Do you currently run or plan to run events that need handling bookings, such as seminars, community courses, not-for-profit fundraisers, social conferences, or even a large-scale event like an art exhibition, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Managing event registrations can be a time-consuming process. You may be required to manage scheduling, availability, attendee numbers, data processing and storage, payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders and alerts, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to participants.
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 duplicate previously-run events, give event managers more control, improve customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event registration system can be very costly.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-based website or blog, you can install an inexpensive and highly professional web-based event booking solution.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Management Plugin
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily create your event and start processing registrations literally in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and take online event bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich software that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can employ various event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up selling tickets, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media sites like Facebook.
View detailed information about event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is considerably different than the older EE 3, as it has been revamped using a different structure to allow for future growth. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually phase out EE 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
For more details go here:
Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Automated Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website or blog into an automated and fully featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to attendee limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by virtually eliminating the chore of processing registrations and signups manually.
Basically, you are facilitating participants to perform the registration by themselves.
Allowing your clients to do all of the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you invest more of your attention on creating a better event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon see, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and registration process that you want your customers to experience.
Additional benefits of the plugin include the following:
- Significantly Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to developing your own system or using a third-party provider. This is made possible by using a model where Event Espresso users purchase the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then buy add-ons only when you need added features.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept new registrations 24 hours a day. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features and add-ons (see below) let people interested in registering for your event invite friends who may be interested in attending.
- Green And Paperless Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event signup process is conducted entirely online, significantly reducing typical paper consumption from tasks related to enrollment.
- Own Your Data. You control all the information acquired from event attendees.
Plugin Features
The Event Espresso plugin provides functionality to end-users through built-in features (these are included with the software) and additional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many great features to web site owners. Here are just a few of these:
- Fast and easy to install and set up. Be up and running in minutes.
- Customized Event Registration Form. With Event Espresso you can collect unique data using a custom event registration form on your site to plan a tailored experience for your clients.
- Customizable Event Page Designs. You can customize your events and bookings page using Event Espresso’s limitless template options and components, as well as HTML and CSS.
- Ticket Selector. Present a number of ticket options to prospective attendees so they can purchase the ticket(s) that will best fit their needs.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration enables event managers to configure the display of Google Maps on the event listing and event details sections.
- Spam Protection. Prevent the risk of spamming and bot software programs creating bogus registrations on your site with reCAPTCHA tools to provide human authentication.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system allows you to validate tickets, speed up door registrations, set up multiple check-in “stations” and track all attendees.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. EE 4 provides you with the tools to gain a better understanding of who your customers are and how you have done past business with your clients. Your Contact Profile section stores updated records such as the name, biography, contact information, event registration data, private comments, etc. about each customer.
- Ticketless Events. List events without the requirement for attendees to book tickets. Event Espresso can be used for all kinds of events, not just those that need tickets.
- RSS Feeds. Keep your website readers updated about your events, drive quality traffic and reach a wider audience with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Optimized For The Latest Version Of WordPress. The EE 4 user interface follows all WordPress guidelines to help you create visually enhanced event pages that are easier to use and mobile-friendly.
- Easy Event Management. Event Espresso puts event managers in full control of all aspects of an event’s registration and ticketing processes, and lets you automate the process with event management tools that include staff and venue management, customizable event page designs, payment processing and handling, wait lists, attendee limits, printable ticketing and more.
- Bulk Upload Events. Event Espresso 4 provides an advanced importing capability that enables you to upload a lot of event data at once. You can export, edit and import data for events, datetimes, tickets, prices, custom registration questions, venue info, terms, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Event Venue Manager. The venue management feature in EE 4 allows details about venues to appear throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front end of your site to inform users of your event’s location. The venue profile has many standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also lets you republish venue information like venue seating capacity, venue web address, venue phone number, physical, directions map, etc. You can also display venues in specific areas in your WP theme and on a venue listing page on your website where you can set up and reuse venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a given venue.
