Does your company currently run or plan to run events that require bookings or registrations, such as workshops, training classes, charity fund-raisers, marketing functions, or even a big event like a music show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event bookings can be a complex process. You will probably need to co-ordinate scheduling, availability, participant numbers, data collection and storage, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations, reminders and notifications, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to event attendees.
There are lots of advantages to setting up an online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce costs, help you easily replicate recurring events, give event managers more control, create a better customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that this can be quite costly.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-powered digital presence, you can set up a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event booking system.
Introducing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WP software allows you to easily create multiple events and begin accepting online registrations in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and receive online event registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed software that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can use multiple event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up ticket sales, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event participants, or integrating your event registration forms with an autoresponder system for ongoing updates.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Important: Currently, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is completely different than the older EE 3, as it is being revamped using a different structure to accommodate future growth and expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually migrate 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 Of Using Event Espresso
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
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing online presence into a fully-featured and automated event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even 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 eliminating the chore of processing registrations and bookings manually.
Basically, you are enabling participants to enrol on their own.
Letting your enrollees to do the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you invest more resources on delivering a memorable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn shortly, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and booking process that you want your attendees to experience.
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 building your own solution or using a 3rd-party service provider. The cost is kept low through a model where you purchase the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then purchase optional add ons when you need new functionality.
- Higher Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online event sign-ups 24 hrs a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing add-ons (see below) let people interested in registering for your event invite others who may be interested.
- Green Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event signup process is performed entirely online, eliminating traditional paper consumption from tasks related to enrollment.
- All Information Belongs To You. You control all the data acquired from event participants.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to its customers through built-in features (these come with the plugin) and optional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many features to WordPress users. Here are just some:
- Quick and easy to install and configure. Ready to start using in minutes.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In Event Espresso 4, events can have many dates and times (called datetimes), which these can be managed from one single event.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Attendees can easily find your events and add these to their schedule with a calendar.
- Tax Administration Options. Event Espresso 4 provides a number of options to manage taxes for an event and report tax fee components to registrants who purchase tickets. You can configure taxes globally or on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
- Smart Single Page Checkout. 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 added attendees.
- Default Prices. Create events quickly and easily by pre-configuring default pricing.
- Discount Codes. Offer promotional and discount codes to incentivize visitors to register now, or make your offerings more attractive for others. Also useful if you want to sell-out events close to deadlines.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of attendees and check-in everyone who attends.
- Waiting Lists. Latecomers can subscribe to a waiting list if your event is full. You can also specify that waiting list members pre-pay if you plan to expand capacity for the event.
- Public Commenting. Add “social proof” by encouraging potential customers to interact with you online via commenting and past participants to post reviews that can help others decide whether or not to register. Moderation settings for comments are configured via the WP commenting section.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events allow you to build your event page over multiple sessions without displaying it live on your site. You can keep editing your event until you are ready to go live, or schedule your event pages to publish at a future time and date.
- 15+ Languages. Event Espresso is being translated into 15+ languages, with more translations coming soon.
- Default Tickets. If you create identical tickets for your events, you can automatically set up as your default ticket for all new events simply by checking a box.
- Register Multiple Event Attendees. Event Espresso 4 allows an individual or a group to enroll multiple participants simultaneously. Event managers control how many people are allowed to register in one registration session by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso lets you engage with an expert community of experienced event managers and plugin users. You can network with other Event Espresso users through their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Staff Management. Save time and keep your data organized by reusing team member profiles for multiple events or displaying profile information such as staff member’s contact information, resume and photo using a shortcode in any event description.
- Event Reporting. Quick-view event reporting provides you with data of your registrations and transactions, enabling you to analyze the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and how much money you have collected.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows web developers to have more control and options over the content of your events and how the information displays to your prospective event participants.
- Metabox Management & Reorganization. Event Espresso leverages the WordPress user interface, which gives you the ability to reorder the user interface to match your workflow processes. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or removed from your page.
- Autonomy, Flexibility And Value For Money: According to the philosophy stated on their web site, Event Espresso’s aim 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 company operates on a model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also comes with 40+ added features, including:
- Email shortcodes for including customer data in notification emails and email newsletters.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse the same group of questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page in registration.
Addons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow you to significantly expand the functionality of managing your event.
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, a default image will be used.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Custom Template Addon: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes many datetime events into a dropdown list.
- Events Date Range Template Addon: The Date Range custom event list template lets your users to browse for events that take place in a certain date range.
- Social Coupons Integration Add-on: If your site uses 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 can display your event lists in a variety of visually exciting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add-on Versions: This add-on lets you involve other users 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 give them different permissions with different privileges, allowing staff to help you manage your events or events that other people create. You can customize roles so that users do 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 add-on.
- Multi-Event Registration Addon: The Multi-Event registration addon gives your potential customers the ability to register for 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 cart. With the Multi-Event Registration addon, 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 Calendar Addon: This WordPress events calendar displays events and categories of events via an attractive graphical calendar.
- JSON API Add-on: The Event Espresso JSON API add on gives permission for other applications, web sites, mobile applications, etc… to access your Event Espresso content through an Application Programming Interface (API).
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software, including new addons.
For full details about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website here:
Testimonials
Here are a few of the testimonials that users have posted about Event Espresso:
”Broadcasting my support for Event Espresso will be a pleasure. I recently helped the Webmaster at a sister church configure your event manager for their site, so I can say with confidence and from experience, that Event Espresso is the best Event Manager plugin ever!” Philip Simpson, The Charlotte Church
”…it really does blow everything else that’s out there out of the water.” Chris Reynolds, Arcane Palette Creative Design
”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
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, teacher, conference 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 licensed owner, search the support forum for inspiration and practical suggestions to improve your event management and registration process or enhance the experience of your event attendees.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso is compatible with all WP plugins and themes that follow standard WP coding guidelines. If you do need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent technical 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 great support with access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, custom development 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 a well-staffed 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 Price
Event Espresso is available in a number of editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin options, however, you should consider using one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This license lets you configure Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This allows you to run Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This edition lets you run Event Espresso on 5 sites. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 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 specials being offered. When we last checked, the software retails for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest price: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Management
Note: The pricing above was current when this review was written. This may not be the actual price 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 its plugin. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the software’s 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 your particular use-case, or to report errors and leave 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 and trusted by thousands of WordPress website owners.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you currently run events that involve managing dates, times and venues (offline and online), booking attendees, and reserving seating, then you will probably not find a better solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
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