Do you currently run or plan to run events that require handling bookings, such as workshops, training courses, charity fund-raisers, social events, or even a big event such as a concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Managing event registrations can be a complicated and time-consuming process. You will most likely need to manage scheduling, available dates and spaces, registration numbers, data processing, payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to event registrants.
There are many benefits to setting up an online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily reproduce similar events, give you more control, improve user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that this can be quite costly.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-based web site, you can install an inexpensive and professional online event registration solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily set up multiple events and start processing bookings literally in a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and accept online registrations)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can employ several event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up selling tickets, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your event attendees, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing updates.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their software: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is completely different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the plugin is being rebuilt using a different structure to allow for future growth. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually retire EE 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
Learn more here:
Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing web site into an automated and feature-rich event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by practically eliminating the need to process registrations manually.
Basically, you are facilitating attendees to enroll by themselves.
Letting your customers to do the data themselves frees up your time and lets you spend more of your energy on organizing a more unique event.
More 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.
Some additional plugin benefits include the following:
- Lower Costs: Event Espresso provides you with an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own system or using a third-party provider. This is made possible through a model where Event Espresso users start with the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then buy optional add ons when you need new functionality.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept new event bookings outside normal business hours. In addition, Event Espresso social addons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event invite other people they know who may also be interested.
- Paperless Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign up process can remain wholly online, reducing typical paper consumption from tasks associated with administration.
- All Information Belongs To You. You own all the information collected from your event participants.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to end-users through standard features (these come with the plugin) and additional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of great features to WordPress users. Here are just some:
- Quick and simple to install and use. Ready to start accepting registrations in minutes.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In EE 4, events can have many dates and times (datetimes), and these can be managed from one single event.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Customers can easily find your events and add these to their schedule with the WordPress calendar.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso provides integration with payment gateways, allowing you to collect booking payments prior to running events.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your WP theme and display venue information throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Prices. Set up events quickly by pre-configuring default ticket prices.
- Discount Codes. Offer promotional and discount codes to incentivize people to take action without delaying, or make your offers more attractive for others. Also useful if you want to increase sales of events close to deadlines.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. EE 4 lets you know who your clients are and how you have previously engaged with them. Your Contact Profile page stores the name, biography, contact information, event registration details, private comments, etc. about each client.
- Waiting Lists. Interested persons can subscribe to a waiting list if your event has become completely sold out. You can also make it a requirement wait-list registrants pay for their spots if you plan to add more capacity for your event.
- Private Commenting On Contacts. Record observations about event registrants on their profile and how you’ve interacted with them. Private commenting helps you keep records of when event registrants contacted you, your internal notes, and how you’ve assisted them.
- Keyword-Rich Event Page Web Links. Keyword-rich URLs leverage your WP Permalinks configuration settings. “Pretty” web links that use topic-relevant keywords add to the context of your pages and is favored by search engines, helping you get more visitors to your site.
- Your Organization Settings. Configure your organization’s profile to be deployed throughout Event Espresso and your WP themes. Your organization information include: company name, address, city, state, country, zip/postal code, email address, phone, tax number, your logo, Facebook URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ URL, Instagram profile URL.
- Default Tickets. If you find yourself creating identical tickets for your events, you can set up as your default ticket for all new events simply by ticking a checkbox.
- Venue Management. The venue manager feature in Event Espresso 4 lets details about venues to appear throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front-end of your site to inform attendees of the location of your event. The venue profile displays many of the standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also includes venue details such as venue capacity, venue website, phone number, physical, Google map, etc. You can also display all of your venues throughout specific sections in your theme and on a venue archive page on your website where you can set up and display venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have listed for a given venue.
- Automatic Upgrades. Event Espresso offers easy one-click updating to make sure that you have the newest features and to keep your plugin installation compatible with the latest version of WordPress.
- Social Sharing. Event registrants and site visitors can help increase exposure for your event using social media share buttons.
