Do you currently run or plan to run events that require co-ordinating registrations, such as workshops, group classes, non-profit fund-raisers, marketing events, or even a big event like a trade exhibit, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Managing event sign-ups can be a complicated and time-consuming process. You will most likely need to manage event schedules, available dates and seating, participant numbers, data collection and storage, collecting payments and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to participants.
There are many benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower expenses, help you easily duplicate previous events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be quite expensive.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-based website or blog, you can set up an inexpensive and highly professional web-based event booking system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Manager
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily create multiple events and start processing online registrations in just a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and take online event registrations)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize registration forms
You can employ several event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up selling tickets, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your participants, or integrating your event registration forms with social media sites like Facebook.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Important: Currently, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is impressively different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the platform is being revamped using a different structure to enable future expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually migrate completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
More info:
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 current web site into a feature-rich and professional event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple pricing options 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 practically eliminating the need to process registrations and sign-ups manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating attendees to perform the enrollment process on their own.
Letting your customers to do the data entry frees you up from doing admin work and lets you spend more of your energy on organizing a more unique event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will see in a moment, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management process that you want your users to experience.
Additional benefits of the plugin include the following:
- Lower Costs: Event Espresso gives you an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own software or using a third party provider. This is made possible by using a model where Event Espresso users buy the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and buy optional add ons only when you need extra functionality.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new event registrations any time of day or night. In addition, Event Espresso social and marketing features and addons (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event share your information with other people they know who may also be interested in attending.
- Green Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign up process can remain entirely online, reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks related to admin and record-keeping.
- Own Your Information. You control all the information you acquire from event participants.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to end-users through built-in features (these come with the software) and additional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many great features to site owners. Here are just some:
- Fast and easy to install and use. Be up and running in minutes.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In EE 4, events can have many dates and times (called datetimes), that these can be managed from one single event.
- Customizable Event Designs. Customize your events and bookings page using Event Espresso’s limitless template options and parts, as well as HTML and/or CSS.
- Tax Administration Options. Event Espresso 4 provides several options to handle taxes for your event and report tax fee components to customers who purchase tickets. You can configure taxes globally and on a per-ticket basis.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration enables event managers to configure the display settings of Google Maps on your event listing and event details pages.
- Default Prices. Create events quickly by pre-configuring system-default ticket pricing.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system enables you to validate tickets, speed up in-venue registrations, set up various check-in “stations” and track your participants.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of event attendees and check-in those who have attended.
- Waiting Lists. Prospective participants can join a waiting list if your event has reached capacity. Additionally, you can specify that wait-list registrants pay for their spots if you plan to add more capacity for the event.
- Private Contact Commenting. Record notes about contacts on their profile. Private commenting lets you keep records of when users contacted you, your internal comments, and how you’ve interacted with them.
- Draft Events. Draft events let you build your event over multiple sessions without displaying it live on your site. You can work on your event pages until you are ready to publish it live to your website, or schedule to publish your event at a later time and date.
- Country-specific Settings. You can configure the country and currency settings that will be used throughout Event Espresso, including currency, currency symbols, decimal signs, characters and places, country codes, regions, and so on.
- Default Tickets. If you find yourself creating identical tickets for many of your events, you can set up as your default ticket for any new events simply by ticking a checkbox.
- WP Visual Editor. Event Espresso uses the native WordPress Visual editor, allowing you to quickly and easily insert graphic images and write and edit your content without having to know HTML or CSS, just like any WordPress post or page.
- Event Espresso Community. Event Espresso provides users with access to an expert community of event managers and other plugin users. You can network with other Event Espresso users via their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media pages on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Staff Member Manager. Save time and keep your business organized by reusing staff profiles for multiple events or displaying profile information such as staff member’s contact information, resume and photo using a shortcode in an event description.
- Transaction Reporting. Quick-view event reports provides you with information of your registrations and transactions, enabling you to analyze the performance of your events with the aggregate number of people who have registered and how much money you have collected.
Extra features include:
- Hooks, Actions And Filters. These allow web developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso software that are compatible with WordPress.
- Control Box Management And Organization. Event Espresso lets you leverage the WP user interface, which brings the ability to reconfigure the user interface to suit your workflow processes. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or deleted from the page.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value: 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 and highly efficient model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also provides you with over 40 additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – eliminates the need to re-enter event details when adding new events.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse a group of questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page in registration.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As well as an amazing range of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow users to significantly enhance the functionality of the event management system.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display scheduled events by location. There are 4 maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Custom Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize many datetime events into a drop-down list.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add on: The Category Accordion template shows the categories in a simple list. Clicking on a category name shows the events associated with that category and closes 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 share a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after booking.
- 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 addon lets you involve other staff in your organization to help manage your events 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 capabilities, 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 areas of your WordPress 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.
- EE4 Event Ticketing Add on: The Ticketing add-on gives you the capacity to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add on gives you the ability to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing add on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for managing check-in scans at the door. Registrants can either print out their tickets or display them on their mobile devices. The barcode scanner can be used for checking in or checking out registrants and to validate tickets.
- EE4 Events Calendar Add-on: This WordPress events calendar displays events and event categories via a nice graphical calendar.
- Infusionsoft Integration Add-on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and business marketing software add on, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture event attendee data, track registrations, and accept payments from your website.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add ons.
To learn more about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
Customers – Feedback
Here are just some of the many great testimonials that satisfied 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
”Event Espresso event management plugin for WordPress is really an awesome plugin.” Cheryl Smithem, Charleston PR & Design
”Loving the functions and support from Event Espresso. One of the best plugins I’ve ever bought!” Nathan
Useful Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, presenter, show planner, or event professional, there are simply endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a registered owner, go through the user forum for new ideas and practical ways to streamline your event management and registration workflow and enhance the experience of your registrants.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with all WP plugins and WP themes that follow standard WP coding guidelines. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great customer support, as so many of its plugin clients attest:
”No complaints here. Satisfied customer. You can teach us all few things about customer service. Thanks!” Charles
Event Espresso provides exceptional support including access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, custom development 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 WordPress developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can depend on to run your events.
Event Espresso Cost
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software features, however, you should consider downloading one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This allows you to configure Event Espresso on 1 site only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License – This lets you set up Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Edition – This option allows you to set up Event Espresso on 5 domains. It 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 special offers. Presently, the plugin is selling for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Please Note: The pricing above was current when this review was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin author when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Information
Event Espresso regularly adds 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.
Use the plugin’s online documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to a specific situation, or to report problems and leave feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event booking and ticketing management software, used by thousands of people.
If you own a WordPress-powered web site and you plan to run any event that requires scheduling dates, times and venues (offline and online), enrolling attendees, and booking seating, then you will probably not find a better solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Registration Plugin
***