- Event Espresso Community. Event Espresso lets you network with an expert community of event managers and plugin users. You can engage with other members of the Event Espresso community using their community chat room, support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Social Sharing. Event participants and website visitors can spread the word about your event using social share buttons.
- Accurate Attendee Manager. You control your attendees’ date; who has enrolled, for what event and what amount they have paid. With the attendee manager, you can get an overview of registered participants and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export a list of attendees to an Excel spreadsheet for additional reports, send customized payment reminders and receipts and send messages to your registrants individually or all at once.
Extra features include:
- Hooks, Actions And Filters. These allow developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso plugin that are compatible with the WordPress software platform.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 allows you to generate a log file with debugging data which can be helpful for developers when troubleshooting.
- Autonomy, Flexibility And Value For Money: According to the mission statement on their website, Event Espresso’s aim 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 as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also provides you with 40+ added features, including:
- Live-filtering when searching for events within the Event Espresso admin.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing the same group of questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page during registration.
Add ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow users to further enhance the functionality of your event management system.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Grid Template Addon: Displays events in a pure CSS grid-like structure using the featured image. Hovering over the image will display further information. If an event does not have a featured image, a default image will be used.
- Recurring Events Management Add-on: The Recurring Events management add on lets you put your events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months ahead. You can schedule as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in the future as you like. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close bookings for all recurring events.
- Events Date Range Template Add on: The Date Range custom event list template allows your users to browse for events that take place in a certain date range.
- Social Coupons Integration Add-on: If your website uses 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 Addon: The Custom Template add-on is capable of displaying your events in a range of visually exciting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Addon Editions: This add on lets you include others in the event management process and give new users the ability 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 allow them different permissions with different privileges, so your staff can 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 WP dashboard and/or certain areas of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to allow users to have geographic responsibilities for events and users, use the Roles and Permissions Pro add-on.
- EE4 Event Ticketing Add on: The Ticketing addon adds the capacity to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add on adds the ability 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. Customers 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 attendees and to validate tickets.
- EE4 Events Calendar Add on: This add on uses the WordPress calendar to display events and event categories via a nice graphical calendar.
- MailChimp Integration Add on: The MailChimp add on lets you auto-register attendees to a chosen mailing autoresponder list or group within MailChimp.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add-ons.
For complete details about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
Users – Testimonials
Here are a few of the many testimonials that customers have written 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
”Over the next 5-6 years we should be able to claim that we saved the company over $100,000 – Thanks Event Espresso!” David Waterman, KT Benefits & InkItDigital.com
”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, concert promoter, or event management professional, there are just countless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a licensed user, visit the support forum for useful ideas and practical suggestions to streamline your event management process and improve the experience of your event customers.
Event Espresso Support
Event Espresso works with with most WP plugins and themes that follow standard WP coding guidelines. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive support, as many of its satisfied plugin clients attest:
”Your plugin saved our client nearly $9000 in development costs because it handled the majority of the functionality we were looking for at a much lower cost. EventEspresso’s staff have been very responsive to our needs when we have them (which has been rare, because the plugin is so well coded). Great job on a great plugin!” Brandon P., Experience Farm
The Event Espresso software provides robust support including access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, priority 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.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts an established team of experienced WordPress developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely software you can rely on to manage your events.
Product Licensing Pricing
Event Espresso is available in a number of editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software functionality, however, you will want to consider purchasing one of the paid plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This enables you to set up Event Espresso on one domain only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This license option enables you to set up Event Espresso on 1 site only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This license lets you configure Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The price of the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. When we last checked, the plugin retails for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest price: Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticket Registration System For WordPress
Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this article was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin seller when you visit the site.
Additional Information
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the software’s documentation tools for answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to a specific situation, or to report issues and share feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event booking and ticketing manager software, used and trusted by thousands of WP site owners.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you currently run an event that requires managing dates and venues (offline and online), enrolling participants, or selling tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable WordPress plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management
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