Page Checkout Process. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is smart, fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically duplicate the primary registrant’s information for any added attendees.
- Spam Protection. Eliminate the likelihood of spammers and robots making false registrations on your site by using reCAPTCHA features that provide human authentication.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system lets you authenticate tickets, speed up in-venue registrations, set up multiple check-in “stations” and track all attendees.
- Event Check-In List. Generate an exportable list of event registrants and check-in everyone who attends.
- Administrative Pre-approval. Be selective about who can attend your events.
- Event RSS Feeds. Automatically update customers, drive quality traffic and expand your content reach with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Works With The Most Up-To-Date Version Of WordPress. The EE 4 user interface follows the WordPress guidelines to help you build aesthetically beautiful event pages that are easier to use and mobile-friendly.
- Country Settings. You can configure the country and currency settings that will be used when promoting your events, such as currency name, currency symbols, decimal signs, characters and places, country codes, regions, etc.
- Exportable Information. You can output all of your information gathered from event participants into Excel or CSV format for compiling advanced reports, devising marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, etc..
- Event Venue Profiles. The venue manager in Event Espresso 4 lets information about a venue to display throughout the Event Espresso admin and the public areas of your site to inform attendees of your event’s location. The venue record displays many of the standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also displays information such as venue capacity, venue website, venue phone number, venue location details, maps, etc. You can also display all of your event venues in various sections on your WordPress theme as well as on a venue archive page on your site where you can set up and publish venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have listed for a particular venue.
- One-Click Plugin Updates. Event Espresso offers easy 1-click software installation updates to ensure that you have the latest features and to keep your plugin installation working with the latest version of WordPress.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential clients who have not made payment for their admission with a standard but personalized invoice with just one click. Your invoices will reference pre-registered attendees who have not paid their registration in full by name, display the balance they owe, and include a link to the event, a payment link and a url to download a PDF invoice.
- Accurate Attendee Manager. You have control of your customers’ records; who has enrolled, which event they have registered for and what amount they paid. With the attendee manager, you can get an overview of registered attendees and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export an attendee list to an Excel spreadsheet for additional uses, send custom payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your event participants on a person-by-person basis or collectively.
Extra features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming. Event Espresso is simple enough for general users, and also robust and customizable for higher end users and web-based software developers. The bottom line is that by using Object-oriented programming (OOP), Event Espresso 4 makes possible more complex developments and customizations to the application.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. EE 4 lets you output a log file with debugging data which can be helpful for web developers who are troubleshooting.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value: According to the mission statement on their 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 goals, 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 provides you with 40+ added features, including:
- Email shortcodes that includes registrant data in notification emails and email updates.
- Default surcharge (the same as applying a service tax to each ticket).
- Option to skip the confirmation page during registration.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As well as a comprehensive array of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow software users to significantly expand the capabilities of managing your event.
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. There are 4 maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Manager Add-on: The Recurring Events manager addon lets you put events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years in advance. You can create as many future events as you want. Event Espresso will automatically open and close bookings for all of your recurring events.
- Events Date Range Template Addon: The Date Range custom event list template lets your users to browse for events that occur within a certain date range.
- Social Media Buttons Add-on: The social media add-on displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media add on comes free with any of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- Custom Files Add on: The Custom Files add-on allows you to bypass certain aspects of the plugin.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add-on Versions: This add-on lets you involve others in the event management process 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 WP users roles and assign them different permissions with different privileges, so others 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 areas of your WP dashboard and/or certain sections 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 add-on gives your potential attendees the ability to book 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 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 View Template Addon: The Events Table Template add on gives event managers an easy-to-use system that lets you edit 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 enables web developers to design custom templates using one of the templates provided as a source template.
- Infusionsoft Integration Add-on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft integration all-in-one sales and business marketing plugin add on, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture customer data, track bookings, and accept payments from your web site.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software, including new add-ons.
For more information about the newest Event Espreso features and add ons, visit the plugin website:
Plugin Users – Testimonials
Below are some of the many great testimonials that satisfied customers have posted about Event Espresso:
”My clients have used Event Espresso for Transportation (Cadet Bus for leave), Parties (tailgates and brewery tours), and Horse-back riding lessons and camps. What a terrific plug-in and fantastic support from Seth!” Nina, Blue Iris Web Design
“I just completed my first event using Event Espresso. I really believe without Event Espresso my event would not have been the success it was.” Cathy Earle, Women Only Weekend
”I can’t even imagine what I would want the plugin to do that it doesn’t already do. I’m really happy with the features.” Jim Harmer, Improve Photography
Useful Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, trainer, concert promoter, or event management professional, there are just endless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a licensed user, spend a little time researching the support forum for inspiration and practical suggestions to streamline your event management workflow or enhance the experience of your participants.
Event Espresso Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with other WordPress plugins and WP themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive support, as many of its customers attest:
”These guys are right on any problem or issue or even general questions. You can’t really put a value high enough on the kind of support these guys offer.” Mark Wigston, Muskoka Graphics
The plugin provides great support with access to a support forum, in-depth 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 a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can count on to run your events.
Software Price
Event Espresso is available in various editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software features, however, you may want to consider purchasing one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This edition enables you to configure Event Espresso on 1 site only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License – This allows you to install Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This allows you to install Event Espresso on five sites. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Price details for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Presently, the software retails for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticketing Registration System For WordPress
Please Note: The pricing above was current at the time this review was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin seller 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 remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the plugin’s online documentation pages for answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to your particular use-case, or to notify developers about problems and leave feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event registration and ticketing manager plugin, used and trusted by thousands of users.
If you own a WordPress-powered website and you plan to run an event that requires managing dates and venues (offline and online), registering attendees, and reserving tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable WordPress plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Management And Registration System For WordPress
***
