Do you currently run or plan to run events that require registrations, such as workshops, community courses, charity fund-raisers, corporate functions, or even a large-scale event like a show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Managing event sign-ups can be a complicated and time-consuming process. You need to co-ordinate calendar schedules, availability, registration numbers, data administration, payments and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders and alerts, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to participants.
There are a number of benefits to setting up an online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower costs, help you easily replicate previous events, give you more control, improve user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be quite costly.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-powered web site, you can easily set up a very inexpensive and professional online event booking solution.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Registration System
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily set up an event and begin accepting registrations in a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and accept online event bookings)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich software that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
Customize registration forms
You can use a range of event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up ticket sales, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your participants, or integrating your event registration forms with social media sites like Facebook.
View detailed information about event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is impressively different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the software has been revamped using a different structure to enable future growth and expansion. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually migrate completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and advantages of this plugin.
More info:
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 current digital presence into an automated and fully featured event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to attendee limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Increased 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.
Essentially, you are making it easier for event participants to enroll on their own.
Allowing your enrollees to do all of the data entry frees up your time and lets you focus more of your energy on delivering a more unique event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon discover, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management process that you want your attendees to experience.
Additional benefits include the following:
- Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own system or using a 3rd-party service. This is made possible by using a model where you purchase the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then buy optional add-ons when you need additional features.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online event bookings 24 hours a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing features and add ons (see below) let people interested in registering for your event invite friends who may be interested.
- Green Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, the event booking process remains wholly in digital form, eliminating typical paper consumption from tasks related to admin and record-storage.
- Own Your Information. You own all the data you collect from your event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
The Event Espresso plugin delivers functionality to its users through built-in features (these come with the software) and additional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many great built-in to WP users. 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 create multiple ticket types and specify different prices, ticket quantity limits, and more.
- Event Calendar. Registrants can easily find your events and add these to their schedule using the WordPress calendar.
- Tax Admin And Reporting. Event Espresso 4 provides a number of ways to administer taxes for your event and report tax fees to registrants who purchase tickets. Event managers can configure taxes globally and on a per-ticket basis.
- Smart Single Page Checkout Process. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is smart, fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically copy the primary attendee’s registration information for any additional registrants.
- Default Price Types. Price types let you create new prices that adjust the base ticket pricing of the default ticket.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system lets you validate tickets, speed up door registrations, create various check-in “stations” and track event participants.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of booking event attendees when they show up, or send in paper registration forms for manual registration later.
- Ticketless Events. You can create events without requiring participants to book tickets. Use Event Espresso for any form of event, not only those that need tickets.
- XML RSS Feeds. Keep your users up-to-date about your events, drive quality traffic and widen your content reach with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Draft Events. Draft events allow you to develop an event over time without publishing it to your website. You can work on your events until you are ready to publish it to your website, or schedule your event pages to publish at a later time and date.
- 15+ Languages. Event Espresso can be run in 15+ languages, with more languages planned.
- Upload Event Data. Event Espresso 4 provides an advanced importing feature that allows you to easily upload a lot of event data all at one time. You can export, edit and import data for events, datetimes, ticketing information, pricing, registration questions, venues, terminology, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Venue Profiles. The venue management feature in Event Espresso 4 allows details about a venue to display throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front-end of your website to inform users of your event’s location. The venue profile displays many standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also displays details like venue capacity, venue website, phone number, venue address, maps, etc. You can also list venue profiles throughout various locations of your WP theme as well as on a venue listing page on your website where you can set up and display venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have booked for a particular venue.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso lets you network with an expert community of event managers and other plugin users. You can engage with other members of the Event Espresso community through their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media pages on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Social Sharing. Event participants and site visitors can help promote your events using social share buttons.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post types. You can also customize the templates to display event information in your own custom way.
Extra features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for most WordPress users, and also extremely robust and customizable for enterprise-level users and developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, EE 4 makes possible more complex extensions and customizations to the plugin.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 lets you generate a log file with debugging data that can be helpful for developers who are diagnosing errors.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And Value For Money: 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 goals, the company operates on a modular and efficient model 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 40+ additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes that includes customer data in emails and email updates.
- Default surcharge (the same as applying a service fee to each ticket).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Addons
As well as an incredible array of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow users to further enhance the capabilities of managing an event.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Addon: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display the scheduled events by location. 4 maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Management Add on: The Recurring Events management add on lets you put events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months ahead. You can schedule as many events in the future as you want. Event Espresso will automatically open and close registrations for all recurring events.
- Events Calendar Table Template Add-on: The Calendar Table template is a list template with a bold date and customizable “register now” button. The template can be customized to display an event thumbnail instead of the date.
- EE4 Events Social Sharing Addon: Add social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that lets your attendees to post a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after registration.
- Custom Files Add on: The Custom Files addon provides PHP files that let you bypass certain aspects of the Event Espresso plugin.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add on Editions: This addon lets you include others in the event management process and give new users permission to create events or regional managers the capacity 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 others can help you manage your events or events that others create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain sections of your WP dashboard and/or certain parts 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 addon.
- Multi-Event Registration Add-on: The Multi-Event registration addon gives your 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 Calendar Add-on: This add on uses the WP calendar to display events and categories of events in a nice graphical calendar.
- EE4 Infusionsoft Integration Addon: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft integration all-in-one sales and marketing software add-on, you can completely automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture event attendee data, track bookings, and accept payments from your web site.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin, including new addons.
For more information about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, visit the plugin website:
User Feedback
Here are just some of the many great testimonials that customers have posted about Event Espresso:
”It’s been very comprehensive and covers exactly the aspects of event registration that we needed for our site plus some features that we didn’t even need but could still use in the future. Very Excellent Plugin!” Tristan Hall, Area 12:2 Youth Group
“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
“Love the plugin, we only use it once a year for a race we have in February. This saved us tons of time in data entry. In addition, we had more runners register than any other year. We attribute that to the ease of registering online. Thanks for your work.” Ed, Friends of Oscar Scherer Park
Useful Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, trainer, seminar promoter, or event professional, there are just countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a registered owner, go through the forums for inspiration and practical ways to improve your event management and registration process and improve the experience of your customers.
Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with all WordPress plugins and themes that follow standard WP development rules. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent support, as so many of its plugin 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
The Event Espresso plugin provides exceptional support with access to support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledge base 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 an established team of experienced web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can rely on to run your events.
Software Pricing
Event Espresso is available in various editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you need to consider downloading one of the ”Pro” plugin editions below:
- Personal Edition – This lets you run Event Espresso on one site only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This enables you to configure Event Espresso on 1 site only. It includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License – This edition allows you to configure Event Espresso on five domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The cost of purchasing the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. When we last checked, the plugin sells for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager
Note: The pricing above was current when this review was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin author when you visit the website.
Additional Information
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software. 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 pages for answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to a specific situation, or to report errors and give feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event registration and ticketing management plugin, used by thousands of companies.
If you are a WordPress user and you intend to run any event that requires scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), booking participants, and/or booking tickets or 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 – WordPress Event Management And Ticketing Registration Software
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