Does your company currently run or plan to run events that need managing bookings or registrations, such as seminars, community classes, not-for-profit fund-raisers, corporate conferences, or even a big event such as a show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups is a time-consuming process. You have to manage scheduling, available dates and spaces, registration numbers, data processing, payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to attendees.
There are lots of benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce costs, help you easily duplicate recurring events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event registration system can be quite expensive.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-based digital presence, you can download and install a very inexpensive and highly professional online event booking solution.
Presenting …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily create multiple events and begin processing online bookings in minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and take online bookings)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed plugin that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize event registration forms
You can use various event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up selling tickets, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media sites like Facebook.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Note: Currently, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is impressively different than the older EE 3, as the plugin is being redeveloped using a different structure to accommodate future growth. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually phase out Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and advantages of using this plugin.
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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
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing online presence into an automated and feature-rich event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to attendee limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically doing away with the need to process registrations manually.
Essentially, you are enabling attendees to enrol by themselves.
Letting your enrollees to do the data entry frees up your time and lets you direct more of your energy on creating a memorable event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will see in a moment, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your clients to experience.
Some additional benefits of the plugin include:
- Lower Costs: Event Espresso provides you with a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to developing your own software or using a third party service provider. The cost is kept low by using a model where you purchase the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and buy addons when you need extra features.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept online registrations outside normal business hours. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event invite others who may also be interested in attending.
- Green Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, the event signup process can be performed entirely online, significantly reducing traditional paper waste from tasks related to admin and record-storage.
- Own Your Information. You control all the data gathered from event attendees.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to its customers via standard features (these come with the plugin) and optional features that customers can buy for an additional cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many built-in to WordPress users. Here are just a few of these:
- Fast and simple to install and use. Ready to use in very little time.
- Customized Event Registration. With Event Espresso you can collect unique data using custom event registration forms on your web site to create a unique experience for your attendees.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Registrants can easily see your upcoming events and add these to their schedule using the WordPress calendar.
- Tax Administration Options. Event Espresso 4 gives you a number of options to handle taxes for an event and provide reports of tax fees to customers when purchasing tickets. You can administer taxes globally and on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your theme and display contact details throughout other areas of your site.
- Spam Protection. Reduce the risk of spammers and robots making fake registrations on your website by using reCAPTCHA option to authenticate human activity.
- In-App Documentation Systems. Event Espresso 4 includes three built-in in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Event Check-In List. Generate an exportable list of event attendees and confirm everyone who has attended.
- Administrative Pre-approval. Be selective about who can and cannot participate in your events.
- Private Contact Commenting. Record comments about event attendees on their profile and how you’ve helped them. Private commenting enables you to keep a record of when users contacted you, your internal comments, and how you have helped them.
- Draft Events. Draft events allow you to develop an event in your own timeframe without displaying it live on your site. You can work on your events until you are ready to publish it live to your website, or schedule to publish your event page at a later time and date.
- Your Organization Settings. Configure your profile to display throughout Event Espresso and your WordPress themes. Your organization information include: business name, address, city, state, country, zip/postal code, email, phone, VAT/tax number, business logo, Facebook URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ profile URL, Instagram URL.
- Default Tickets. If you create similar tickets for many of your events, you can automatically set one of those tickets as your default ticket for the next time you create an event simply by ticking a checkbox.
- Venue Management. The venue manager feature in Event Espresso 4 allows information about venues to be made available throughout the Event Espresso admin and the public areas of your website to inform potential registrants 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 reuse venue information such as venue seating capacity, venue site URL, telephone number, physical, maps, etc. You can also display venue profiles in various areas in your theme as well as 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 particular venue.
- Automatic Plugin Updating. Event Espresso offers easy one-click plugin upgrading to ensure that you have the newest features and to keep your installation up-to-date with new versions of WordPress.
- Social Sharing. Event participants and website visitors can help create a wider exposure for your event using social media share buttons.
- Accurate Event Attendee Manager. You have control of your participants’ records; who has enrolled, for what event and how much they’ve paid. With the attendee manager, you can get a quick overview of registered attendees and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export an event attendee list to an Excel spreadsheet for additional uses, send customized payment reminders and receipts and send messages to your event registrants on a person-by-person basis or collectively.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows you to have more control and options over the content of your event page and how the information displays to your visitors.
- Maintenance Mode. Pause registration capabilities for normal website traffic whenever you need to perform maintenance on your site. You can continue to work on the back-end of your site during maintenance mode.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value: According to the mission statement on their site, Event Espresso’s goal 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 company operates on 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 over 40 additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – limits the need to re-enter event details when creating new events.
- Default surcharge (the same as adding a service fee to every ticket).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow you to further enhance the functionality of your event management process.
Some of these addons 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, a default image will be used.
- Recurring Events Management Addon: The Recurring Events manager add-on lets you put your events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months in advance. You can add as many events in advance as you like. Event Espresso will automatically open and close registrations for all of these recurring events.
- Events Date Range Template Add-on: The Date Range custom event list template lets your users to search for events that occur in a certain date range.
- Social Coupons Integration Add-on: If your site uses Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can even specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- Custom Template Add-on: The Custom Template add on can display your events in a variety of exciting and interesting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Addon Editions: This add on lets you include staff in the event management process and give new users the capacity 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 give them different permissions with different capabilities, so your staff can help you manage your events or events that other people create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain areas of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain areas 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 add-on gives 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 shopping 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 an easy-to-use system that lets you edit 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 developers design their own custom templates using one of the included templates as a base template.
- JSON API Add on: The Event Espresso JSON API add on gives permission for other software applications, web sites, 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, visit the plugin website:
User Feedback
Below are some of the many testimonials that satisfied customers have posted about Event Espresso:
”My hope with this whole integration is to be able to show other school districts an affordable and easy solution to these registrations. I cannot believe how much money they are charged for less by other companies. This has the potential to save schools tens of thousands, which is huge right now.” Kelly, College Station Independent School District
“I just completed my first event using Event Espresso. I really believe without Event Espresso my event would not have been the success it was.” Cathy Earle, Women Only Weekend
”Thank you, we just did 2 sell out seminars of 50 attendees in 48 hours using Event Espresso and it was awesome. My wife was able to pick up on the processing backend with ease. You have done a great job on getting this system together – very simple, clear and well laid out With powerful functionality. I am so glad I dumped the old booking application we had and gave Event Espresso a go. Just wanted to say thanks, and thanks for the very patient, friendly and speedy assistance in helping me to get it all set up at the start. Many thanks to you and your team. A grateful customer.” Nicholas de Castella, Emotional Intelligence Trainings
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, presenter, show planner, or event management professional, there are simply endless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed user, spend a little time visiting the user forum for tips and practical ways to improve your event management workflow or improve the experience of your customers.
Support
Event Espresso works with with most WordPress plugins and WP themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great technical support, as so many of its plugin end-users confirm:
”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, knowledge base and how tos, one-on-one 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 WordPress developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely software you can rely on to organize and manage your events.
Event Espresso Cost
Event Espresso is available in different plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you will want to consider downloading one of the ”Pro” plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This license option lets you install Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This license option enables you to run Event Espresso on one site only. It includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License – This lets you install Event Espresso on 5 domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Pricing details of the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, the software is being retailed for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current price: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing when this review was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin developer when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Information
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.
Search the software’s documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to your specific use-case, or to report bugs and give feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event registration and ticketing manager software, used by thousands.
If you are a WordPress user and you plan to run events that require scheduling dates, times and venues (offline and online), booking attendees, or selling tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management
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