Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that need co-ordinating bookings, such as workshops, community courses, charity fundraisers, networking events, or even a big event like an exhibition, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event bookings is a time-consuming process. You have to manage calendar schedules, availability, registration numbers, data processing, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations, reminders and alerts, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to event registrants.
There are many benefits to setting up an online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower costs, help you easily reproduce similar events, give event managers more control, create a more enjoyable customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be very expensive.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-powered site, you can easily set up a very inexpensive and professional web-based event registration solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticket Registration System
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily schedule an event and start accepting online registrations in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and receive online bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can employ a range of event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up selling tickets, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your participants, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing updates.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Note: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is considerably different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the software is being redeveloped using a different structure to enable future growth and expansion. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually phase out Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and features of using this plugin.
For more details go here:
Benefits
Here are just some of the many benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Automated Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing online presence into a feature-rich and professional event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to attendee limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by virtually doing away with the chore of processing registrations manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for attendees to register by themselves.
Allowing your clients to do the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you concentrate more attention on delivering a memorable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will see shortly, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your participants to experience.
Additional benefits include:
- Significantly Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin is a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own software or using a 3rd party service provider. The cost is kept to a minimum by using a model where you purchase the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and buy optional 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 and marketing add-ons (see below) let people interested in registering for your event invite their friends who may also be interested.
- Green Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign-up process remains wholly in digital form, reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks associated with administration.
- All Data Belongs To You. You control all the information gathered from your event participants.
Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to users through standard features (these come with the plugin) and additional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many unique built-in to WP users. Here are just a few of these:
- Fast and simple to install and implement. Be up and running in minutes.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In Event Espresso 4, events can have many dates and times (datetimes), that these can be managed from one single event.
- Customizable Event & Registration Page Designs. You can customize your events and bookings page using Event Espresso’s unlimited template options and parts, as well as HTML and CSS.
- Tax Administration. Event Espresso 4 provides several ways to administer taxes for your event and report tax fee components to customers who purchase tickets. Event managers can administer taxes globally and on a per-ticket basis.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration enables you to customize the display settings of Google Maps on the event listing and event details sections.
- Spam Protection. Reduce the risk of spamming and bot software programs making fake registrations by using reCAPTCHA settings to provide human validation.
- Mobile Registration And Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system enables you to validate tickets, speed up in-venue registrations, create multiple check-in “stations” and track attendees.
- Manual Registration Option. you have the option of booking event attendees when they show up, or sending in paper-based forms for manual processing later.
- Waiting Lists. Prospective attendees can subscribe to a waiting list if your event is completely sold out. Additionally, you can specify that wait-list members pay for their spots if you plan to expand numbers for your event.
- Public Commenting. Add social engagement to your events by allowing potential attendees to interact with you online via commenting and past customers to post comments that can help others decide whether or not to sign up. Moderation settings for public commenting are set up using the WP commenting settings.
- Draft Events. Draft events enable you to develop your event page in your own timeframe without publishing it to your website. You can work on your event pages until you are ready to publish it live on your website, or schedule to publish your event at a later date and time.
- Your Organization Settings. Configure your organization’s profile to display throughout Event Espresso and your WordPress themes. Organization data include: business name, street address, city, state, country, zip code, email, phone, tax number, logo, Facebook URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ URL, Instagram URL.
- Import Event Information. Event Espresso 4 provides an advanced importing capability that allows you to upload a lot of event data at once. You can export, edit and upload data for events, datetimes, tickets, prices, custom registration questions, venues, terms, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- WordPress Visual Editor. Event Espresso uses the standard WordPress WYSIWYG editor, allowing you to quickly and easily insert images and format your event descriptions without knowing HTML or CSS, just like any standard WordPress post or page.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso lets you interact with an expert community of event managers and plugin users. You can network with other Event Espresso users through their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media pages on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Staff Manager. Save time and stay organized by reusing staff member 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.
- Accurate Attendee Management. You have control of your customers’ information; who has registered, which event they have registered for and how much they have 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 a list of event attendees to an Excel spreadsheet for additional uses, send customized payment reminders and receipts and send messages to your registrants individually or collectively.
Additional features include:
- Hooks, Actions & Filters. These allow web-based software developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso application that are compatible with WordPress.
- Control Box Management And Reorganization. Event Espresso lets you leverage the WP user interface, which brings the ability to reorder the user interface to match your workflow processes. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or deleted from the page.
- Autonomy, Flexibility 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 model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also comes with over 40 added features, including:
- Email shortcodes that includes registrant data in emails and email newsletters.
- Default surcharge (the same as adding a service tax to every ticket).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Addons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow customers to significantly expand the capabilities of managing an event.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add-on: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display your scheduled events by location. 4 maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Custom Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize events with multiple datetimes into a dropdown list.
- Events Date Range Template Addon: The Date Range custom event list template allows your users to search for events that occur within a certain date range.
- Social Coupons Integration Add-on: If your site is featured on 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 event lists in a range of visually exciting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add-on Versions: This add on lets you involve other users in the event management process and give new users the capacity 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 give them different permissions with different privileges, so others can help you manage your events or events that others create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain parts of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain parts 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.
- Multiple Event Registration Add on: The Multi-Event registration add-on gives your potential attendees the ability to register for 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 Multiple Event Registration add on, attendees can register for several events at once and even add additional attendees to any of the same events in the same checkout process.
- EE4 Events Calendar Add on: This WordPress events calendar displays events and event categories using a nice graphical calendar.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp add on lets you automatically register attendees to a specified mailing list or group within your MailChimp account.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin, including new addons.
For more details about the newest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
User Testimonials
Below are some of the many testimonials that satisfied users have written about Event Espresso:
”Event Espresso is one of the nicest Event Managers (WP Plugin) I have come across.” Joe Distefano, Citizen Joe
”I have been using Event Espresso to run my festival and have been very happy with how it has worked out. They have provided tremendous support and their iPhone app is amazing and easy to use. I suggest using it for your event.” Alex Grant, Byron Spirit Festival
”I played around with the free version for a couple hours then purchased the Pro for a client. Love it and so do they! Sweetest Event plugin I have tried.” Bill Chambers, Bill Chambers Design
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, teacher, event planner, or event management consultant, there are just endless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, spend a little time going through the forums for useful ideas and practical suggestions to streamline your event management and registration process or enhance the experience of your registrants.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with all WP plugins and WordPress themes that follow WP coding standards. If you find that you need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great 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 Event Espresso plugin provides exceptional support with access to support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, email 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 web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can depend on to manage your events.
Event Espresso Pricing
Event Espresso is available in a range of editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin options, however, you need to consider downloading one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This allows you to install Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This allows you to run Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This allows you to run Event Espresso on five sites. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The cost to purchase the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the software retails for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing: Event Espresso – Event Manager And Registration System For WordPress
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing when this review was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin developer when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the software’s online documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to a particular situation, or to notify developers about issues and share feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product information pages.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event booking and ticketing management plugin, used and trusted by thousands of people.
If you own a WordPress-powered site and you currently run events that involve managing dates, times and venues (offline and online), booking attendees, and/or booking tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable WordPress plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Management Plugin
***