- Accurate Participant Manager. You have control of your customers’ information; who has enrolled, which event they have registered for and how much they’ve paid. With the attendee manager, you can get an overview of registered attendees and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export an event attendee list to a CSV file for additional reports, send customized payment reminders and receipts and send messages to your registrants on a person-by-person basis or as a group.
Extra features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming. Event Espresso is simple enough for non-technical WP users, and also robust and customizable for higher end users and developers. The bottom line is that by using Object-oriented programming (OOP), EE 4 allows for more complex developments and customizations to the software.
- Control Box Management And Reorganization. Event Espresso leverages the WordPress user interface, which brings the ability to reorder the user interface to suit your workflow process. Each control box can be collapsed, re-arranged or completely removed from your workflow configuration.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & Value: According to the mission statement on their site, 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 goals, the software has been built using a modular 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 over 40 added features, including:
- Live-filtering when searching for events within the Event Espresso admin.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse the same questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page during registration.
Addons
As well as an incredible number of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow customers to significantly enhance the capabilities of events.
Some of these add-ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add-on: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display upcoming events by location. There are 4 maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Custom Template Add-on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes the events with multiple datetimes into a drop-down list.
- Events Date Range Template Add-on: The Date Range custom event list template allows your users to browse for events that take place in a certain date range.
- Social Coupons Integration Add on: If your website 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 add-on allows you to 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 site users will have access to these special events. Members can also enter personal data into their profile page allowing them to quickly register for events by auto-filling in their personal information on the event booking form. Users can also look up event history and make payment for events.
- Seating Chart Add-on: The seating chart add on is for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart add-on lets you offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues directly from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart add-on lets you manage the experience for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to every seat.
- EE4 Event Ticketing And Bar Scanning Add on: The Ticketing add on gives you the capacity to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add on adds the capacity to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing add-on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode types are included for managing check-in scans at the venue door. Customers can either print out their tickets or display them on their mobile devices. The mobile app can be used for checking in or checking out registrants and to validate tickets.
- EE4 Events Table View Template Add-on: The Events Table Template add-on provides event managers with an easy-to-use system that lets you change the look and feel 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 design custom templates using one of the included templates as a base template.
- MailChimp Integration Addon: The MailChimp addon lets you automatically register attendees to a particular mailing autoresponder list or group within MailChimp.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software, including new add-ons.
For more details about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
User Testimonials
Here are just some of the many great testimonials that satisfied customers have posted about Event Espresso:
”Event Espresso rocks! I use it for my dance class registrations. Unlike most dance studios where people have to call or send an email in advance, Event Espresso puts a registration form right there in front of the user and allows me to collect valuable information from the user during the registration process with custom questions such as “Do you have previous dance experience?” or “How did you hear about us?”. It also gives my site a professional look and feel.” Ral, Ral’eau Salsa Dance Company
”I have to say that it has been the right choice for me…I’ve been extremely pleased with the way my site is working.” Robin, RobinTime
”I am in love with your product, I work with many educational institutions that hold classes/events and I will definitely recommend this to all of them, the only time I have seen a system this comprehensive and sophisticated is when an organization I worked with paid a programmer nearly $8,000 for a custom solution, and yet still there are features in your registration system that his didn’t have. Thank you so much for your help and patience.” Abdullah J.
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, trainer, conference promoter, or event consultant, there are just endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a registered user, search the forums for useful ideas and practical suggestions to improve your event management process and improve the experience of your event customers.
Support
Event Espresso works with with other WP plugins and themes that follow WP coding standards. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive user support, as many of its customers 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
The Event Espresso plugin provides amazing support with access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, priority 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 web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can rely on to manage your events.
Product Pricing
Event Espresso is available in different editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin options, however, you may want to consider using one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This lets you run Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License – This edition lets you set up Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This allows you to run Event Espresso on five sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Pricing details of the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Presently, the software is selling for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Note: The above reflects the pricing when this article was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Plugin Info
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 plugin’s documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to a specific use-case, or to report problems and give 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 WP event booking and ticketing manager plugin, used and trusted by thousands of event promoters.
If you own a WordPress website and you plan to run events that involve scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), enrolling attendees, and selling tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable WP plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Management Plugin
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