Do you currently run or plan to run events that require handling bookings or registrations, such as workshops, community courses, not-for-profit fund raisers, social events, or even a big event such as an arts & crafts, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups is a complex process. You need to co-ordinate calendar schedules, dates, attendee numbers, data administration, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders and notifications, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to participants.
There are a number of benefits 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 previously-run events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be very expensive.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-powered digital presence, you can install a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event booking solution.
Presenting …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily create an event and begin accepting registrations in just a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and take online registrations)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize event registration forms
You can use a range of event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up selling tickets, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media sites like Facebook.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Note: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is considerably different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the software is being rebuilt using a different structure to allow for future growth and expansion. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually migrate completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
Learn more here:
Benefits
Here are just some of the many benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current website into a fully-featured event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by virtually eliminating the chore of processing registrations and bookings manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for event attendees to enrol themselves.
Allowing your clients to do the data themselves frees up your time and lets you invest more of your time on planning a more enjoyable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will see shortly, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management and booking process that you want your participants to experience.
Some additional benefits of the plugin include:
- Significantly Lower Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd party service provider. This is made possible by using a model where you buy the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and purchase optional addons only if you need additional features.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept new signups 24 hours a day. In addition, Event Espresso social and marketing features (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event share your information with others who may also be interested in attending.
- Green Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event signup process remains entirely online, significantly reducing typical paper waste from tasks associated with administration.
- Own Your Information. You own all the information you acquire from event attendees.
Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to users via standard features (these are included with the plugin) and optional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of great features to WordPress users. Here are just a few of these:
- Fast and simple to install and implement. Be up and running in no time.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso allows you to create as many different types of tickets as you need and set different prices, maximum number of tickets, etc.
- Event Calendar. Attendees can easily see your events and add these to their schedule using a WordPress calendar.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso seamlessly integrates with leading payment gateways, enabling you to collect payments before running the events.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your WP theme and reuse contact data throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types let event managers create new prices that adjust the default ticket price of the default ticket.
- Discount Codes. Leverage promotional and multiple discount codes to incentivize prospects to make a decision immediately, or make your events more attractive for price-sensitive prospects. This is also practical if you want to increase sales of events close to timelines.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of participants and confirm everyone who has attended.
- Waiting Lists. Interested persons can join a waiting list if your event has reached the maximum number of registrants. Additionally, you can specify that waiting list registrants pay for their spots if you plan to add more capacity for the event.
- Event RSS Feeds. Provide automatic updates to customers, drive quality traffic and reach a wider audience with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Keyword-Rich URLs. Keyword rich event page Web links take advantage of your WordPress Permalinks configuration settings. SEO-friendly web links that include topic-relevant keywords add to the context of your pages and improves your search rankings, helping you get more traffic to your events.
- Country-specific Settings. You can configure the country and currency settings to be used throughout Event Espresso, including currency, currency symbols, decimal signs, characters and places, country codes, states or provinces, and so on.
- Exportable Data. You can export all of your data collected from event participants into Excel or CSV format for compiling reports, devising new marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, and so on.
- WYSIWYG Editor. Event Espresso uses the default WordPress WYSIWYG editor, allowing you to quickly and easily insert images and write your content without knowledge of HTML or CSS, just like any standard WordPress post or page.
- 1-Click Updating. Event Espresso offers simple 1-click plugin installation upgrading to ensure that you have the latest features and to keep your installation compatible with the latest version of WordPress.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential participants who have not paid in full for their admission with a standard but personalized PDF invoice with one click of a button. Your invoices will address registered customers who have not paid their registration yet by name, give them the amount they owe, and include links to the event details, a payment link and a link where they can download the invoice.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post type features such as custom fields, post meta data, taxonomies, etc. You can also customize the templates to display event information in your own unique way.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows developers to have more control and options over your event page content and how your information displays to your site visitors.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 lets you output a log file with debugging data which can be useful for web developers when diagnosing problems.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value: According to the philosophy stated on their website, Event Espresso’s objective 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 software has been built using 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:
- Duplicating events – streamlines the need to re-enter event information when creating new events.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing the same questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow users to further enhance the capabilities of events.
Some of these add-ons 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 recurring events weeks or months ahead. You can create as many future events as you want. Event Espresso will automatically open and close bookings for all of these recurring events.
- Events Date Range Template Addon: The Date Range custom event list template allows your users to browse for events that occur within a certain date range.
- Events Social Sharing Add-on: This addon adds social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that lets your registrants to share a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after registration.
- Custom Template Add-on: The Custom Template add-on can display your event lists in a number of visually exciting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add-on Editions: This addon lets you include others in your organization to help manage your events and give new users the ability 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 assign them different permissions with different capabilities, allowing others to 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 allow users to have geographic responsibilities for events and users, use the Roles and Permissions Pro add-on.
- Event Ticketing And Bar Scanning Add-on: The Ticketing addon adds the capacity to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon adds the capacity to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing addon includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for handling check-in scans at venues. Attendees can either print out their tickets or display them on their mobile devices. The barcode scanner can be used for checking in or checking out registrants and to validate tickets.
- Events Calendar Add on: This add-on uses the WP calendar to display events and event categories in a nice graphical calendar.
- EE4 Infusionsoft Integration Add-on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft integration all-in-one sales and marketing software addon, you can completely automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture registrant data, track bookings, and accept payments from your web site.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin, including new add ons.
For more information about the newest Event Espreso features and add ons, visit the plugin website:
Users – Feedback
Here are some of the many great testimonials that users have posted about Event Espresso:
”Congratulations on an absolutely fantastic plugin. I’m really impressed with its functionality and add on features and will definitely upgrade my client’s production site to the premium version (when ready for launch) to incorporate all the features. As I have told another client “this plugin is the cat’s meow”.” Pete Mansel
”I have been using Event Espresso to run my festival and have been very happy with how it has worked out. They have provided tremendous support and their iPhone app is amazing and easy to use. I suggest using it for your event.” Alex Grant, Byron Spirit Festival
”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
Plugin Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, presenter, workshop promoter, or event consultant, there are simply countless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered owner, go through the support forum for inspiration and practical suggestions to streamline your event management workflow and improve the experience of your event customers.
Support
Event Espresso works with with other WordPress plugins and themes that follow standard WP development guidelines. If you do need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive user support, as many of its customers 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
The software provides great support with access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base 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 an established team of experienced WordPress web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can count on to organize and manage your events.
Plugin Cost
Event Espresso is available in different editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin options, however, you may want to consider downloading one of the premium plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This license option lets you 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 lets you set up Event Espresso on one domain only. It includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This allows you to configure Event Espresso on five sites. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one 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. Presently, the plugin sells for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Manager
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing when this article was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin developer when you visit the site.
Additional Plugin Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding 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 plugin’s documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to your particular situation, or to report problems and leave feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event registration and ticketing manager plugin, used by thousands of event promoters.
If you are a WordPress user and you plan to run events that involve managing dates and venues (offline and online), enrolling participants, and/or reserving tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticketing Registration Plugin For WordPress
***
