Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that require managing bookings or registrations, such as seminars, community classes, non-profit fund raisers, networking conferences, or even a large-scale event such as an exhibition, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Managing event sign-ups is a time-consuming process. You will most likely need to co-ordinate calendar schedules, available dates and seating, participant numbers, data processing, collecting payments and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders and alerts, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and providing tickets to participants.
There are a number of advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce costs, help you easily reproduce previous events, give event managers more control, create a better user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that this can be very costly.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-powered web site, you can easily install a very inexpensive and highly professional online event registration system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WP software lets you easily set up multiple events and begin receiving online registrations in just minutes.
(Set up multiple events and accept online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize registration forms
You can use a number of event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up selling tickets, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with an autoresponder system for ongoing updates.
View detailed information about event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their software: EE 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is completely different than the older EE 3, as the plugin has been rebuilt using a different structure to accommodate future growth. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually retire Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
More info:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just some of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current website 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 seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by literally doing away with the chore of processing registrations manually.
Essentially, you are enabling attendees to perform the registration on their own.
Allowing your attendees to do the data themselves frees up your time and lets you invest more energy on creating a more enjoyable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover in a moment, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and registration process that you want your customers to experience.
Some additional benefits and advantages include:
- Reduced Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own system or using a 3rd-party service. This is made possible through a model where users buy the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and purchase add-ons when you need additional features.
- Higher Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online signups 24 hrs a day. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features and add ons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event invite friends who may also be interested.
- Paperless Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event signup process can remain wholly in digital form, significantly reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks associated with administration.
- All Data Belongs To You. You own all the information obtained from event participants.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to its users through built-in features (these are included with the plugin) and optional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers a number of features to WordPress users. Here are just a few of these:
- Fast and easy to install and set up. Ready to start accepting registrations in minutes.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso allows you to configure as many different types of tickets as you need and specify separate pricing options, limits on ticket quantities, and more.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Registrants can easily find your upcoming events and add these to their schedule with the WordPress calendar.
- Tax Administration Options. Event Espresso 4 gives you several ways to manage taxes for an event and report tax fee components to customers who purchase tickets. Event managers can administer taxes globally and on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your WordPress theme and reuse venue data throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Prices. Create events quickly by pre-configuring system-default ticket pricing.
- Mobile Registration & Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system allows you to authenticate tickets, speed up in-venue registrations, create multiple check-in “stations” and track all participants.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of event participants and check-in those who have attended.
- Admin Pre-approval. Control who can register for your events.
- Private Notes On Contacts. Record comments about a contact on their profile and how you have assisted your contacts. Private notes helps you keep records of when users contacted you, your internal observations, and how you’ve helped them.
- Keyword Rich Page URLs. Keyword rich URLs leverage your WP site’s Permalinks configuration settings. “Pretty” urls that include relevant keywords enhance the context of your pages and improves your search rankings, helping you get more visitors to your events.
- Multi-Language Plugin. Event Espresso has been translated into 15+ languages, with more languages coming soon.
- Upload Events. Event Espresso 4 provides an advanced importing feature that enables you to import a lot of event data all at one time. You can export, edit and import information about events, datetimes, ticketing information, prices, custom registration questions, venues, terminology, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Multiple Event Attendee. Event Espresso 4 allows one person or people to buy multiple tickets and different ticket types at the same time. Event managers specify how many people can enroll in one 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 a community of experienced event managers, software programmers, designers, digital marketers and businesses who also use the plugin. You can network with other members of the Event Espresso community using their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Team Member Manager. Save time and keep your information organized by reusing staff member profiles for multiple events or displaying profile information such as team member’s contact information, resume and photo using a shortcode in an event description.
- Accurate Attendee Management. You have control of your customers’ information; who has registered, for what event and what amount they’ve 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 an event attendee list to an Excel spreadsheet for additional uses, send customized payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your participants individually or all at once.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows developers to have more control and options over the content of your event pages and how the information displays to your site visitors.
- Metabox Management And Reorganization. Event Espresso leverages the WP user interface, which gives you the ability to reorganize the user interface to match your workflow processes. Each control box can be collapsed, re-arranged or completely removed from the page.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & 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 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 includes 40+ additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – eliminates the work of re-entering event information when adding new events.
- Default surcharge (similar to adding a service tax to all tickets).
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow plugin users to further expand the capabilities of managing your event.
Some of these addons include:
- 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 the event does not have a featured image available, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Template Addon: 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 displays the categories as a simple list. Clicking the category name shows all events related to that category and closes previously open categories.
- Events Social Sharing Addon: Add social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that allows your attendees to share a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after booking.
- Custom Template Addon: The Custom Template add on can display your event lists in a range of exciting and interesting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add on Editions: 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 allow them different permissions with different privileges, allowing others 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 parts of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain sections 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 Add on: The Multiple Event registration addon gives your potential attendees the ability to book 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 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.
- Events Table View Template Addon: The Events Table Template add-on gives event managers an easy-to-use system that allows you to modify the look and feel of your event lists. It comes with a simple table template with category filters, table search, table paging and more. It also enables developers to build custom templates using one of the included templates as a source template.
- EE4 Infusionsoft Integration Addon: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft integration all-in-one sales and marketing plugin addon, you can completely automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture customer data, track enrollments, and accept payments from your Event Espresso powered 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 latest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
User Testimonials
Here are some of the many testimonials that satisfied customers have posted about Event Espresso:
”It’s been very comprehensive and covers exactly the aspects of event registration that we needed for our site plus some features that we didn’t even need but could still use in the future. Very Excellent Plugin!” Tristan Hall, Area 12:2 Youth Group
”You can tell that the Event Espresso team is really passionate about their work, and that they care and spend a lot of time helping people work with their plugin and use it with their events – it’s something every WordPress service should aim for.” Ryan Imel, WPCandy
”Thank you, we just did 2 sell out seminars of 50 attendees in 48 hours using Event Espresso and it was awesome. My wife was able to pick up on the processing backend with ease. You have done a great job on getting this system together – very simple, clear and well laid out With powerful functionality. I am so glad I dumped the old booking application we had and gave Event Espresso a go. Just wanted to say thanks, and thanks for the very patient, friendly and speedy assistance in helping me to get it all set up at the start. Many thanks to you and your team. A grateful customer.” Nicholas de Castella, Emotional Intelligence Trainings
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, teacher, show planner, or event professional, there are just countless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a registered user, search the user forum for tips and practical ways to improve your event management process or improve the experience of your event participants.
Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with all WP plugins and WordPress themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great support, as so many of its clients attest:
“I’m really impressed with not only the application itself but the support. I have rarely seen such a responsive support staff than at EE. They rock…I highly recommend this plugin!” sock2me
Event Espresso provides great support that includes access to support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, one-on-one 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 web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can rely on to organize and manage your events.
Software Pricing
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you need to consider downloading one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This edition lets you install Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This license enables you to run Event Espresso on 1 site only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License – This enables you to install Event Espresso on 5 domains. 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 can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Presently, the plugin sells for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticket Registration System For WordPress
Note: The pricing above was current when this review was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin developer when you visit the website.
Additional Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software. 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 setup and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to your particular use-case, or to report problems and give feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event booking and ticketing management plugin, used by thousands of people.
If you own a WordPress website and you intend to run events that require managing dates, times and venues, registering participants, and/or selling tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Management
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