Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that need managing registrations, such as workshops, community classes, not-for-profit fund-raisers, networking conferences, or even a large-scale event like an exhibition, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Managing event bookings can be a complicated and time-consuming process. You will most likely need to manage calendar schedules, available dates and seating allocations, registration numbers, data entry, payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders and alerts, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and issuing tickets to event attendees.
There are a number of advantages to setting up an automated web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower costs, help you easily replicate recurring events, give event managers more control, improve user experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that this can be very expensive.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-powered web site, you can install a very inexpensive and professional online event booking system.
Presenting …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP lets you easily schedule your event and begin receiving registrations in just minutes.
(Set up multiple events and receive online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed application that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can use multiple event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media and email marketing solutions.
View detailed information about your event attendees
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 Event Espresso 3, as the software has been redeveloped using a different structure to allow for future growth. The EE 4 plugin software 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 read more about this plugin.
To learn more about the plugin go here:
Plugin 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 digital presence into a fully-featured and automated event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to attendee limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by literally eliminating the chore of processing registrations manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating participants to complete the enrollment process themselves.
Allowing your customers to do all of the data themselves frees up your time and lets you direct more resources on planning a more unique event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn in a moment, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management process that you want your attendees to experience.
Some additional benefits of the plugin include:
- Significantly Lower Costs: Event Espresso gives you an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own solution or using a third-party service. This is made possible through a model where you pay for the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and buy add ons only if you need extra functionality.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new bookings 24/7. In addition, Event Espresso social features (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event invite friends who may be interested.
- Paperless Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event booking process can be completed wholly online, reducing typical paper waste from tasks related to enrollment.
- All Data Belongs To You. You own all the information collected from event participants.
Features
The Event Espresso plugin delivers functionality to users via standard features (these come with the plugin) and optional features that customers can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many features to web site owners. Here are just a few of these:
- Fast and simple to install and configure. Ready to start using in very little time.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In EE 4, events can have many dates and times (called datetimes), that these can be managed from a single event.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Attendees can easily find your events and add these to their schedule with the WordPress calendar.
- Tax Admin And Reporting. Event Espresso 4 provides several options to handle taxes for your event and provide reports of tax fee components to registrants who purchase tickets. You can configure taxes globally and on a per-ticket basis.
- Smart 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.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow you to create new prices that adjust the base ticket price for your default ticket.
- Discount And Promotional Codes. Provide promotion and discount codes to encourage visitors to take action without delaying, or simply make your offerings more appealing for others. Also useful for helping to increase sales of events close to timelines.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. EE 4 lets you know who your clients are and how they have done business with you.
- Waiting Lists. Latecomers can join a waiting list if your event has reached the limit of attendees. You can also make it a requirement waiting list registrants pay for their spots if you plan to expand numbers for the event.
- Public Commenting. Add social engagement to your event pages by allowing potential prospects to interact with you online via commenting and past attendees to post comments that can help others consider whether or not to sign up. Moderation settings for comments are configured via the WP commenting settings.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events enable you to develop your event over multiple sessions without publishing it to your website. You can work on your events until you are ready to go live, or schedule your event to publish at a later time and date.
- Full Control Of Your Event Management. Event Espresso puts you in complete control of every aspect of an event’s registration and ticketing, and also lets you automate the process with event management tools that include staff and venue manager, custom event designs, payment processing, wait lists, attendee limits, print-ready ticketing and more.
- Default Tickets. If you create identical tickets for most of your events, you can set one of those tickets as your default ticket for all new events simply by checking a box.
- Event Venue Profiles. The venue management feature in Event Espresso 4 lets details about a venue to appear throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front-end of your website to inform users of your event’s location. The venue profile displays many of the standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also displays details such as venue capacity, venue web address, telephone number, physical and/or virtual location, map, etc. You can also display venues throughout specific areas of your WP theme as well as on a venue listing page on your site where you can set up and publish venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a given venue.
- Registrant Profiles. Manage your registrant’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their data organized and easily within reach.
- Staff Manager. Save time and keep your information organized by reusing staff profiles for multiple events or displaying profile information such as team member’s contact information, resume and photo using a shortcode in an event description.
- Categorize Events. If you have a number of event types such as free and paid, conference speakers and mastermind sessions, different types of exercise classes, etc. you can categorize them to make it easier for your attendees to locate what they’re looking for. You can list all events in a category on an event category page, make events searchable by category, and color-code events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make them easier to find, in addition to suggesting other events in the categories that interest your existing customers.
Extra features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming. Event Espresso is simple enough for most WordPress users, and also extremely robust and customizable for enterprise-level users and developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, Event Espresso 4 makes possible more complex extensions and customizations to the plugin.
- Maintenance Mode. Pause registration capabilities for normal site traffic when site maintenance is needed. You can continue to work on your event pages 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 mission, the software has been built using 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 over 40 added features, including:
- Email shortcodes for including attendee data in emails and email newsletters.
- Default surcharge (similar to adding a service tax to all tickets).
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow users to further enhance the capabilities of managing your event.
Some of these add ons 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 an event does not have a featured image, 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 Calendar Table Template Add on: The Calendar Table template is a list template with a bold date and customizable “register now” button. The template can be customized to display the event thumbnail image instead of the date.
- Social Coupons Integration Add on: If your website 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 Files Add-on: The Custom Files add on provides PHP files that let you override certain aspects of the plugin.
- 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 addon allows you to offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart add on lets you control the environment for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach single pricing to every seat.
- Event Ticketing & Bar Scanning Addon: The Ticketing addon adds the capacity to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon adds the capacity to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing addon includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for handling check-in scans at venues. Attendees 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 attendees and to validate tickets.
- EE4 Events Table View Template Add-on: The Events Table Template addon gives event managers a simple and 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 lets web developers design custom templates using one of the templates provided as a source template.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp add-on allows you to automatically register attendees to a particular mailing list or group within MailChimp.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software, including new add-ons.
For more information about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
User Testimonials
Below are some of the many great testimonials that customers have posted about Event Espresso:
”Event Espresso is so easy to use yet feature rich and stable. It is a cornerstone of our site and our success.” Fraser Barner, Speaker’s Lab
“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
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, presenter, event promoter, or event management professional, there are just unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a registered owner, go through the support forum for inspiration and practical suggestions to streamline your event management process and enhance the experience of your customers.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso works with with most WordPress plugins and themes that follow standard WP development guidelines. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent user support, as many of its satisfied clients attest:
”Your plugin saved our client nearly $9000 in development costs because it handled the majority of the functionality we were looking for at a much lower cost. EventEspresso’s staff have been very responsive to our needs when we have them (which has been rare, because the plugin is so well coded). Great job on a great plugin!” Brandon P., Experience Farm
Event Espresso provides amazing support that includes access to support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, custom development 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 a solution you can rely on to manage your events.
Product Price
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software functionality, however, you should consider purchasing one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal Edition – This allows you to configure Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This license option allows you to set up Event Espresso on one site only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This lets you set up Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The price of the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Presently, the plugin sells for the pricing 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 not be the actual price 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 stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the plugin’s documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to a specific situation, or to notify developers about problems and give feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product web site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event booking and ticketing manager plugin, used and trusted by thousands of users.
If you own a WordPress-powered website and you plan to run events that require scheduling dates, times and venues (offline and online), enrolling attendees, and/or booking tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
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