Does your business currently run or plan to run events that need handling registrations, such as workshops, community classes, charity fund raisers, networking events, or even a big event like 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 complex process. You may be required to manage calendar schedules, event dates, registration numbers, data processing and storage, collecting payments and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders and notifications, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to attendees.
There are many benefits to setting up an automated online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily duplicate similar events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable user experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event booking system can be quite expensive.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-based digital presence, you can set up a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event registration solution.
Presenting …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily schedule multiple events and start processing bookings literally in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and receive online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich software that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
Customize event registration forms
You can employ multiple event registration strategies, from simple online bookings 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 sites like Facebook.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is significantly different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the software is being rebuilt using a different structure to enable future expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually phase out EE 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
Go here to learn more about the plugin:
Plugin 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 And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing digital presence into a feature-rich and professional event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating limits, multiple price options 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 improve your business productivity by literally eliminating the chore of processing registrations and bookings manually.
Basically, you are facilitating event attendees to perform the registration themselves.
Letting your clients to do all of the data entry frees up your time and lets you direct more of your time on creating a more unique event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn in a moment, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management and registration process that you want your customers to experience.
Additional plugin benefits include the following:
- Lower Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own system or using a third-party service provider. This is made possible by using a model where users purchase the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then buy addons when you need extra features.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept new signups outside traditional business hours. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social add-ons (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event invite friends who may also be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign-up process is performed wholly online, eliminating traditional paper waste from tasks associated with enrollment.
- All Data Belongs To You. You own all the information you obtain from your event participants.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to end-users through built-in features (these are included with the plugin) and optional features that users can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many features to website owners. Here are just some:
- Fast and easy to install and use. 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 one single event.
- Event Calendar. Registrants can easily find your events and add these to their schedule using a WordPress calendar.
- Ticket Selector. Present a number of ticket options to registrants so they can choose the ticket(s) that best suits their needs.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration enables event managers to customize the look and control settings of Google Maps on the event listing and event details pages.
- Spam Protection. Eliminate the risk of spammers and bot software programs making bogus registrations on your site by using reCAPTCHA option that provide human authentication.
- Mobile Registration & Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system lets you validate tickets, speed up door registrations, create various check-in “stations” and track attendees.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of booking event attendees at the door, or send in paper-based forms for manual inputting later.
- Waiting Lists. Interested persons can subscribe to a waiting list if your event has reached maximum attendance. Additionally, you can specify that waiting list registrants pay for their spots if you plan to add more capacity for your event.
- RSS Feeds. Keep your customers up-to-date about your events, bring in more visitors and widen your content distribution with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- SEO Friendly URLs. Keyword-rich event page Web links take advantage of your Permalinks configuration settings. “Pretty” web links with topic-relevant keywords enhance the context of your content and is favored by search engines, helping you bring a more targeted audience to your site.
- Multi-Language Application. Event Espresso is being translated into 15+ languages, with more translations coming soon.
- Exportable Information. You can export all of your information collected from event customers into Excel or CSV format for creating advanced reports, devising marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, and so on.
- WYSIWYG Editor. Event Espresso uses the standard WordPress Visual editor, allowing you to quickly and easily insert images and format your content without knowledge of HTML or CSS, just like any WordPress post or page.
- One-Click Updates. Event Espresso provides simple 1-click software installation upgrading to ensure that you have the latest features and to keep your installation up-to-date with the latest version of WordPress.
- Staff Member Manager. Save time and stay organized by reusing staff profiles for multiple events or displaying their profile using a shortcode in your event description.
- Event Reports. Quick-view event reporting gives you information of all of your registrations and transactions, enabling you to analyze the performance of your events with the aggregate number of people who have registered and amount of revenue you have collected.
Additional features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for most WordPress users, and also robust and customizable for enterprise-level users and web developers. The bottom line is that by using Object-oriented programming (OOP), EE 4 makes possible more complex enhancements and customizations to the plugin.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. EE 4 allows you to output a log file with debugging data that can be helpful for developers who are troubleshooting.
- Autonomy, Flexibility And Value For Money: 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 mission, the company operates on a model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium version of Event Espresso also comes with 40+ added features, including:
- Email shortcodes for including attendee data in notification emails and updates.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse the same questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page during registration.
Add ons
In addition to an amazing array of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow customers to further expand the functionality of events.
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 the event does not have a featured image available, a default image will be used instead.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Template Addon: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes multiple datetime events into a dropdown list.
- 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 be customized to show the event thumbnail instead of a date.
- Social Media Buttons Addon: The social media addon displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media add-on comes free with any of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- Custom Files Addon: The Custom Files add on provides PHP files that let you bypass certain aspects of the plugin.
- Seating Chart Addon: 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 promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues right from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart add on lets you control the environment for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to every seat.
- Event Ticketing & Bar Scanning Add-on: The Ticketing addon gives you the capacity to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon adds the capacity to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing add-on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode types are included for managing check-in scans at venues. Registrants 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 attendees and to validate tickets.
- Events Table View Template Add on: The Events Table Template add on gives you an easy-to-use system that lets you modify 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 developers design their own custom templates using one of the templates included as a base template.
- JSON API Addon: The new Event Espresso JSON API add-on allows other applications, web tools, mobile apps, etc… to access your Event Espresso content through an Application Programming Interface (API).
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software, including new add ons.
For complete details about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
User Testimonials
Here are just some of the many testimonials that customers have written about Event Espresso:
“It is a very, very slick plugin. It’s one of those plugins where you install it, change a couple of settings, and boom you’re selling tickets.” Brad Williams, WebDevStudios
”Over the next 5-6 years we should be able to claim that we saved the company over $100,000 – Thanks Event Espresso!” David Waterman, KT Benefits & InkItDigital.com
”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, trainer, show planner, or event management professional, there are just countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, search the forums for new ideas and practical suggestions to improve your event management process and improve the experience of your participants.
Support
Event Espresso works with with all WP plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress development rules. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great support, as many of its customers confirm:
”It’s magical. Support is amazing, plugin is simple to use, a 3 year old could use the iPhone app…it all is very impressive and professional.” David, House of Prayer
The software provides incredible support that includes access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase 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.
In addition, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can count on to organize and manage your events.
Product Cost
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software features, however, you should consider using one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This lets you set up Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This lets you run Event Espresso on one site only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This enables you to set up Event Espresso on 5 sites. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The cost to purchase the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Presently, the software is selling for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Please Note: The pricing above was current at the time this article was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin seller when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Plugin Info
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the plugin’s online documentation tools for answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to a particular situation, or to notify developers about bugs and give feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event registration and ticketing manager plugin, used and trusted by thousands of WP users.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you currently run events that require managing dates, times and venues (offline and online), registering participants, or selling seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
***
