Do you currently run or plan to run events that need co-ordinating registrations, such as workshops, group classes, not-for-profit fund-raisers, networking functions, or even a big event such as a regional festival, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Managing event bookings can be a complex and time-consuming process. You may need to manage event schedules, available dates and spaces, attendee numbers, data entry, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to participants.
There are a number of advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower costs, help you easily duplicate previous events, give you more control, improve client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be costly.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-powered web site, you can install a very inexpensive and highly professional online event booking system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress allows you to easily create multiple events and begin processing registrations in minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and receive online event bookings)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can use several event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your participants, or integrating your event registration forms with an autoresponder system for ongoing updates.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Please Note: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is considerably different than the older EE 3, as the platform is being redeveloped using a different structure to allow for future expansion. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually retire EE 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
For more details 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
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current digital presence into a fully-featured and automated event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically eliminating the chore of processing registrations manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for attendees to enrol themselves.
Letting your customers to do the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you direct more time on delivering a better event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon discover, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and registration process that you want your customers to experience.
Some additional benefits include:
- Reduced Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd party service. This is made possible by using a model where you purchase the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and purchase addons when you need extra functionality.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new event signups 24/7. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing add ons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event invite others who may also be interested.
- Paperless Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event signup process can be performed wholly online, reducing traditional paper waste from tasks associated with enrollment.
- Own Your Data. You own all the data obtained from event participants.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to users through standard features (these come with the software) and optional features that customers can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of built-in to WP users. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and easy to install and use. Be up and running in no time.
- Customized Event Registration Form. With Event Espresso you can gather specific data using a custom event registration form on your web site to create a customized experience for your users.
- Event Calendar. Customers can easily find your events and add these to their schedule using a calendar.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso integrates with payment gateways, allowing you to collect payments before running events.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your theme and reuse venue details throughout other areas of your site.
- Spam Protection. Prevent the chance of spammers and robots creating bogus registrations by using reCAPTCHA settings that provide human authentication.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 provides three built-in in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of booking event participants at the door, or send in paper forms for manual processing later.
- Waiting Lists. Prospective attendees can subscribe to a waiting list if your event is full. You can also specify that wait-listed members pre-pay if you plan to add more capacity for your event.
- XML RSS Feeds. Automatically update your website visitors, drive quality traffic and expand your content reach with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Keyword Rich URLs. Keyword rich event page URLs leverage your Permalinks configuration settings. SEO-friendly permalinks with topic-relevant keywords enhance the context of your events and improves your search rankings, helping you get a more targeted audience to your website.
- Your Organization Settings. Configure your organization’s profile to be deployed throughout Event Espresso and your front-end templates. The organization fields include: organization name, address, city, state, country, zip code, email address, phone, tax number, logo, Facebook profile URL, Twitter URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ profile URL, Instagram URL.
- Default Tickets. If you find yourself creating identical tickets for many of your events, you can automatically set one of those tickets as your default ticket for the next time you create an event simply by checking a box.
- Venue Manager. The venue management feature in Event Espresso 4 allows information about a venue to be made available throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front end of your website to inform potential participants of your event’s location. The venue record has many of the standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also lets you add venue information like venue seating capacity, venue web address, phone number, physical and/or virtual location, maps, etc. You can also list venues throughout various sections in your theme as well as on a venue listing page on your website where you can set up and reuse venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a given venue.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso gives you access to a community of experienced event managers, web developers, web designers, marketers and business owners who also use the software. You can engage with other Event Espresso users through their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media pages on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Social Sharing. Event attendees and your website visitors can spread the word about your event using social share buttons.
- Transaction Reports. Event reporting provides you with information of your registrations and transactions, enabling you to analyze the performance of your events with the aggregate number of people who have registered and how much money has been collected.
Extra features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming. Event Espresso is simple enough for most 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 allows for more complex developments and customizations to the software.
- Control Box Management And Reorganization. Event Espresso lets you leverage the WordPress user interface, which brings the ability to reorder the user interface to match your workflow processes. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or deleted from your page.
- Autonomy, Flexibility And 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 company operates on a model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also provides you with 40+ added features, including:
- Duplicating events – eliminates the need to re-enter event details when adding new events.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse a common set of questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
In addition to a very large array of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow you to significantly enhance the capabilities of the event management system.
Some of these add ons include:
- EE4 Events Grid Template Addon: 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, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Management Addon: The Recurring Events manager addon enables you to put your events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months … even years ahead. You can schedule as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in advance as you need. Event Espresso will automatically open and close bookings for all recurring events.
- Events Date Range Template Addon: The Date Range custom event list template lets your users to browse for events that take place in a certain date range.
- Social Coupons Integration Addon: If your site uses Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can also specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- Custom Files Add on: The Custom Files add-on provides PHP files that allow you to bypass certain aspects of the Event Espresso plugin.
- Seating Chart Add-on: The seating chart add on is great for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is perfect 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 website. The Seating Chart add-on lets you manage the experience for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach single pricing to each seat.
- Multi-Event Registration Addon: The Multi-Event registration addon gives potential attendees the ability to register for multiple events at once. In each event listing registrants 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 Table View Template Addon: The Events Table Template add-on gives event managers a simple and easy-to-use system that allows you to edit the design of your event lists. It comes with a simple table template with category filters, table search, table paging and more. It also allows developers to build custom templates using one of the included templates as a base template.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp addon lets you auto-register attendees to a selected autoresponder list or group within your MailChimp account.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software, including new add-ons.
For full details about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website here:
User Testimonials
Here are some of the many testimonials that plugin users have posted about Event Espresso:
”Tri-South, Inc is using Event Espresso to manage the course catalog, event ticketing, and class registration. [As their developer] I have customized a few items to make the site and plugin a seamless integration. The client is very pleased!” Jenifer Design
”When you can get a company to expend more money switching systems just to use your plugin…you’ve really accomplished something.” David, House of Prayer
”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
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, trainer, festival promoter, or event consultant, there are simply countless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed user, visit the support forum for useful ideas and practical ways to streamline your event management and registration workflow or enhance the experience of your customers.
Event Espresso Support
Event Espresso works with with most WP plugins and WordPress themes that follow standard WP coding guidelines. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive support, as so many of its clients confirm:
”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
The software provides comprehensive support including access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base 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.
In addition, 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 depend on to manage your events.
Product Cost
Event Espresso is available in a number of editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software features, however, you should consider downloading one of the paid plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This option lets you configure Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This option enables you to install Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Edition – This lets you set up Event Espresso on five sites. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The price of the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the plugin is being retailed for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Management
Please Note: The pricing above was current at the time this review was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the site.
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.
Use the software’s documentation tools for answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to your specific use-case, or to report problems and leave feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product information pages.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event registration and ticketing management plugin, used by thousands.
If you are a WordPress user and you currently run events that require scheduling dates and venues, registering participants, and/or booking tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable WordPress plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
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