Do you currently run or plan to run events that require registrations, such as seminars, group classes, charity fund raisers, corporate conferences, or even a big event such as a regional festival, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups is a complex and time-consuming process. You will most likely need to manage scheduling, available dates and spaces, participant numbers, data processing, payments and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders and alerts, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to event attendees.
There are many advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower expenses, help you easily copy settings for previous events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event booking system can be quite costly.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-powered website, you can download and install an inexpensive and professional online event registration solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – Event Manager & Registration Plugin For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP enables you to easily schedule your event and begin processing online bookings in just a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and receive online event registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
Customize your event registration forms
You can use a number of event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your participants, or integrating your event registration forms with an autoresponder system for ongoing notifications.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their software: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is completely different than the older EE 3, as it is being rebuilt using a different structure to accommodate future expansion. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually transition completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just some of the many 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 current web site into a fully-featured and automated event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to attendee limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by virtually doing away with the need to process registrations manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating participants to perform the registration themselves.
Allowing your enrollees to do the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you focus more of your time on planning a better event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon see, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your clients to experience.
Additional plugin benefits include:
- Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own system or using a third-party service provider. The cost is kept to a minimum by using a model where users pay for the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then buy add ons only if you need new features.
- Higher Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online sign-ups any time of day or night. In addition, Event Espresso social and marketing addons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event invite others who may be interested.
- Paperless Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, the event registration process can be performed entirely online, reducing typical paper consumption from tasks related to administration.
- Own Your Data. You own all the information you obtain from your event participants.
Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to end-users via standard features (these come with the plugin) and additional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many great features to site owners. Here are just some:
- Fast and easy to install and set up. Be up and running in very little time.
- Customized Event Registration Form. Event Espresso lets you collect unique information using custom event registration forms on your web pages to prepare a tailored experience for your attendees.
- Custom Notification Emails. Configure automated registration and payment notification emails to communicate with event attendees.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso provides integration with several payment gateways, enabling you to collect registration payments prior to running events.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your theme and display events information throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Prices. Set up events fast with pre-configured default pricing.
- Discount & Promotional Codes. Leverage promotional and multiple discount codes to incentivize visitors to register now, or make your offers more attractive for price-sensitive prospects. Also useful if you want to sell-out events close to timelines.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. EE 4 lets you know who your clients are and how they’ve done business with you.
- Event Manager Pre-approval. Control who can participate in your events.
- RSS Feeds. Keep your site readers up-to-date about your events, bring in more visitors and reach a wider audience with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Optimized For The Most Up-To-Date Version Of WP. The EE 4 user interface follows the WordPress guidelines to help you create beautiful event pages that are easier to use and mobile-friendly.
- Country Settings. Event managers can configure the country and currency settings that will be used to promote your events, such as currency name, currency symbols, decimal characters and places, country codes, regions, etc.
- Import Events. Event Espresso 4 provides a CSV-based importing capability that lets you import bulk event data all at one time. You can export, edit and upload data for events, datetimes, ticketing details, pricing, registration questions, venues, terms, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Multiple Participant Enrollments. EE 4 allows a single person or people to buy multiple tickets and different ticket types at once. You control how many attendees are able to register in a single booking session by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Attendee Records. You can manage each customer’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their data organized and easily within reach.
- Social Sharing. Event registrants and your website visitors can tell others about your event using social sharing buttons.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post types. You can also customize the page templates to display events in your own custom way.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows web-based software developers to have more control and options over the content of your events and how the information displays to prospective customers.
- Metabox Management & Organization. Event Espresso lets you leverage the WordPress user interface, which brings the ability to reorganize the user interface to match your workflow. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or completely removed from your page.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And Value For Money: According to the mission statement on their site, 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 company operates on a modular that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also provides you with 40+ additional features, including:
- Live-filtering when you search for events in the Event Espresso admin.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing a group of questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page during registration.
Add ons
In addition to a very large array of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow plugin users to further expand the functionality of events.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Addon: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display all upcoming events by location. There are 4 maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Template Addon: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes multiple datetime events into a dropdown list.
- Events Category Accordion Template Addon: The Category Accordion template shows categories in a simple list. Clicking a category name shows the events associated with that category and closes any previously open categories.
- EE4 Events Social Sharing Addon: This add on adds 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 booking.
- Custom Files Add-on: The Custom Files add-on provides PHP files that allow you to override certain aspects of the plugin.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add on Editions: This add-on lets you involve staff 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 privileges, allowing others to help you manage your events or events that others create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain parts 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 addon gives potential customers 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 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 event categories in an attractive graphical calendar.
- JSON API Add-on: The Event Espresso JSON API addon gives permission for other software applications, web sites, mobile apps, etc… to access your Event Espresso details through an API (Application Programming Interface).
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software, including new add ons.
For more information about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, visit the plugin website here:
Customer Feedback
Here are just some of the many great testimonials that customers have posted about Event Espresso:
”Event Espresso is one of the nicest Event Managers (WP Plugin) I have come across.” Joe Distefano, Citizen Joe
”This really is a hell of a plugin. For me, it’s probably the final nail in the coffin for Joomla, as WP can now pretty much do EVERYTHING Joomla does, but better. Love the simplicity of this plugin!” Sam, Web Contempo
”At first we looked at CVENT for one of our clients and they wanted $16,000 per year for 3000 event attendees + fees totaling $22k. That is before Staff and Webinar fees. Worst of all we had to prepay the $16k amount even if we never used all 3000 attendees. That was when we looked at Event Espresso and we realized we could build our own event system for less than 16K. For the most part we have been very satisfied with our decision. The real ROI will come next year when they don’t have to pay another 16k-22K! 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 (Long Version), KT Benefits & InkItDigital.com
Useful Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, presenter, festival planner, or event consultant, there are just unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, visit the user forum for useful ideas and practical ways to improve your event management workflow and improve the experience of your event customers.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with all WordPress plugins and themes that follow standard WP coding guidelines. If you do need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great support, as many of its plugin users attest:
”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 plugin provides incredible support with access to support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledge base 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 an established team of experienced web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely software you can count on to run and manage your events.
Event Espresso Cost
Event Espresso is available in a range of editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software functionality, however, you may want to consider purchasing one of the paid plugin editions below:
- Personal Edition – This license lets you configure Event Espresso on 1 site only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This enables you to install Event Espresso on one site only. It includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This allows you to set up Event Espresso on five domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Current pricing for the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. When we last checked, the plugin retails for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Please Note: The pricing above was current when this article was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin author when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Plugin Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its 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 documentation tools for answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to your particular use-case, or to report bugs and leave feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product web site.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WP event booking and ticketing management software, used by thousands.
If you own a WordPress site and you currently run an event that involves scheduling dates and venues, registering attendees, or selling tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Manager System
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