Do you currently run or plan to run events that need co-ordinating bookings or registrations, such as workshops, community courses, charity fund raisers, social conferences, or even a large-scale event like a dance party, 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 will most likely need to co-ordinate scheduling, date availability, participant numbers, data entry, payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders and notifications, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to event attendees.
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 lower costs, help you easily replicate recurring events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be expensive.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-powered website, you can install an inexpensive and professional web-based event booking solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Registration System
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP lets you easily create multiple events and start accepting registrations literally in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and take online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich software that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can employ several event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up ticket-selling, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your event attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media sites like Facebook.
View detailed information about 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 fundamentally different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the platform has been rebuilt using a different structure to enable future expansion. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually transition completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
Learn more here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current website into an automated and feature-rich event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by virtually eliminating the need to process registrations manually.
Basically, you are enabling participants to perform the registration themselves.
Allowing your participants to do the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you focus more time on creating a memorable event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover shortly, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and booking process that you want your users to experience.
Some additional benefits include the following:
- Less Costs: Event Espresso is an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third-party service. This is made possible through a model where users buy the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then purchase add ons only if you need additional features.
- Higher Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online event sign-ups outside normal business hours. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social and marketing add ons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event invite others who may also be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, your event booking process is completed wholly in digital form, reducing typical paper consumption from tasks associated with enrollment.
- Own Your Data. You control all the information acquired from event attendees.
Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to end-users through built-in features (these are included with the plugin) and additional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many great features to WP users. Here are just some:
- Fast and simple to install and use. Be up and running in minutes.
- Customized Event Registration. With Event Espresso you can collect specific data using a custom event registration form on your site to plan a unique experience for your event participants.
- Custom Notification Email Message. Easily configure customized automatic registration and payment confirmation email messages to communicate with your customers.
- Tax Administration Options. Event Espresso 4 provides several options to manage taxes for your event and provide reports of tax fees to customers who purchase tickets. Event managers can administer taxes globally or on a per-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your WP theme and reuse contact details throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Prices. Set up events fast with pre-configured system-default ticket prices.
- Discount & Promotional Codes. You can leverage promotion and multiple discount codes to encourage visitors to register without delaying, or make your events more attractive for price-sensitive prospects. This is also practical for helping to sell out events close to deadlines.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. Event Espresso 4 provides you with the tools to understand who your customers are and how they’ve done business with you.
- Administrative Pre-approval. Control who can register for your events.
- Public Commenting. Add social a new level of social sharing to your event by encouraging potential attendees to interact with you online via commenting and past participants to post reviews that can help others consider whether or not to register. Moderation settings for comments are configured via the WordPress commenting settings.
- Draft Events. Draft events let you build your event at your own pace without displaying it live on your website. You can work on your event pages until you are ready to publish it live to your website, or schedule your event to publish at a future time and date.
- Easy Event Management. Event Espresso puts you in complete control of all aspects of an event’s registration and ticketing processes, and allows you to automate the process with event management tools that include staff and venue manager, custom event page designs, payment processing, list waiting, attendee limits, print-ready ticketing and more.
- Bulk Upload Event Information. Event Espresso 4 provides a CSV-based importing feature that enables you to upload bulk event data all at one time. You can export, edit and import data for events, datetimes, ticketing information, prices, custom registration questions, venue info, terminology, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Visual Editor. Event Espresso uses the native WP WYSIWYG editor, so you can quickly and easily add images and stylize your event descriptions without having to learn HTML or CSS, just like any typical WordPress post or page.
- Registrant Records. Manage your attendee’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their data organized and easily accessible.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential clients who have not paid yet for their booking with a standard but personalized PDF invoice with just one click. Your invoices will address registered attendees who have not paid their registration yet by name, display the balance they owe, and include links to the event, a payment link and a link to download a PDF invoice.
- Accurate Event Attendee Manager. You control your participants’ records; who has enrolled, for what event and what amount they have 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 a list of attendees to an Excel spreadsheet for additional uses, send customized payment reminders and receipts and send messages to your attendees on a person-by-person basis or as a group.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows you to have more control and options over your event pages and how your information displays to your readers.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 lets you generate a log file with debugging data that can be helpful for web developers when potential errors.
- Autonomy, Flexibility And Value For Money: 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 company operates on a modular that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also includes over 40 additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – eliminates the work of re-entering event information when creating new events.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse the same group of questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Add ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow you to significantly expand the capabilities of events.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Addon: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display scheduled events by location. Four maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Template Add-on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize multiple datetime events into a dropdown list.
- Events Calendar Table Template Addon: The Calendar Table template is a list template with a bold date and customizable “register now” button. The template can also be customized to show the event thumbnail image instead of the date.
- 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 lets you display your events in a number of exciting and interesting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add on Versions: This addon lets you include your staff in your organization to help manage your events and give new users permission to create events or regional managers the ability to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WordPress users roles and assign them different permissions with different capabilities, allowing others to help you manage your events or the events that other people create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain areas of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain parts of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to allow users to control factors geographically for events and users, use the Roles and Permissions Pro add-on.
- Multiple Event Registration Addon: The Multi-Event registration addon gives potential attendees 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 shopping cart. With the Multiple 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 Table Template Addon: The Events Table Template addon provides event managers with a simple and easy-to-use system that allows you to modify the design of your event lists. It comes with a simple table template with category filters, table search, table paging and more. It also enables web developers to design custom templates using one of the templates included as a source template.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp add on lets you auto-register participants to a particular mailing list or group within MailChimp.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add-ons.
For complete details about the newest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
Plugin Users – Feedback
Below are a few of the testimonials that satisfied plugin users have written about Event Espresso:
”Tri-South, Inc is using Event Espresso to manage the course catalog, event ticketing, and class registration. [As their developer] I have customized a few items to make the site and plugin a seamless integration. The client is very pleased!” Jenifer Design
”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
”Event Espresso is very nice and functional plugin. Set it up is not very easy for a beginner like me, but you have one of the best support team in your side. They answer all questions in a timely manor. I didn’t know anything about setting up the plugins, Thanks to Event Espresso Support team that now I can find my way around this plugin. Event Espresso helps our company to manage the workshops, keep track of our students, manage the emails, and much more. We upgrade from personal License to Business license in just two weeks of using Personal license. I strongly recommend the Business license.” Ted Karlsalr, Omnilargess
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, presenter, concert planner, or event professional, there are simply endless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered user, spend a little time visiting the forums for inspiration and practical ways to streamline your event management and registration workflow and improve the experience of your event registrants.
Event Espresso Support
Event Espresso works with with other WP plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress development guidelines. If you do need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive customer support, as so many of its users attest:
”No complaints here. Satisfied customer. You can teach us all few things about customer service. Thanks!” Charles
The software provides robust support with access to support forums, in-depth 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 WordPress developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can depend on to organize and manage your events.
Software Price
Event Espresso is available in a range of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software functionality, however, you need to consider using one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This lets you run Event Espresso on one domain only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This enables you to configure Event Espresso on one domain only. It includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This option allows you to install Event Espresso on 5 sites. 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 specials being offered. Presently, the software is being retailed for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticketing Registration Software For WordPress
Note: The pricing above was current at the time this article was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin author when you visit the website.
Additional Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the software’s documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to your particular use-case, or to notify developers about bugs and share feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product information pages.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event registration and ticketing manager plugin, used and trusted by thousands.
If you are a WordPress user and you currently run any event that requires managing dates and venues (offline and online), booking participants, or selling seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticket Registration System
***