Do you currently run or plan to run events that require bookings or registrations, such as seminars, community courses, non-profit fund raisers, marketing functions, or even a large-scale event such as a music show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Managing event registrations is a time-consuming process. You will probably need to co-ordinate calendar schedules, availability, attendee numbers, data entry, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to attendees.
There are many benefits to setting up an online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower expenses, help you easily replicate previously-run events, give you more control, improve user experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be costly.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-based site, you can install an inexpensive and professional web-based event registration system.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin lets you easily schedule multiple events and start receiving bookings literally in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and process online bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can use various event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up selling tickets, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media sites like Facebook.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Note: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is fundamentally different than the older EE 3, as the platform has been revamped using a different structure to accommodate 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 some of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
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 attendee limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by virtually doing away with the chore of processing registrations manually.
Basically, you are enabling attendees to complete the sign-up process on their own.
Allowing your customers to do the data themselves frees up your time and lets you invest more of your attention on organizing a better event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover shortly, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management process that you want your participants to experience.
Some additional benefits of the plugin include:
- Less Costs: The Event Espresso plugin provides you with a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third party service provider. This is made possible by using a model where you buy the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and buy add ons when you need extra functionality.
- Higher Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online sign-ups 24/7. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features and add-ons (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event invite others who may also be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign up process can remain entirely in digital form, significantly reducing typical paper waste from tasks related to enrollment.
- Own Your Information. You control all the data you obtain from your event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to its customers via built-in features (these are included with the software) and additional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many great features to WP users. Here are just a few:
- Fast and simple to install and configure. Be up and running in very little time.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In EE 4, events can have multiple dates and times (called datetimes), which these can be managed from one single event.
- Customizable Event Designs. You can customize your events and bookings page using Event Espresso’s limitless template options and components, and HTML and CSS.
- Tax Administration Options. Event Espresso 4 provides several ways to handle taxes for an event and provide reports of tax fee components to registrants when purchasing tickets. You can administer taxes globally and on a per-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your theme and display contact details throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow you to 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 multiple check-in “stations” and track attendees.
- Manual Registration Option. you have the option of registering event participants when they show up, or sending in paper forms for manual processing later.
- Waiting Lists. Latecomers can join a waiting list if your event has become completely sold out. You can also specify that wait-list registrants pre-pay if you plan to expand capacity for your event.
- Private Notes On Contacts. Keep notes about event attendees on their profile. Private notes enables you to keep records of when users contacted you, your internal observations, and how you’ve helped your customers.
- Keyword-Rich URLs. Keyword-rich Web links take advantage of your WordPress site’s Permalinks configuration settings. SEO-friendly web links that include relevant keywords add to the context of your events and is favored by search engines, helping you drive a more targeted audience to your events.
- Your Organization Settings. Configure your profile to be used throughout the plugin and your front-end templates. Organization fields include: business name, street address, city, state, country, zip/postal code, primary contact email address, telephone, VAT/tax number, logo, Facebook URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest profile URL, Google+ profile URL, Instagram profile URL.
- Default Tickets. If you find yourself creating similar tickets for your events, you can easily set up as your default ticket for the next time you create an event simply by checking a box.
- Event Venue Manager. The venue manager in EE 4 allows information about a venue to appear throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front end of your website to inform attendees of your event’s location. The venue record displays many of the standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also displays information such as venue capacity, venue site URL, telephone number, physical, map, etc. You can also display venues on various parts of your theme and on a venue listing page on your website where you can set up and publish venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have booked for a specific venue.
- Registrant Profiles. You can manage each customer’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their records organized.
- Social Sharing. Event participants and your website visitors can help publicize your events using social media sharing buttons.
- Event Reporting. Event reports gives you data of all registrations and transactions, enabling you to analyze the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and amount of revenue has been collected.
Extra features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for most WP users, and also robust and customizable for higher end users and developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, Event Espresso 4 allows for more complex developments and customizations to the plugin.
- Metabox Management & Organization. Event Espresso leverages the WP user interface, which gives you the ability to reconfigure the user interface to suit your workflow process. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or deleted from your workflow configuration.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value For Money: According to the mission statement on their site, Event Espresso’s goal 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 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 edition of Event Espresso also comes with 40+ added features, including:
- Live-filtering when searching for events in the Event Espresso admin.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse a series of questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page during the registration process.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow users to further expand 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 the event does not have a featured image, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Template Addon: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize the events with many datetimes into a dropdown list.
- Events Date Range Template Addon: The Date Range custom event list template enables your users to browse for events that take place in a certain date range.
- Social Media Buttons Add on: The social media addon displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media add on is included free with all of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- Custom Template Add-on: The Custom Template add on is capable of displaying your events in a range of exciting and interesting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add-on Editions: This add on lets you include other users in your organization to help manage your events and give new users the capacity 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 others can help you manage your events or the events that others create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain sections of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain sections 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 addon.
- Multi-Event Registration Add on: The Multi-Event registration add-on gives your potential attendees the ability to register for 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 cart. With the Multiple 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.
- EE4 Events Table Template Addon: The Events Table Template add-on provides you with an easy-to-use system that allows you to change the design 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 custom templates using one of the templates included as a base template.
- JSON API Addon: The Event Espresso JSON API add-on gives permission for other software applications, web tools, mobile applications, etc… to access your Event Espresso data through an Application Programming Interface (API).
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin, including new add ons.
For more details about the latest Event Espreso features and add-ons, visit the plugin website here:
Customer Feedback
Here are some of the many testimonials that users 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 recently downloaded it to add to a nonprofit site for a Boy Scout troop and the features work wonderfully with what we wanted to accomplish for the site. It allows us to set up calendar, events, and even take payments for trips. At first, I thought that it would be overkill for such a small site, but now I see the possibilities and will definitely be offering Event Espresso to my clients that need an event organization system for their web sites.” Lucy Conn, Troop 462
”I played around with the free version for a couple hours then purchased the Pro for a client. Love it and so do they! Sweetest Event plugin I have tried.” Bill Chambers, Bill Chambers Design
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 achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, go through the user forum for tips and practical ways to improve your event management process or enhance the experience of your customers.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso works with with all WP plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress development rules. If you do need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great support, as so many of its plugin clients confirm:
”Your plugin saved our client nearly $9000 in development costs because it handled the majority of the functionality we were looking for at a much lower cost. EventEspresso’s staff have been very responsive to our needs when we have them (which has been rare, because the plugin is so well coded). Great job on a great plugin!” Brandon P., Experience Farm
The Event Espresso plugin provides great support including access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, email 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 software you can depend on to manage your events.
Product Cost
Event Espresso is available in a range of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin features, however, you should consider using one of the ”Pro” plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This option enables you to configure Event Espresso on one site only. It includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This license option allows you to set up Event Espresso on 1 site only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This license lets you configure Event Espresso on 5 domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Current pricing for the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, the software sells for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Manager
Please Note: The pricing above was current at the time this review was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin developer when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Plugin Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the plugin’s documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to a particular situation, or to notify developers about bugs and leave feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product site.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event booking and ticketing manager plugin, used by thousands of WordPress users.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you currently run an event that requires managing dates and venues, enrolling attendees, and reserving tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Manager
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