Do you currently run or plan to run events that require registrations, such as seminars, group courses, charity fund-raisers, social conferences, or even a big event such as a music 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 most likely have to co-ordinate event schedules, availability, participant numbers, data processing, payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to event attendees.
There are lots of advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower expenses, help you easily duplicate previously-run events, give event managers 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 site, you can install a very inexpensive and professional web-based event booking solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Registration Software
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress allows you to easily create your event and begin accepting bookings in just a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and process online bookings)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed software that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can use a number of event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up selling tickets, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your event participants, or integrating your event bookings with social media sites like Facebook.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Note: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is completely different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the platform is being revamped 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 phase out EE 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
Go here to learn more:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just some of the many benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Automated Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current website into a fully-featured and automated event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to attendee limits, multiple pricing levels 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 chore of processing registrations manually.
Essentially, you are making it easier for event attendees to register on their own.
Letting your attendees to do the data themselves frees up your time and lets you direct more of your attention on planning a more enjoyable event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will see in a moment, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and booking process that you want your clients to experience.
Additional benefits of the plugin include:
- Lower Costs: Event Espresso provides you with an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own software or using a third party provider. The cost is kept to a minimum through a model where Event Espresso users purchase the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and purchase optional add ons when you need added features.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new event signups outside traditional business hours. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social features (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event invite other people they know who may be interested in attending.
- Green Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign up process can remain wholly in digital form, reducing typical paper waste from tasks related to admin and record-storage.
- All Information Belongs To You. You control all the data collected from event attendees.
Features
The Event Espresso plugin delivers functionality to users via standard features (these come with the software) and optional features that you can buy for an added cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many features to web site owners. Here are just some:
- Quick and simple to install and set up. Ready to start using in minutes.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In EE 4, events can have many dates and times (datetimes), and these can be managed from a single event.
- Customizable Event And Registration Page Designs. Customize your events and signup page using Event Espresso’s template options and components, plus HTML or CSS.
- Ticket Selector. Present multiple ticket options to prospects and let them purchase the ticket(s) that will best fit their needs.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration enables event managers to customize the look and control settings of Google Maps on your event listing and event details sections.
- Default Price Types. Price types let event managers create new prices that adjust the base ticket price for your system-default ticket.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 comes with 3 useful in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of participants and confirm everyone who has attended.
- Waiting Lists. Interested persons can join a waiting list if your event has reached the limit of participants. You can also specify that wait-listed members pre-pay if you plan to add more capacity for the event.
- Public Commenting. Add social engagement to your events by encouraging potential customers to ask questions about your event and previous attendees to post comments that can help others choose whether or not to sign up. Moderation settings for public commenting are set up using the WordPress built-in commenting admin area.
- Keyword-Rich Event Page URLs. Keyword rich URLs leverage your WordPress Permalinks configuration settings. Search engine friendly urls that include topic-relevant keywords add to the context of your pages and is favored by search engines, helping you drive a more targeted audience to your events.
- Multi-Language Software. Event Espresso is is available in more than 15 languages, with more translations planned.
- Exportable Information. You can output all of your information gathered from event attendees into Excel or CSV format for creating advanced reports, planning marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, and so on.
- Event Venue Manager. The venue manager in EE 4 lets information about venues to be published throughout the Event Espresso admin and the public areas of your site to inform users of the location of your event. The venue record has many of the standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also includes venue information like venue capacity, venue web address, telephone number, physical, maps, etc. You can also display all of your event venues in various locations on your WP theme as well as on a venue listing page on your website where you can set up and publish venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have booked for a particular venue.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso gives you access to a community of experienced event managers, software programmers, web designers, marketers and businesses who also use the plugin. You can interact with other members of the Event Espresso community via their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media pages on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Staff Management. Save time and keep your data organized by reusing team member profiles for multiple events or displaying their profile using a shortcode in your event description.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post types. You can even customize your templates to display event information in your own custom way.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows you to have more control and options over your events and how your information displays to visitors.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 allows you to create a log file with debugging data which can be helpful for web developers who are troubleshooting.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And Value For Money: According to the mission statement on their web 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 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 provides you with 40+ added features, including:
- Email shortcodes that includes participant data in notification emails and newsletters.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing the same group of questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page during the registration process.
Add-Ons
In addition to a comprehensive range of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow customers to significantly expand the functionality of managing an event.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display the scheduled events by location. There are 4 maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Management Add-on: The Recurring Events manager add-on allows you to put your events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months … even years in advance. You can create as many events in advance as you need. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close bookings for all 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 be customized to display an event thumbnail image instead of a date.
- 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 allows you to override 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 lets you promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart add-on lets you control the experience for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to each seat.
- Event Ticketing Addon: The Ticketing add-on gives you the capacity to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add-on 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 managing check-in scans at the door. Attendees 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 Table View Template Add on: The Events Table Template add-on gives event managers a simple and easy-to-use system that lets you change 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 web developers to design custom templates using one of the included templates as a source template.
- Infusionsoft Integration Add on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account 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 enrollments, and accept payments from your Event Espresso powered website.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software, including new add ons.
For more details about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
User Testimonials
Below are a few of the testimonials that users 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
”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
“Love the plugin, we only use it once a year for a race we have in February. This saved us tons of time in data entry. In addition, we had more runners register than any other year. We attribute that to the ease of registering online. Thanks for your work.” Ed, Friends of Oscar Scherer Park
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, trainer, event promoter, or event management professional, there are just endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered owner, spend a little time visiting the user forum for tips and practical ways to streamline your event management and registration workflow and improve the experience of your registrants.
Support
Event Espresso works with with most WordPress plugins and WordPress themes that follow standard WP coding guidelines. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent customer support, as so many of its satisfied plugin users 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
The Event Espresso plugin provides incredible support with access to support forums, 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.
In addition, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can depend on to run your events.
Software Cost
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you will want to consider downloading one of the premium plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This license enables you to set up Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This license allows you to run Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This lets you install Event Espresso on five domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Current pricing for the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Presently, the software sells for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Please Note: The pricing above was current when this article was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the site.
Additional Information
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to remain 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 a particular use-case, or to report issues and share feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event registration and ticketing management software, used by thousands of WordPress site owners.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you plan to run an event that requires managing dates, times and venues, enrolling attendees, and reserving tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticket Registration Software For WordPress
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