Does your company currently run or plan to run events that need to accept bookings, such as seminars, group classes, non-profit fundraisers, marketing events, or even a big event such as a music show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event registrations can be a complex and time-consuming process. You will probably have to co-ordinate scheduling, date availability, registration numbers, data entry, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and providing tickets to event participants.
There are many advantages to setting up an online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower costs, help you easily replicate similar events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be very costly.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-powered digital presence, you can easily install an inexpensive and highly professional online event booking system.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Manager Plugin
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily schedule an event and start accepting registrations in just minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and take online event bookings)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed software that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize registration forms
You can use several event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your attendees, 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 article, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is considerably different than the older EE 3, as it has been redeveloped using a different structure to enable future expansion. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually retire EE 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and features of 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:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current web site into a feature-rich and professional event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically doing away with the need to process registrations manually.
Essentially, you are making it easier for attendees to enrol by themselves.
Allowing your customers to do the data entry frees up your time and lets you direct more energy on delivering a more enjoyable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon discover, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and booking process that you want your customers to experience.
Some additional plugin benefits include the following:
- Significantly Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to developing your own solution or using a 3rd-party provider. This is made possible by using a model where you start with the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then buy optional add-ons when you need extra features.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept new event registrations 24/7. In addition, Event Espresso social and marketing add ons (see below) let people interested in registering for your event invite others who may also be interested.
- Paperless Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, the event registration process can be performed entirely in digital form, significantly reducing typical paper consumption from tasks related to administration.
- All Data Belongs To You. You own all the information acquired from your event attendees.
Plugin Features
The Event Espresso plugin provides functionality to end-users through built-in features (these are included with the software) and additional features that users can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many unique built-in to website owners. Here are just some of these:
- Fast and easy to install and use. Ready to start using in minutes.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso lets you configure as many different types of tickets as you need and set prices, limits on ticket quantities, and more.
- Event Calendar. Participants can easily see your upcoming events and add these to their schedule with the calendar.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso seamlessly integrates with several payment gateways, allowing you to collect registration fees before running the events.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your WP theme and reuse attendee details throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types let event managers create new prices that adjust the default ticket price for the default ticket.
- Mobile Registration & Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system enables you to authenticate tickets, speed up door registrations, set up various check-in “stations” and track event attendees.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of registering event attendees at the door, or send in paper-based forms for manual inputting later.
- Ticketless Events. Set up events without the requirement for attendees to book tickets. Event Espresso can be used for all types of events, not only those that require tickets.
- Private Contact Commenting. Keep comments about a contact on their profile. Private notes enables you to keep records of when event attendees contacted you, your internal observations, and how you have helped your customers.
- Draft Events. Draft events let you build your event page over time without displaying it live on your website. You can work on your event pages until you are ready to go live, or schedule your event page to publish at a later time and date.
- Easy Event Management. Event Espresso puts event managers in complete control of every aspect of an event’s registration and ticketing, and lets you automate this process with event management tools that include staff and venue management, customizable event designs, payment processing, wait lists, attendee limits, print-ready ticketing and more.
- Bulk Import Event Information. Event Espresso 4 provides an advanced importing feature that enables you to upload bulk event data all at one time. You can export, edit and upload information about events, datetimes, ticketing details, prices, custom registration questions, venues, terms, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Visual Editor. Event Espresso uses the built-in WP WYSIWYG editor, so you can quickly and easily add graphic images and stylize your event descriptions without knowing HTML or CSS, just like any WP post or page.
- Attendee Profiles. You can manage your registrant’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their information organized.
- Staff Member Management. Save time and stay 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 several different types of events like free and paid, conference speakers and breakout sessions, different kinds of courses, etc. you can categorize them to help event participants to find what they’re looking for. You can display all events in a category on a custom event category page, make all events searchable by category, and colour-code your events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make them easier to find, as well as suggesting new events in the categories that appeal to your visitors.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows you to have more control and options over the content of your events and how the information displays to your prospective event attendees.
- Control Box Management And Organization. Event Espresso lets you leverage the WordPress user interface, which gives you the ability to reconfigure the user interface to suit your workflow process. Each control box can be collapsed, re-arranged or completely removed from the workflow configuration.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & 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 goals, the software has been built using a modular and efficient model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also comes with 40+ added features, including:
- Duplicating events – limits the work of re-entering event details when adding new events.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse a common set of questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Add-Ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow end-users to further enhance the capabilities of events.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display scheduled events by location. 4 maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Management 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 add as many future events as you want. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close registrations for all of your recurring events.
- 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 also be customized to show an event thumbnail instead of the date.
- Social Coupons Integration Add-on: If your site uses Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can even specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration add-on lets you take advantage of the WordPress user system. With the WP User Integration addon you can give users a special incentive by offering member pricing and overriding event pricing when your members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered site users can have access to your special events. Members can also add personal details into their profile page allowing them fast registration for events by auto-filling in the personal information on the event booking form. Your users can also look up past events and pay for new events.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add on Versions: This add-on lets you include other users in the event management process and give new users the ability to create events or regional managers permission 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 others create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain parts of your WP dashboard and/or certain parts of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to allow users to control factors geographically for events and users, use the Roles and Permissions Pro add on.
- Event Ticketing Addon: The Ticketing addon adds the capacity to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon adds the ability to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing add on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for handling check-in scans at the door. Registrants can either print out their tickets or display them on their mobile devices. The mobile app can be used for checking in or checking out attendees and to validate tickets.
- EE4 Events Calendar Addon: This WordPress events calendar displays events and categories of events using a nice graphical calendar.
- Infusionsoft Integration Add-on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and marketing software addon, 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: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin, including new addons.
To learn more about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website:
Users – Feedback
Below are some of the many testimonials that satisfied plugin users 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 recently downloaded it to add to a nonprofit site for a Boy Scout troop and the features work wonderfully with what we wanted to accomplish for the site. It allows us to set up calendar, events, and even take payments for trips. At first, I thought that it would be overkill for such a small site, but now I see the possibilities and will definitely be offering Event Espresso to my clients that need an event organization system for their web sites.” Lucy Conn, Troop 462
”Event Espresso is very nice and functional plugin. Set it up is not very easy for a beginner like me, but you have one of the best support team in your side. They answer all questions in a timely manor. I didn’t know anything about setting up the plugins, Thanks to Event Espresso Support team that now I can find my way around this plugin. Event Espresso helps our company to manage the workshops, keep track of our students, manage the emails, and much more. We upgrade from personal License to Business license in just two weeks of using Personal license. I strongly recommend the Business license.” Ted Karlsalr, Omnilargess
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, trainer, seminar planner, or event management consultant, there are just endless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a registered user, search the support forum for tips and practical ways to improve your event management workflow or improve the experience of your registrants.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with other 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 clients attest:
“I’m really impressed with not only the application itself but the support. I have rarely seen such a responsive support staff than at EE. They rock…I highly recommend this plugin!” sock2me
Event Espresso provides robust support that includes access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, priority 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.
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 organize and manage your events.
Event Espresso Cost
Event Espresso is available in a range of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin options, however, you may want to consider using one of the ”Pro” plugin editions below:
- Personal Edition – 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. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License – This lets you run Event Espresso on 1 site only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Edition – This allows you to configure Event Espresso on five sites. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one 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 special offers. Currently, the plugin retails for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing: Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticketing Registration System 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 site.
Event Espresso – Additional Plugin Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the software’s online documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to your particular situation, or to report errors and share feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event registration and ticketing management software, used and trusted by thousands of WP users.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you intend to run events that require scheduling dates and venues, booking participants, or selling tickets, then you will probably not find a better plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Ticketing Registration System
***