Does your company currently run or plan to run events that require co-ordinating bookings or registrations, such as workshops, training courses, non-profit fund-raisers, corporate events, or even a large-scale event like an art exhibition, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups is a complex and time-consuming process. You will most likely be required to co-ordinate scheduling, dates, participant numbers, data administration, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders and alerts, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and providing tickets to event attendees.
There are lots of advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower costs, help you easily replicate previously-run events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable client experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be very expensive.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-powered digital presence, you can install an inexpensive and highly professional online event registration system.
Introducing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily schedule multiple events and start receiving online bookings in just a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and take online registrations)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
Customize registration forms
You can employ multiple event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up ticket sales, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your participants, or integrating your event registration forms with social media and autoresponders.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Note: Currently, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their software: EE 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is completely different than the older Event Espresso 3, as it is being rebuilt using a different structure to allow for future expansion. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually transition completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
Learn more here:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current digital presence into a fully-featured and automated 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.
Increased Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by literally eliminating the chore of processing registrations and sign-ups manually.
Basically, you are enabling event attendees to enroll themselves.
Letting your participants to do the data themselves frees up your time and lets you direct more energy on creating a better event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn in a moment, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your users to experience.
Additional benefits and advantages include the following:
- Significantly Lower Costs: Event Espresso provides you with a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own software or using a third party service. The cost is kept to a minimum by using a model where Event Espresso users purchase the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then purchase add-ons when you need additional functionality.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept online sign-ups outside normal business hours. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing features (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event share your information with other people they know who may also be interested in attending.
- Green Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign-up process is transacted entirely online, significantly reducing traditional paper waste from tasks associated with admin and record-keeping.
- Own Your Information. You control all the information obtained from event attendees.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to users through built-in features (these are included with the software) and optional features that users can buy for an additional cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of features to WP users. Here are just some:
- Fast and easy to install and configure. Be up and running in very little time.
- Custom Event Registration Forms. With Event Espresso you can collect specific information using a custom event registration form on your site to plan a customized experience for your clients.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Attendees can easily find your upcoming events and add these to their schedule with a calendar.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso integrates with payment gateways, allowing you to collect booking fees prior to running events.
- Smart Single Page Checkout Process. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically duplicate the primary registrant’s details for any additional attendees.
- Default Prices. Create events quickly with pre-configured system-default ticket pricing.
- In-App Documentation Systems. Event Espresso 4 includes three detailed in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of registering event participants at the door, or send in paper forms for manual registration later.
- No-Ticket Events. List events without the requirement for registrants to get tickets. Event Espresso can be used for any type of event, not just when tickets are required.
- Event RSS Feeds. Keep your site readers updated about your events, drive quality traffic and reach a wider audience with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- SEO Friendly URLs. Keyword rich event page 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 pages and is favored by search engines, helping you get a more targeted audience to your website.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your organization’s profile to display throughout Event Espresso and your front-end templates. Your organization data include: business name, street address, city, state, country, zip code, email, phone number, VAT/tax number, business logo, Facebook profile URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ URL, Instagram URL.
- Exportable Information. You can export all of your data collected from event participants into Excel or CSV format for producing reports, planning marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, and so on.
- Register Multiple Event Participants. EE 4 allows an individual or people to purchase multiple tickets and different types of tickets at once. Event managers can control how many attendees can register in a single session by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Attendee Records. Manage each attendee’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their data organized.
- Social Sharing. Event attendees and your website visitors can tell others about your event using social media share buttons.
- Categorize Events. If you have several different event types like free and paid, conference speakers and mastermind sessions, different types of exercise classes, etc. you can categorize these to make it easier for your participants to locate what they’re searching for. You can list all the events in a category on a custom event category page, make events searchable by category, and color-code events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make them easier to find, in addition to suggesting new events in the categories that interest your existing customers.
Extra features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming. Event Espresso is simple enough for general WordPress users, and also robust and customizable for enterprise-level users and developers. The bottom line is that by using Object-oriented programming (OOP), EE 4 facilitates more complex enhancements and customizations to the software.
- Control Box Management & Reorganization. Event Espresso leverages the WordPress user interface, which gives you the ability to organize the user interface to match your workflow. Each control box can be collapsed, re-arranged or deleted from your workflow configuration.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & Value: 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 objectives, the company operates on a model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium version of Event Espresso also comes with over 40 additional features, including:
- Live-filtering when you search for events within the Event Espresso admin.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse a common set of questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Add-Ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow you to further enhance the capabilities 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. Four maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Manager Add-on: The Recurring Events management add-on enables you to put events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years ahead. You can add as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in the future as you want. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close bookings for all recurring events.
- Events Calendar Table Template Add on: 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 instead of a date.
- Social Coupons Integration Add-on: If your site uses Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can even specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- Custom Files Add-on: The Custom Files add on allows you to bypass certain aspects of the Event Espresso plugin.
- Seating Chart Addon: The seating chart add-on is suitable for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is ideal for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart addon lets you promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart addon lets you manage the environment for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to every seat.
- Event Ticketing & Bar Scanning Add-on: The Ticketing addon adds the ability to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon adds the capacity to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing add on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode types are included for handling check-in scans at venues. Attendees can either print out their tickets or display them on their mobile devices. The mobile app can be used for checking in or checking out registrants and to validate tickets.
- Events Calendar Addon: This addon uses the WP calendar to display events and event categories using an attractive graphical calendar.
- Infusionsoft Integration Add on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and business marketing plugin add-on, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture customer data, track registrations, and accept payments from your website.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software, including new addons.
For complete details about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
Testimonials
Here are some of the many testimonials that customers have posted about Event Espresso:
”I want to commend you on a fabulous product which is just the right price for a small non-profit. People are happy with the registration process, as are we! …Thank you SO much for a great product.” Sandra Forero Bush, World Trade Center Tacoma
”I searched long and hard to find something that would serve my needs. This is, by far, the most complete and comprehensive solution I have found.” Bill Hepper, We Teach Live
”Hello. I wanted to say that I’ve purchased Event Espresso twice now for two different organizations and have had great success with the purchases. Outside of photography, I also build small websites with WordPress as the CMS. I built two websites for two different martial arts organizations who host yearly seminars and tournaments. The plug in has provided a way for attendees to sign up online from both Canada and the United States with ease, and also allowed the organizations to easily manage payments, attendee lists, and many other aspects of the events. Thanks to Seth for creating such a great plug in, and for your constant support!” James Zedd, James Zedd Photography
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, presenter, workshop promoter, or event management consultant, there are simply endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed user, spend a little time visiting the user forum for new ideas and practical ways to improve your event management workflow and improve the experience of your event customers.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with most WordPress plugins and WP themes that follow standard WordPress coding rules. If you do need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive end-user support, as so many of its plugin users confirm:
”By far, the customer service experience with Event Espresso has been the best of any WordPress Theme or Paid Plugin that I’ve used in the past two years!” Megan Murray, Boys & Girls Club of Lake Tahoe
The plugin provides amazing support that includes access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, premium 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 a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can count on to organize and manage your events.
Event Espresso Cost
Event Espresso is available in a number of 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 License Edition – This edition lets you set up Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This option lets you run Event Espresso on 1 site only. It includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This option lets you install Event Espresso on 5 sites. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $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 current pricing details: 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.
Additional Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the software’s documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to your specific use-case, or to notify developers about errors and give feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event booking and ticketing management plugin, used by thousands of users.
If you are a WordPress user and you plan to run events that require managing dates, times and venues (offline and online), booking attendees, or selling tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable WordPress plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
***