Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that require handling bookings, such as seminars, training classes, non-profit fund-raisers, networking functions, or even a big event such as a concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Co-ordinating event registrations is a time-consuming process. You will most likely have to co-ordinate scheduling, event dates, attendee numbers, data collection and admin, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders and notifications, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to attendees.
There are a number of benefits to setting up an online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower costs, help you easily duplicate similar events, give event managers more control, improve client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event registration system can be very expensive.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-powered web site, you can easily install a very inexpensive and professional web-based event registration system.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Registration System
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily schedule an event and begin processing bookings in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and process online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich software that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can use a number of event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event participants, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing updates.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Important: Currently, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is considerably different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the software has been revamped using a different structure to allow for future growth. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually transition completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
More info:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current web site into a fully-featured event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to attendee limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by practically doing away with the chore of processing registrations manually.
Essentially, you are enabling event attendees to complete the registration process by themselves.
Allowing your clients to do all of the data themselves frees you up from doing admin work and lets you focus more of your energy on planning a more unique event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will see shortly, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and booking process that you want your customers to experience.
Additional plugin benefits include:
- Less Costs: Event Espresso provides you with a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own system or using a 3rd-party service. This is made possible through a model where users buy the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and buy addons when you need additional functionality.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept new event sign-ups 24/7. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing features (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event share your information with friends who may also be interested.
- Paperless Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event signup process can be kept entirely online, reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks associated with admin and record-storage.
- Own Your Data. You control all the data you obtain from your event participants.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to its users through built-in features (these come with the plugin) and optional features that customers can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of features to web site owners. Here are just some of these:
- Quick and simple to install and use. Be up and running in no time.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso lets you configure as many types of tickets as you want and specify prices, ticket quantity limits, etc.
- Customized Confirmation Emails. Easily set up customized automated booking and payment notification email messages to communicate with your customers.
- Tax Admin And Reporting Options. Event Espresso 4 provides a number of ways to administer taxes for an event and provide reports of tax fee components to customers who purchase tickets. Event managers can configure taxes globally and on a per-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your theme and reuse events details throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Prices. Create events quickly and easily by pre-configuring default ticket pricing.
- Promotional Codes. You can leverage promotional and multiple discount codes to incentivize people to take action immediately, or make your offers more affordable for others. This is also practical for helping to sell-out events close to deadlines.
- Manual Registration Option. you have the option of booking event participants when they show up, or send in paper forms for manual submission later.
- No-Ticket Events. Set up events without the requirement for participants to get tickets. Event Espresso can be used for all types of events, not just when tickets are for sale.
- Public Commenting. Add “social proof” by allowing potential customers to interact with you online via commenting and previous customers to post comments that can help others choose whether or not to enroll. Moderation settings for comments are set up in the WP commenting system.
- Draft Events. Draft events allow you to develop an event page over multiple work sessions without publishing it to your site. You can work on your events until you are ready to take things live, or schedule your event to publish at a later date and time.
- Full Control Of Your Event Management. Event Espresso puts event managers in complete control of every aspect of your event’s registration and ticketing processes, and also allows you to automate this process with event management tools that include staff and venue manager, customizable event designs, payment processing, list waiting, attendee limits, printable ticketing and more.
- Upload Events. Event Espresso 4 provides a CSV-based importing capability that allows you to quickly upload bulk event data at once. You can export, edit and import information about events, datetimes, ticketing details, prices, custom registration questions, venues, terms, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Event Venue Management. The venue management feature in EE 4 allows details about venues to be published throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front-end of your site to inform attendees of the location of your event. The venue profile 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, phone number, venue address, Google map, etc. You can also list venue profiles throughout different locations of your WP theme and on a venue archive page on your site where you can set up and display venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a specific venue.
- Attendee Profiles. You can manage each customer’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their data organized and easily within reach.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential event participants who have not made payment for their registration with a standard but personalized invoice with one click. Your invoices will reference pre-registered customers who have not paid their registration in full by name, display the balance owing, and include a link to the event details, a payment link and a url to download a PDF invoice.
