Do you currently run or plan to run events that need co-ordinating registrations, such as workshops, community courses, charity fundraisers, marketing functions, or even a big event such as a regional festival, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Managing event bookings is a complex and time-consuming process. You will most likely have to co-ordinate scheduling, available dates and seating, participant numbers, data collection and admin, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to event attendees.
There are many advantages to setting up an online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce costs, help you easily reproduce previously-run events, give event managers more control, improve customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be costly.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-based site, you can install a very inexpensive and professional online event registration system.
Presenting …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WP software enables you to easily create multiple events and start accepting bookings literally in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and receive online bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich application that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Customize your event registration forms
You can employ multiple event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up selling tickets, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your event attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media and autoresponders.
View detailed information about event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is completely different than the older Event Espresso 3, as it is being revamped using a different structure to allow for future growth. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually migrate completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
For more details go 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 web site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing web site into a feature-rich and professional event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating capacity 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 virtually eliminating the need to process registrations and signups manually.
Essentially, you are enabling event participants to enrol by themselves.
Allowing your participants to do all of the data entry frees up your time and lets you concentrate more of your resources on planning a better event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will see in a moment, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and booking process that you want your customers to experience.
Some additional benefits include:
- Less Costs: Event Espresso provides you with a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own software or using a third-party service provider. The cost is kept to a minimum by using a model where you start with the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and buy add ons when you need additional functionality.
- Higher Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online event registrations any time of day or night. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social and marketing features (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event share your information with others who may also be interested.
- Green And Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, your event booking process remains wholly online, reducing typical paper consumption from tasks associated with enrollment.
- All Data Belongs To You. You control all the information you obtain from your event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
The Event Espresso software provides functionality to its customers through standard features (these come with the software) and additional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many features to WordPress users. Here are just a few:
- Fast and simple to install and set up. Ready to start accepting registrations in minutes.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In Event Espresso 4, events can have multiple dates and times (called datetimes), and these can be managed from a single event.
- Customizable Event Designs. Match your site’s look and feel for your events and enrollments page using Event Espresso’s unlimited template options and components, and HTML and CSS.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso provides integration with leading payment gateways, allowing you to collect money before running events.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your theme and reuse registrant information throughout other areas of your site.
- Spam Protection. Eliminate the chance of spammers and robots creating fake registrations on your website by using reCAPTCHA features that provide human validation.
- Mobile Registration & Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system enables you to validate tickets, speed up door registrations, create various check-in “stations” and track your attendees.
- Manual Registration Option. you have the option of booking event attendees at the door, or sending in paper-based registration forms for manual processing later.
- Ticketless Events. Promote events without making it necessary for registrants to book tickets. Event Espresso can be used for any form of event, not only those that require tickets.
- Public Commenting. Add social engagement to your events by encouraging potential registrants to ask questions about your event and past attendees to post comments that can help others decide whether or not to register. Moderation settings for comments are set up using the WordPress native commenting settings.
- Search Engine Friendly URLs. Keyword-rich event page Web links take advantage of your Permalinks configuration settings. Search engine friendly permalinks that use 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.
- 15+ Languages. Event Espresso is being translated into 15+ languages, with more languages planned.
- Default Tickets. If you create similar tickets for most of your events, you can easily set one of those tickets as your default ticket for the next time you create an event simply by checking a box.
- Event Venue Profiles. The venue manager in EE 4 lets information about a venue to be published throughout the Event Espresso admin and the public areas of your site to inform registrants of the location of your event. The venue record displays many standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also lets you reuse venue details such as venue capacity, venue website, venue phone number, venue location details, directions map, etc. You can also list venue profiles on specific parts in your theme and on a venue listing page on your website where you can set up and publish venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a specific venue.
- Event Espresso Community. Event Espresso lets you interact with an expert community of experienced event managers and other plugin users. You can interact with other Event Espresso users via their community chat room, support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential customers who have not paid in full for their enrollment with a standard but personalized invoice with just one click of a button. Your invoices will address pre-registered attendees who have not paid their registration in full by name, display the amount owing, and include links to the event, a payment url and a link to download the invoice.
- Accurate Participant Manager. You control your customers’ details; who has enrolled, for what event and how much they’ve paid. With the attendee manager, you can get a quick overview of registered attendees and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export a list of event attendees to a spreadsheet for additional uses, send customizable payment reminders and receipts and send messages to your clients individually or collectively.
Additional features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming. Event Espresso is simple enough for most WP users, and also extremely robust and customizable for enterprise-level users and web developers. The bottom line is that by using Object-oriented programming (OOP), EE 4 allows for more complex enhancements and customizations to the application.
- Control Box Management And Organization. Event Espresso leverages the WP user interface, which gives you the ability to reorder the user interface to match your workflow process. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or removed from the workflow configuration.
- Flexibility, Autonomy 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 as a result.
The premium version of Event Espresso also provides you with 40+ additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes for including customer data in notification emails and updates.
- Default surcharge (the same as adding a service tax to all tickets).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow users to significantly expand the capabilities 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 the event does not have a featured image, a default image will be used.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize events with many datetimes into a drop-down list.
- Events Category Accordion Template Addon: The Category Accordion template shows categories in a simple list. Clicking on a category name shows the events related to that category and closes any previously open categories.
- EE4 Events Social Sharing Add-on: This addon adds social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that lets your registrants to post a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after booking.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration addon allows you to take full advantage of the WordPress user system. With the WP User Integration addon you can give users a special incentive by offering member prices and overriding event pricing when members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered users of the site will have access to these special events. Members can also add personal information into their profile page allowing them fast registration for events by auto-filling in their personal information on the event registration form. Your users can also look up previous events and pay for future events.
- Seating Chart Addon: The seating chart add-on is great for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart add on allows you to offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues directly from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart add on lets you control the experience for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach single pricing to every seat.
- Event Ticketing Add-on: The Ticketing add-on adds the ability to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add on adds the capacity to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing addon includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode types are included for managing check-in scans at the venue door. 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 Add-on: This add-on uses the WordPress calendar to display events and categories of events using a nice graphical calendar.
- Infusionsoft Integration Add-on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft 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 event attendee data, track bookings, and accept payments from your web site.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin, including new addons.
For more information about the latest Event Espreso features and add-ons, visit the plugin website here:
Testimonials
Below are some of the many great testimonials that satisfied 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
”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
”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, presenter, conference planner, or event management professional, there are just endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a licensed user, search the forums for tips and practical suggestions to streamline your event management and registration workflow or enhance the experience of your event participants.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with other WP plugins and WordPress themes that follow standard WordPress coding guidelines. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great user support, as so many of its end-users attest:
”Thank you Seth for being so responsive and going above and beyond the call of duty with your app! I highly recommend Event Espresso for its functionality and for the stellar support. Seth has a deep knowledge and understanding of WordPress and has built a tool that is seamless to use for both organizer and attendee alike! After looking at a bunch of alternatives, Event Espresso far surpasses the other apps that are available.” Wendy Troupe, ICS North Pole Express
The plugin provides amazing 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 that gives 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 web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely software you can depend on to manage your events.
Software Cost
Event Espresso is available in different plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you need to consider purchasing one of the ”Pro” plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This option enables you to install Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This enables you to install Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This license lets you set up Event Espresso on 5 sites. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Current pricing for the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Presently, the software is selling for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Management And Registration System For WordPress
Please Note: The pricing above was current when this review was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin developer when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Info
Event Espresso regularly adds 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 setup and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to a specific situation, or to notify developers about problems and give feedback.
For detailed 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 and trusted by thousands of users.
If you own a WordPress website and you currently run any event that involves scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), booking participants, and booking tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso
***