Does your company currently run or plan to run events that need to accept registrations, such as seminars, group classes, not-for-profit fund-raisers, networking functions, or even a large-scale event like a music festival, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Managing event bookings is a complicated and time-consuming process. You will probably need to manage scheduling, event dates, registration numbers, data collection, payments and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and providing tickets to attendees.
There are many advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower costs, help you easily replicate similar events, give event managers more control, create a better client experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event booking system can be expensive.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-based digital presence, you can set up a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event registration system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WP software lets you easily create multiple events and begin processing online bookings in a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and accept online bookings)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed application that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can use multiple event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media and autoresponders.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Important: Currently, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is considerably different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the software is being rebuilt using a different structure to allow for future expansion. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually move completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and advantages of this plugin.
Go here to learn more about the plugin:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website or blog into a feature-rich and professional event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by virtually doing away with the need to process registrations manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for event participants to perform the registration process themselves.
Letting your clients to do all of the data entry frees you up from doing admin work and lets you focus more of your energy on creating a memorable event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn shortly, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management process that you want your clients to experience.
Additional benefits of the plugin include:
- Significantly Lower 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. The cost is kept low through a model where Event Espresso users purchase the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then purchase add ons when you need additional functionality.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new registrations outside normal business hours. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing features (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with their friends who may be interested in attending.
- Green & Paperless Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, the event booking process can remain wholly in digital form, eliminating traditional paper waste from tasks related to admin and record-keeping.
- All Information Belongs To You. You own all the information you obtain from event participants.
Features
The Event Espresso plugin provides functionality to users via built-in 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 features to website owners. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and simple to install and set up. Ready to start accepting registrations in minutes.
- Customized Event Registration. Event Espresso lets you collect specific data using a custom event registration form on your website to plan a unique experience for your customers.
- Event Calendar. Attendees can easily see your upcoming events and add these to their schedule with a WordPress calendar.
- Tax Admin & Reporting. Event Espresso 4 provides a number of ways to manage taxes for your event and report tax fees to registrants when purchasing tickets. You can configure taxes globally and on a per-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your WordPress theme and reuse attendee data throughout other areas of your site.
- Spam Protection. Eliminate the chance of spamming and bot software programs making fake registrations with reCAPTCHA features that provide human authentication.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system lets you authenticate tickets, speed up door registrations, set up various check-in “stations” and track participants.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. Event Espresso 4 provides you with the tools to understand who your customers are and how they’ve done business with you.
- Waiting Lists. Prospective participants can subscribe to a waiting list if your event is full. Additionally, you can specify that wait-list registrants pay for their spots if you plan to expand capacity for your event.
- Private Contact Notes. Record notes about contacts on their profile. Private notes allows you to keep a record of when event attendees contacted you, your internal notes, and how you’ve interacted with your customers.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events let you build an event in your own time-frame without publishing it to your website. You can keep building your events until you are ready to publish it live to your website, or schedule to publish your event at a later time and date.
- 15+ Languages. Event Espresso is being translated into 15+ languages, with more translations planned.
- Exportable Information. You can output all the data gathered from event participants into Excel or CSV format for producing advanced reports, implementing marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, etc..
- Event Venue Manager. The venue manager feature in EE 4 allows details about a venue to be made available throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front-end of your site to inform attendees 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 displays venue information such as venue seating capacity, venue website, venue phone number, physical, maps, etc. You can also display venues on various sections on your theme and on a venue archive page on your website where you can set up and reuse venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a specific venue.
- Attendee Profiles. You can manage your attendee’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their records organized and easily within reach.
- Staff Manager. Save time and stay organized by reusing staff member profiles for multiple events or displaying their profile using a shortcode in your event description.
- Accurate Event Participant Manager. You control your attendees’ information; who has registered, for what event and how much they’ve paid. With the attendee manager, you can get an overview of registered participants and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export a list of event attendees to a spreadsheet for additional reports, send customizable payment reminders and receipts and send messages to your event registrants on a person-by-person basis or as a group.
