Do you currently run or plan to run events that require co-ordinating bookings or registrations, such as workshops, group courses, not-for-profit fund-raisers, networking conferences, or even a large-scale event such as a music festival, 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 will most likely be required to manage event schedules, date availability, registration numbers, data collection and admin, payments and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders and alerts, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to participants.
There are many advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower expenses, help you easily duplicate previous events, give you more control, improve user experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be expensive.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-based website or blog, you can easily set up an inexpensive and highly professional web-based event registration solution.
Presenting …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress software enables you to easily create your event and start accepting online registrations in just minutes.
(Set up multiple events and process online event bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich application that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize registration forms
You can use a range of event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up selling tickets, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your participants, or integrating your event bookings with social media and autoresponders.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso offers 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 it is being redeveloped using a different structure to enable future growth and expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually transition completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Benefits
Here are just some of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current digital presence into an automated and feature-rich event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to attendee limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system 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 enrol themselves.
Letting your clients to do all of the data entry frees you up from doing admin work and lets you invest more energy on planning a memorable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon discover, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and registration process that you want your customers to experience.
Additional benefits and advantages include the following:
- Less Costs: The Event Espresso plugin is an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own solution or using a 3rd party service. The cost is kept low through a model where you buy the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then purchase optional add-ons when you need added features.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept new bookings 24/7. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social features and add ons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event invite their friends who may be interested.
- Paperless Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, the event signup process can be conducted entirely online, eliminating typical paper waste from tasks associated with admin and record-storage.
- Own Your Data. You own all the data you collect from event participants.
Features
The Event Espresso software delivers functionality to its customers via built-in features (these are included with the software) and additional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many built-in to WP users. Here are just some of these:
- Fast and easy to install and configure. Be up and running in minutes.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In Event Espresso 4, events can have many dates and times (called datetimes), which these can be managed from a single event.
- Customized Notification Emails. Easily configure customized automated booking and payment confirmation email messages to communicate with your participants.
- Ticket Selector. Present multiple ticket options to prospects so they can choose the ticket(s) that will best fit their needs.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration allows you to configure the look and control settings of Google Maps on your event listing and event details sections.
- Spam Protection. Reduce the risk of spammers and robots creating fake registrations with reCAPTCHA settings to provide human validation.
- Promotional Codes. You can leverage promotional and multiple discount codes to encourage prospects to take action without delays, or simply make your offers more attractive for price-sensitive prospects. Also useful for helping to sell out events close to deadlines.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of booking event attendees at the door, or sending in paper registration forms for manual inputting later.
- Administrative Pre-approval. Control who can and can’t register for your events.
- Private Contact Commenting. Keep notes about users on their profile. Private notes lets you keep a record of when users contacted you, your internal observations, and how you have helped your customers.
- Draft Events. Draft events let you build your event page in your own time frame without publishing it to your site. You can continue editing your events until you are ready to publish it on your website, or schedule your event page to publish at a later time and date.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your profile to be deployed throughout the software and your WordPress themes. Your organization information include: organization name, address, city, state, country, zip code, primary contact email address, phone, tax number, logo, Facebook URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ profile URL, Instagram profile URL.
- Import Events. EE 4 provides a CSV-based importing feature that allows you to import bulk event data all at one time. You can export, edit and upload information about events, datetimes, tickets, pricing, registration questions, venue info, terminology, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- WYSIWYG Editor. Event Espresso uses the native WordPress Visual editor, so you can quickly and easily insert graphic images and create your content without having to learn HTML or CSS, just like any WordPress post.
- Registrant Profiles. You can manage each registrant’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their records organized.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential event customers who have not paid in full for their enrollment with a standard but personalized PDF invoice with one click. Your invoices will address registered participants who have not paid their registration yet by name, give them the amount owing, and include links to the event information, a payment url and a link where they can download the invoice.
- Accurate Event Attendee Management. You have control of your participants’ records; who has registered, 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 attendee list to Excel for additional reports, send custom payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your attendees individually or all at once.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows web-based software developers to have more control and options over the content of your events and how your information displays to readers.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registration capabilities for normal website visitors when you need to make changes on your site. You can still work on your event pages during maintenance mode.
- Autonomy, Flexibility And 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 goals, 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 provides you with 40+ added features, including:
- Live-filtering when you search for events in the Event Espresso admin.
- Default surcharge (the same as adding a service tax to all tickets).
- Default payment status.
Add-Ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow users to further expand the functionality of events.
Some of these add ons include:
- EE4 Events Grid Template Addon: 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, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Manager Addon: The Recurring Events manager add on lets you put events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months in advance. You can add as many future events as you need. Event Espresso will automatically open and close registrations for all of these recurring events.
- Events Category Accordion Template Addon: The Category Accordion template shows the categories in a simple list. Clicking on a category name shows all events related to that category and closes previously open categories.
- Social Coupons Integration Add on: If your site 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.
- Custom Template Add on: The Custom Template add-on is capable of displaying your event lists in a number of exciting and interesting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Addon Versions: This addon lets you include staff in the event management process and give new users permission to create events or regional managers permission to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WordPress users roles and allow them different permissions with different capabilities, so your staff can help you manage your events or events that other people create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain parts of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain areas 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 add on.
- Multiple Event Registration Add-on: The Multiple Event registration add-on gives your potential attendees 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 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 addon uses the WordPress calendar to display events and categories of events using a nice graphical calendar.
- JSON API Addon: The new Event Espresso JSON API add-on gives permission for other software applications, web sites, mobile apps, etc… to access your Event Espresso content through an API (Application Programming Interface).
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add-ons.
For more information about the latest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
User Feedback
Below are just some of the many great testimonials that users have posted about Event Espresso:
”My hope with this whole integration is to be able to show other school districts an affordable and easy solution to these registrations. I cannot believe how much money they are charged for less by other companies. This has the potential to save schools tens of thousands, which is huge right now.” Kelly, College Station Independent School District
”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
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, presenter, event planner, or event management professional, there are just endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered owner, spend a little time going through the user forum for useful ideas and practical ways to streamline your event management workflow and enhance the experience of your attendees.
Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with other 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 highly responsive support, as many of its plugin end-users confirm:
”Thank you Seth for being so responsive and going above and beyond the call of duty with your app! I highly recommend Event Espresso for its functionality and for the stellar support. Seth has a deep knowledge and understanding of WordPress and has built a tool that is seamless to use for both organizer and attendee alike! After looking at a bunch of alternatives, Event Espresso far surpasses the other apps that are available.” Wendy Troupe, ICS North Pole Express
Event Espresso provides amazing support that includes access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, one-on-one 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.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can depend on to run your events.
Plugin Price
Event Espresso is available in a range of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software options, however, you need to consider purchasing one of the premium plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This enables you to set up Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This enables you to set up Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This enables you to configure Event Espresso on five domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons 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 special offers. Currently, the plugin is selling for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Please 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.
Event Espresso – Additional Plugin Information
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the plugin’s online documentation pages 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 use-case, or to notify developers about errors and leave feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product website.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the leading WP event registration and ticketing management plugin, used and trusted by thousands of event promoters.
If you own a WordPress website and you plan to run events that involve managing dates, times and venues, enrolling participants, and/or reserving tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
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