Do you currently run or plan to run events that require managing registrations, such as workshops, community courses, non-profit fundraisers, networking events, or even a big event such as a trade exhibit, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Managing event registrations can be a complex process. You will most likely need to manage scheduling, event dates, attendee numbers, data processing, payments and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders and notifications, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to attendees.
There are lots of advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce costs, help you easily reproduce recurring events, give event managers more control, create a better user experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be costly.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-based website, you can easily install a very inexpensive and professional online event booking system.
Introducing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily set up your event and start receiving registrations in a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and receive online event bookings)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich software that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
Customize your event registration forms
You can use multiple event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event participants, or integrating your event registration forms with an autoresponder system for ongoing notifications.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Please Note: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their software: EE 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is considerably different than the older EE 3, as the plugin is being revamped using a different structure to enable future growth. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually transition completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and advantages of using the plugin.
Go here to learn more about the plugin:
Benefits
Here are just some of the benefits 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 digital presence into a fully-featured and automated event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by virtually doing away with the chore of processing registrations manually.
Basically, you are enabling event participants to perform the enrolment process by themselves.
Allowing your attendees to do the data themselves frees you up from doing admin work and lets you direct more energy on delivering a memorable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon learn, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and registration process that you want your customers to experience.
Some additional plugin benefits include the following:
- Significantly Lower Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third-party service provider. This is made possible by using a model where you buy the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and purchase addons when you need additional features.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new registrations outside traditional business hours. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing add ons (see below) let people interested in registering for your event share your information with their friends who may be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, your event registration process can be transacted wholly online, eliminating traditional paper consumption from tasks related to enrollment.
- Own Your Data. You own all the data you collect from your event participants.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to its users via built-in features (these are included with the plugin) and additional features that you can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of features to WordPress users. Here are just a few:
- Fast and easy to install and set up. Be up and running in minutes.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In EE 4, events can have multiple dates and times (called datetimes), that these can be managed from a single event.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Customers can easily see your upcoming events and add these to their schedule with the WordPress calendar.
- Tax Admin & Reporting Options. Event Espresso 4 gives you a number of options to administer taxes for your event and report tax fees to registrants who purchase tickets. Event managers can configure taxes globally or on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your theme and reuse events information throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow event managers to create new prices that adjust the default ticket pricing of your system-default ticket.
- Discount And Promotional Codes. You can leverage promotion and multiple discount codes to incentivize prospects to register without delays, or make your events more affordable for others. Also useful for helping to increase sales of events close to deadlines.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of participants and check in everyone who has attended.
- No Ticket Events. Set up events without requiring registrants to book tickets. Event Espresso can be used for any kind of event, not just those that need tickets.
- RSS Event Feeds. Keep your customers updated about your events, bring in more visitors and expand your content reach with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Search Engine Friendly Page URLs. Keyword-rich URLs leverage your WordPress Permalinks configuration settings. “Pretty” permalinks with topic-relevant keywords enhance the context of your pages and improves your search rankings, helping you bring a more targeted audience to your website.
- Country-specific Settings. Event managers can configure the country and currency settings to be used in events, including currency name, currency signs, decimal characters and places, country codes, states or provinces, etc.
- Default Tickets. If you create similar tickets for your events, you can automatically set one of those tickets as your default ticket for the next time you create an event simply by checking a box.
- WP Visual Editor. Event Espresso uses the default WordPress WYSIWYG editor, so you can quickly and easily insert photos and create your content without knowledge of HTML or CSS, just like any standard WordPress post.
- Attendee Records. Manage each attendee’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their information organized.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential registrants who have not made payment for their admission with a standard but personalized invoice with one click of a button. Your invoices will reference pre-registered participants who have not paid their registration yet by name, display the balance they owe, and include links to the event details, a payment url and a url to download a PDF invoice.
- Accurate Attendee Manager. You control your attendees’ details; who has registered, for what event and what amount they 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 attendees to Excel for additional uses, send custom payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your attendees on a person-by-person basis or all at once.
Extra features include:
- Hooks, Actions & Filters. These features allow developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso software that are completely compatible with WordPress.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 allows you to output a log file with debugging data that can be useful for developers when diagnosing problems.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & 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 objectives, 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 comes with 40+ added features, including:
- Duplicating events – simplifies the work of re-entering event data when adding new events.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse a common set of questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Addons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow customers to significantly expand the capabilities of your event management system.
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 Add on: The Recurring Events management add-on lets you put events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months in advance. You can add as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in the future as you want. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close registrations for all of these recurring events.
- Events Date Range Template Add-on: The Date Range custom event list template allows your users to search for events that occur in a certain date range.
- Social Media Buttons Add-on: 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 addon lets you 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 input 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 past events and pay for future events.
- Seating Chart Add on: The seating chart addon is for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is ideal for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart addon lets you promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues directly from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart addon lets you control the environment for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach single pricing to each seat.
- Multiple 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 attendees will be given the option to either register for a single event or add multiple events to their cart. With the Multiple 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.
- EE4 Events Table Template Addon: The Events Table Template addon provides event managers with an easy-to-use system that lets you 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 enables developers to design custom templates using one of the included templates as a base template.
- EE4 Infusionsoft Integration Add on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft integration all-in-one sales and business marketing plugin addon, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture registrant data, track enrollments, and accept payments from your Event Espresso powered website.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add-ons.
For full details about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website here:
User Feedback
Below are some of the many great testimonials that satisfied users have written about Event Espresso:
”Event Espresso is one of the nicest Event Managers (WP Plugin) I have come across.” Joe Distefano, Citizen Joe
”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 an education services provider, presenter, 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 registered owner, spend a little time visiting the user forum for new ideas and practical ways to streamline your event management and registration workflow or improve the experience of your registrants.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso works with with most WordPress plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress development rules. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive technical support, as many of its satisfied plugin end-users confirm:
”No complaints here. Satisfied customer. You can teach us all few things about customer service. Thanks!” Charles
Event Espresso provides amazing support with access to support forums, in-depth 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.
In addition, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can rely on to run your events.
Plugin Cost
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software functionality, however, you may want to consider purchasing one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This enables you to run Event Espresso on 1 domain only. It includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This option enables you to run Event Espresso on 1 site only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This lets you configure Event Espresso on 5 sites. Price 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. Presently, the software retails for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager
Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this review was written. This may not be the actual pricing 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 its plugin. Make sure to remain 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 setup and using Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to a particular use-case, or to report issues and leave feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event registration and ticketing management software, used by thousands of people.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you plan to run events that involve scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), registering attendees, or selling tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso
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