Extra features include:
- Hooks, Actions & Filters. These features allow web-based software developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso application that are compatible with the WordPress development platform.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registrations for normal site visitors whenever website maintenance is needed. You can continue to work on your content during maintenance mode.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And Value: According to the mission statement on their site, Event Espresso’s aim 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 version of Event Espresso also provides you with over 40 additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes for including participant data in emails and email newsletters.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse a common set of questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page in the registration process.
Add-Ons
In addition to a very large number of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow you to further expand the functionality of events.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display upcoming events by location. There are four maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Management Addon: The Recurring Events manager addon lets you put events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months in advance. You can schedule as many future events as you like. Event Espresso will automatically open and close bookings for all of these recurring events.
- Events Category Accordion Template Addon: The Category Accordion template displays the categories as a simple list. Clicking a category name displays the events associated with that category and closes previously open categories.
- Events Social Sharing Add on: This add on adds social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that lets your registrants to post a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after booking.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration addon lets you take full advantage of the WordPress user system. With the WP User Integration add-on you can give your users a special incentive by offering member prices and overriding event prices when your members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered users of the site can have access to these special events. Members can also enter personal information into their profile page allowing them to quickly register for events by auto-filling in the personal information on the event registration form. Users can also view event history and pay for future events.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Addon Versions: This addon lets you include other staff in your organization to help manage your events and give new users permission to create events or regional managers permission to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WP users roles and allow them different permissions with different privileges, 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 areas of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain parts 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.
- Multi-Event Registration Add on: The Multiple Event registration addon gives your potential attendees the ability to register for 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 shopping cart. With the Multi-Event Registration addon, 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 Template Add-on: The Events Table Template addon provides you with a simple and easy-to-use system that allows you to modify 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 build their own custom templates using one of the templates provided as a source template.
- JSON API Add on: The Event Espresso JSON API addon lets other applications, websites, mobile apps, etc… to access your Event Espresso content through an API (Application Programming Interface).
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software, including new add ons.
For more information about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
Customer Feedback
Below are a few of the many testimonials that customers have written about Event Espresso:
”EventEspresso saves us money, saves our secretary 16-24 hours and looks so professionally done that people ask us how we do it; which we happily tell them, “Event Espresso, and be sure to get the ticketing add-on.”” David, House of Prayer
”You can tell that the Event Espresso team is really passionate about their work, and that they care and spend a lot of time helping people work with their plugin and use it with their events – it’s something every WordPress service should aim for.” Ryan Imel, WPCandy
”Event Espresso plugin still rocks. Saw you guys were up for the WP Honors too. Glad I paid for it! If you need event management on your WordPress site I recommend Event Espresso.” Patrick Allmond, Focus Consulting
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, teacher, show promoter, or event management consultant, there are just countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered owner, go through the user forum for tips and practical suggestions to streamline your event management process and improve the experience of your event registrants.
Support
Event Espresso works with with all WP plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress coding rules. If you find that you need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent user support, as so many of its plugin end-users attest:
”By far, the customer service experience with Event Espresso has been the best of any WordPress Theme or Paid Plugin that I’ve used in the past two years!” Megan Murray, Boys & Girls Club of Lake Tahoe
Event Espresso provides amazing support that includes access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, premium 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 an established team of experienced web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can rely on to manage your events.
Plugin Price
Event Espresso is available in a number of editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software options, however, you will want to consider purchasing one of the paid plugin editions below:
- Personal Edition – This lets you run Event Espresso on one site only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This lets you set up Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This license enables you to run Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The cost of purchasing the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. When we last checked, the plugin is selling for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Manager And Registration Plugin For WordPress
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 Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the software’s online documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to a particular use-case, or to notify developers about bugs and leave feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event registration and ticketing manager plugin, used and trusted by thousands.
If you own a WordPress web site and you intend to run any event that requires managing dates, times and venues, booking participants, and/or booking seating, 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 – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Management Plugin
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