- Categorize Events. If you have multiple types of events like free and paid, conference speakers and breakout sessions, different types of programs and program modules, etc. you can categorize them to make it easier for event attendees to locate what they’re looking for. You can display all the events in a category on a custom event category page, make the events searchable by category, and colour-code events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make these easier to find, as well as suggesting new events in the categories that appeal to your existing customers.
Extra features include:
- Hooks, Actions & Filters. These features allow developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso application that are compatible with the WordPress software platform.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. EE 4 allows you to output a log file with debugging data which can be helpful for web developers who are diagnosing plugin problems.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value: According to the philosophy stated on their website, 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 mission, the software has been built using a modular and effective model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also comes with 40+ added features, including:
- Duplicating events – streamlines the work of re-entering event information when creating new events.
- Default surcharge (the same as applying a service fee to all tickets).
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As well as a comprehensive array of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow end-users to significantly enhance the functionality of your event management process.
Some of these addons include:
- EE4 Events Grid Template Add-on: Displays events in a pure CSS grid-like structure using the featured image. Hovering over the image will display further information. If an event does not have a featured image available, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Management Addon: The Recurring Events manager add on allows you to put events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months ahead. You can create as many events in advance as you need. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close bookings for all of your recurring events.
- Events Calendar Table Template Addon: The Calendar Table template is a list template with a bold date and customizable “register now” button. The template can also be customized to display an event thumbnail image instead of the date.
- Social Media Buttons Addon: The social media add-on displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media addon is included free with any of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration add-on 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 pricing and overriding event pricing when members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered website users will have access to these special events. Members can also enter personal details into their profile page allowing them fast registration for events by auto-filling in the personal information on the event registration form. Users can also look up past events and pay for events.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add on Editions: This add-on lets you include your staff in your organization to help manage your events and give new users permission to create events or regional managers the capacity to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WP users roles and give them different permissions with different privileges, allowing others to help you manage your events or the events that other people create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain parts 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.
- EE4 Event Ticketing Add on: The Ticketing addon adds the capacity to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon gives you the capacity to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing add on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode types are included for handling check-in scans at venues. People can either print out their tickets or display them on their mobile devices. The barcode scanner can be used for checking in or checking out registrants and to validate tickets.
- Events Calendar Add-on: This WordPress events calendar displays events and categories of events in an attractive graphical calendar.
- EE4 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 completely automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture event attendee 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.
For more details about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
Customers – Feedback
Here are just some of the many great testimonials that satisfied customers 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
”Event Espresso event management plugin for WordPress is really an awesome plugin.” Cheryl Smithem, Charleston PR & Design
”You guys have done an AWESOME job with this system…promise me to keep up the excellent work you guys are doing, for as long as you can… Respect!” Robert Jarnroth, Jarnroth Digital Productions
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, trainer, seminar promoter, or event management professional, there are simply endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a licensed user, spend a little time visiting the user forum for tips and practical suggestions to streamline your event management process and enhance the experience of your registrants.
Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with other WP plugins and WordPress themes that follow standard WP coding guidelines. If you do need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive end-user support, as so many of its clients 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
The Event Espresso plugin provides amazing support including access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, premium 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.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely software you can depend on to run your events.
Product Licensing Cost
Event Espresso is available in a range of editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software options, however, you should consider using one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This license option enables you to set up Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This license option lets you run Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Edition – This enables you to set up Event Espresso on 5 sites. 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 depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the software sells for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Note: The pricing above was current when this review was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Plugin Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the software’s documentation tools for answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to your specific use-case, or to notify developers about problems and give feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event booking and ticketing manager plugin, used by thousands.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you plan to run events that involve managing dates and venues, registering participants, and selling seating, then you will probably not find a better solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Manager Plugin
***