Do you currently run or plan to run events that require managing bookings, such as workshops, training courses, charity fund-raisers, marketing conferences, or even a big event such as an exhibition, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups is a complex and time-consuming process. You have to manage scheduling, date availability, registration numbers, data collection and storage, collecting payments and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to participants.
There are many advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower costs, help you easily replicate previously-run events, give event managers more control, improve customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be quite expensive.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-based site, you can set up a very inexpensive and professional web-based event booking solution.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Registration Plugin
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily schedule an event and begin receiving bookings in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and receive online event registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize event registration forms
You can employ multiple event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up ticket sales, 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 your event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is completely different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the plugin has been revamped using a different structure to enable future expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually transition completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and advantages of this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just some of the many benefits 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 existing website into a fully-featured and automated event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by virtually doing away with the need to process registrations manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating event attendees to enroll themselves.
Letting your enrollees to do the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you direct more of your attention on delivering a memorable event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn in a moment, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and booking process that you want your customers to experience.
Some additional benefits include:
- Reduced Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third-party service provider. The cost is kept low by using a model where Event Espresso users purchase the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and purchase optional addons only when you need new functionality.
- More Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept new event registrations 24 hrs a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features (see below) let people interested in registering for your event share your information with their friends who may be interested.
- Green & Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign-up process remains wholly online, eliminating traditional paper waste from tasks associated with administration.
- All Information Belongs To You. You own all the data gathered from event attendees.
Plugin Features
The Event Espresso plugin provides functionality to end-users via standard features (these come with the plugin) and additional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers a number of features to site owners. Here are just some:
- Quick and simple to install and use. Be up and running in no time.
- Customized Event Registration Form. Event Espresso lets you gather unique data using custom event registration forms on your web site to plan a unique experience for your attendees.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Attendees can easily see your upcoming events and add these to their schedule using a calendar.
- Tax Admin And Reporting Options. Event Espresso 4 gives you a number of ways to manage taxes for an event and provide reports of tax fee components to registrants who purchase tickets. You can administer taxes globally or on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your theme and reuse registrant data throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Prices. Create events quickly with pre-configured default pricing.
- Discount And Promotional Codes. Offer promotional and multiple discount codes to encourage prospects to make a decision now, or simply make your offers more attractive for others. Also useful for helping to sell out events close to deadlines.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of attendees and confirm everyone who has attended.
- Admin Pre-approval. Be selective about who can participate in your events.
- Public Commenting. Add social a new level of interaction to your event by allowing potential attendees to interact with you online via commenting and past participants to post feedback that can help others decide whether or not to sign up. Moderation settings for comments are configured via the WordPress built-in commenting section.
- Optimized For The Most Up-To-Date WP Version. The Event Espresso 4 user interface follows the WordPress guidelines to help you build visually enhanced event pages that are easier to use and mobile-friendly.
- Multi-Language Plugin. Event Espresso is is available in 15+ languages, with more translations planned.
- Exportable Data. You can export all of your data collected from your event attendees into Excel or CSV format for producing reports, devising marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, etc..
- Event Venue Manager. The venue manager in Event Espresso 4 allows information about a venue to be made available throughout the Event Espresso admin and the public areas of your site to inform potential registrants of the location of your event. The venue profile displays many of the standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also lets you reuse information like venue capacity, venue site URL, venue phone number, venue location details, maps, etc. You can also list venue profiles throughout various sections on your 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 every event you have booked for a specific venue.
- One-Click Plugin Updates. Event Espresso provides simple one-click plugin installation upgrades to make sure that you have the latest features and to keep your software installation working with the latest version of WordPress.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential event attendees who have not paid yet for their booking with a standard but personalized PDF invoice with one click of a button. Your invoices will reference pre-registered participants who have not paid their registration in full by name, give them the balance they owe, and include a link to the event, a payment url and a url to download the invoice.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post types. You can also customize the templates to display events in your own custom way.
Extra 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 prospective event registrants.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. EE 4 lets you generate a log file with debugging data that can be helpful for developers who are potential application problems.
- 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 goals, the software has been built using a modular and highly effective model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also includes 40+ additional features, including:
- Live-filtering when you search for events within the Event Espresso admin.
- Default surcharge (similar to applying a service tax to tickets).
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow you to significantly enhance the functionality of your event management system.
Some of these add ons include:
- 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 available, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Manager 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 add as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in advance as you like. Event Espresso will automatically open and close registrations for all of your recurring events.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add on: The Category Accordion template displays categories in a simple list. Clicking the category name displays all events related to that category and closes previously open categories.
- Social Coupons Integration Addon: If your site is featured on Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can also specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration addon allows you to take full advantage of the WordPress user system. With the WP User Integration add-on you can give users a special incentive by offering member pricing and overriding event pricing when members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered users of the website can have access to these special events. Members can also store personal data into their profile page allowing them fast registration for events by auto-filling in their personal information on the event booking form. Users can also look up event history and pay for future events.
- 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 add on allows you to offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart add-on lets you control the environment for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to every seat.
- Multi-Event Registration Add on: The Multiple Event registration addon gives your potential customers the ability to book 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 cart. With the Multiple 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.
- EE4 Events Calendar Addon: This add-on uses the WordPress calendar to display events and categories of events via an attractive graphical calendar.
- JSON API Add on: The new Event Espresso JSON API add on allows other applications, web sites, mobile apps, etc… to access your Event Espresso data through an API (Application Programming Interface).
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin, including new add-ons.
For full details about the latest Event Espreso features and add-ons, visit the plugin website here:
User Feedback
Here are some of the many great testimonials that customers have posted 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
”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
Useful Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, presenter, workshop promoter, or event management consultant, there are just endless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered owner, search the forums for inspiration and practical suggestions to streamline your event management and registration workflow or enhance the experience of your registrants.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso works with with all WP plugins and WordPress themes that follow standard WordPress development guidelines. If you do need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive support, as so many of its satisfied plugin customers confirm:
”These guys are right on any problem or issue or even general questions. You can’t really put a value high enough on the kind of support these guys offer.” Mark Wigston, Muskoka Graphics
Event Espresso provides comprehensive support including access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, priority 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 solid track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can count on to manage your events.
Plugin Price
Event Espresso is available in a number of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin options, however, you should consider using one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This allows you to set up Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This enables you to set up Event Espresso on 1 site only. It includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This lets you install Event Espresso on five sites. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The price of the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. When we last checked, the plugin is selling for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Note: The above reflects the pricing when this review was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin developer when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – 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.
Look up the plugin’s documentation pages for answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to a particular use-case, or to notify developers about problems and leave feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event registration and ticketing management software, used and trusted by thousands.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you currently run events that involve scheduling dates and venues, registering attendees, and booking tickets, 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
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