Do you currently run or plan to run events that require bookings or registrations, such as workshops, community courses, charity fund raisers, networking conferences, or even a big event like a rave party, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event registrations is a complex and time-consuming process. You need to co-ordinate scheduling, available dates and seating allocations, participant numbers, data collection, payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to attendees.
There are many advantages to setting up an online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce costs, help you easily duplicate similar events, give event managers more control, improve customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that this can be expensive.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-powered site, you can download and install a very inexpensive and highly professional online event booking solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Ticketing Registration System
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WP software lets you easily set up multiple events and begin processing bookings in just a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and take online bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Customize event registration forms
You can use a number of event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up ticket-selling, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event participants, or integrating your event bookings with social media and email marketing tools.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Note: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is considerably different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the plugin has been revamped using a different structure to accommodate future expansion. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually migrate completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just a few of the 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 current website into a fully-featured and automated event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by literally doing away with the need to process registrations manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating attendees to enrol on their own.
Letting your participants to do all of the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you invest more of your time on delivering a better event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon learn, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and booking process that you want your participants to experience.
Some additional benefits include:
- Reduced Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own solution or using a 3rd-party service. The cost is kept to a minimum through a model where you start with the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then purchase add-ons when you need extra functionality.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept online event sign-ups 24/7. In addition, Event Espresso social and marketing features (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event share your information with friends who may also be interested.
- Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, your event registration process is transacted wholly online, significantly reducing typical paper consumption from tasks related to enrollment.
- All Data Belongs To You. You control all the information you collect from your event attendees.
Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to users through built-in features (these come with the software) and optional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many unique built-in to website owners. Here are just some:
- Fast and easy to install and configure. Be up and running in minutes.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso allows you to configure as many different types of tickets as you need and set different prices, maximum number of tickets, and more.
- Customizable Event Designs. Create the look and feel you want for your events and signup page using Event Espresso’s limitless template options and elements, as well as HTML or CSS.
- Ticket Selector. Present multiple ticket options to registrants so they can choose the ticket(s) that best fits their needs.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your theme and display registrant details throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow event managers to create new prices that adjust the base ticket pricing of the default ticket.
- Discount And Promotional Codes. Leverage promotion and multiple discount codes to incentivize prospects to make a decision now, or simply make your offers more appealing for others. Also useful for helping to increase sales of events close to timelines.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of registering event attendees when they show up, or sending in paper forms for manual processing later.
- Event Manager Pre-approval. Be selective about who can attend your events.
- Private Commenting On Contacts. Record observations about users on their profile. Private commenting enables you to keep records of when users contacted you, your internal comments, and how you have interacted with your customers.
- Draft Events. Draft events let you build an event in your own time frame without displaying it live on your site. You can keep working on your event pages until you are ready to take things live, or schedule to publish your event at a later time and date.
- Full Control Of Your Event Management. Event Espresso puts you in complete control of every aspect of your event’s registration and ticketing processes, and also lets you automate the process with event management tools that include staff and venue manager, custom event designs, payment processing, wait lists, limits on attendees, printable ticketing and more.
- Default Tickets. If you find yourself creating identical tickets for most of your events, you can easily set up as your default ticket for the next time you create an event simply by checking a box.
- Venue Profiles. The venue manager in Event Espresso 4 allows details about venues to appear throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front-end of your website to inform visitors of the location of your event. The venue profile has many standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also lets you add information such as venue seating capacity, venue site URL, telephone number, venue address, location map, etc. You can also list all of your venues throughout specific locations in your WP theme as well as on a venue archive page on your website where you can set up and publish venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have listed for a given venue.
- 1-Click Plugin Installation Updating. Event Espresso offers simple 1-click software updates to make sure that you have the newest features and to keep your software installation working with new versions of WordPress.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential attendees who have not paid yet for their enrollment with a standard but personalized invoice with one click of a button. Your invoices will reference pre-registered attendees who have not paid their registration yet by name, give them the amount they owe, and include a link to the event, a payment link and a link where they can download a PDF invoice.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post type features such as custom fields, post meta data, taxonomies, etc. You can even customize your page templates to display events in your own custom way.
Additional features include:
- Hooks, Actions & Filters. These allow web developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso plugin that are fully compatible with WordPress.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 allows you to generate a log file with debugging data which can be useful for developers when potential application problems.
- Autonomy, Flexibility And 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 mission, the software has been built using a modular that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also provides you with over 40 additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes for including attendee data in emails and newsletters.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing the same group of questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Addons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow end-users to significantly expand the capabilities of events.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Addon: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display your scheduled events by location. 4 maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Template Add-on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes the events with many datetimes into a drop-down list.
- Events Date Range Template Add-on: The Date Range custom event list template lets your users to browse for events that occur in a certain date range.
- Social Coupons Integration Add-on: 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.
- Custom Files Addon: The Custom Files add-on lets you override certain aspects of the Event Espresso plugin.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add on Versions: This add-on lets you include staff 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 allow them different permissions with different privileges, so others can help you manage your events or events that others create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain parts of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain areas 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.
- 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 cart. With the Multi-Event Registration add-on, 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 View Template Add-on: The Events Table Template add-on gives you 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 lets web developers build custom templates using one of the included templates as a base template.
- JSON API Add-on: The Event Espresso JSON API addon lets other software applications, online tools, mobile applications, etc… to access your Event Espresso data through an Application Programming Interface (API).
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add-ons.
For more details about the newest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
Customers – Feedback
Here are just some of the many testimonials that users 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
”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
”I’m using it on multiple sites and enjoying it. It’s simple and as others have stated… fast service and real help.” Arlen Nagata
Useful Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, presenter, show planner, or event management consultant, there are simply countless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed user, go through the forums for tips and practical suggestions to streamline your event management workflow or enhance the experience of your event participants.
Event Espresso Support
Event Espresso is compatible with other WP plugins and WordPress themes that follow WP coding standards. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great user support, as so many of its end-users attest:
”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 great support that includes access to support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, one-on-one 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 a well-staffed team of experienced web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely software you can depend on to run and manage your events.
Product Cost
Event Espresso is available in various editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software features, however, you need to consider using one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal Edition – This edition allows you to configure Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This option enables you to set up Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This license option enables you to install Event Espresso on 5 domains. It includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The price of the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, the software sells for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Manager
Note: The pricing above was current at the time this review was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin author when you visit the site.
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 online documentation tools 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 notify developers about errors and share feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product website.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event registration and ticketing manager plugin, used and trusted by thousands of WP users.
If you are a WordPress user and you plan to run any event that requires scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), booking participants, and reserving seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Manager System
***