Do you currently run or plan to run events that require co-ordinating bookings, such as workshops, group classes, not-for-profit fund raisers, networking events, or even a large-scale event like a school concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event registrations can be a complex and time-consuming process. You may be required to co-ordinate scheduling, dates, participant numbers, data processing and storage, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations, reminders and notifications, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to event participants.
There are many benefits to setting up an automated online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower expenses, help you easily duplicate previous events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be costly.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-powered digital presence, you can set up a very inexpensive and highly professional online event registration solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily create an event and begin accepting registrations in just a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and process online bookings)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Customize your event registration forms
You can employ a range of event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up ticket-selling, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your event participants, or integrating your event bookings with social media and autoresponders.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their software: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is impressively different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the plugin is being revamped using a different structure to allow for 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 the benefits and features of this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits 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 online presence into a fully-featured and automated event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically doing away with the chore of processing registrations manually.
Basically, you are enabling participants to perform the registration by themselves.
Letting your clients to do the data themselves frees you up from doing admin work and lets you focus more resources on delivering a more enjoyable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn in a moment, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management process that you want your customers to experience.
Additional plugin benefits include:
- Less Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own solution or using a 3rd party provider. The cost is kept to a minimum through a model where users start with the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then purchase optional add-ons only if you need additional features.
- More Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept online event registrations 24 hours a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing features and addons (see below) let people interested in registering for your event share your information with others who may be interested in attending.
- Green And Paperless Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, your event signup process remains wholly online, reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks related to administration.
- All Information Belongs To You. You control all the information obtained from event participants.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to its users via built-in features (these are included with the plugin) and additional features that users can buy for an added cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers a number of features to site owners. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and easy to install and use. Ready to use in minutes.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In EE 4, events can have many dates and times (datetimes), and these can be managed from a single event.
- Customizable Event Page Designs. Create a custom look for your events and bookings page using Event Espresso’s unlimited template options and components, plus HTML and/or CSS.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso seamlessly integrates with leading payment gateways, enabling you to collect registration payments before running events.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your theme and reuse events details throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Prices. Set up events quickly and easily with pre-configured default pricing.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 provides 3 built-in in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of registrants and confirm those who attend.
- No Ticket Events. You can create events without requiring participants to book tickets. Event Espresso can be used for any type of event, not just those that accept tickets.
- XML RSS Event Feeds. Provide automatic updates to customers, drive quality traffic and reach a wider audience with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Optimized For The Most Up-To-Date WordPress Version. The Event Espresso 4 user interface follows the WordPress guidelines to help you build beautiful event pages that are responsive and mobile-friendly.
- 15+ Languages. Event Espresso is being translated into 15+ languages, and more languages are being added all the time.
- Default Tickets. If you create similar tickets for your events, you can set up as your default ticket for the next time you create an event simply by checking a box.
- Venue Management. The venue manager in Event Espresso 4 allows information about a venue to appear throughout the Event Espresso admin and the public areas of your website to inform users of your event’s location. The venue record has many standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also lets you reuse venue information like venue seating capacity, venue site URL, telephone number, physical and/or virtual location, maps, etc. You can also display all of your venues on specific locations of your theme and on a venue listing page on your site where you can set up and reuse venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a specific venue.
- Automatic Updating. Event Espresso provides simple 1-click software upgrading to make sure that you have the newest features and to keep your installation working with the latest version of WordPress.
- Staff Management. Save time and keep your information organized by reusing team 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 Event Participant Manager. You control your participants’ details; who has enrolled, which event they have registered for and what amount 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 an attendee list to an Excel spreadsheet for additional reports, send custom payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your event registrants on a person-by-person basis or as a group.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows you to have more control and options over your event pages and how your information displays to visitors.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registrations for normal website visitors when you need to make changes on your website. You can continue to work on your content during maintenance mode.
- 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 mission, 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 includes over 40 added features, including:
- Live-filtering when searching for events within the Event Espresso admin.
- Default surcharge (the same as applying a service fee to each ticket).
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
In addition to an incredible array of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow software users to further enhance the capabilities of the event management process.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display all scheduled events by location. 4 maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Manager Add on: The Recurring Events management add on allows you to put events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years ahead. You can create as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in the future as you want. Event Espresso will automatically open and close bookings for all recurring events.
- Events Category Accordion Template Addon: The Category Accordion template shows event categories in a simple list. Clicking the category name shows the events related to that category and closes previously open categories.
- EE4 Events Social Sharing Addon: Add social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that allows your registrants to share a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after booking.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration addon lets you take advantage of the WP user system. With the WP User Integration addon you can give your users a special incentive by offering member pricing and overriding event pricing when members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered site users will have access to your special events. Members can also input personal data into their profile page allowing them to quickly register for events by auto-filling in their personal information on the event registration form. Your users can also look up event history and pay for events.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Addon Editions: This add-on lets you include staff 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, allowing staff to help you manage your events or events that others create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain sections of your WP dashboard and/or certain areas 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.
- Multiple Event Registration Addon: The Multi-Event registration addon gives potential customers the ability to book multiple events at once. In each event listing registrants 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 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.
- Events Calendar Addon: This WordPress events calendar displays events and categories of events using an attractive graphical calendar.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp addon lets you auto-register attendees to a chosen mailing list or group within MailChimp.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin, including new addons.
For full 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:
”Tri-South, Inc is using Event Espresso to manage the course catalog, event ticketing, and class registration. [As their developer] I have customized a few items to make the site and plugin a seamless integration. The client is very pleased!” Jenifer Design
”This really is a hell of a plugin. For me, it’s probably the final nail in the coffin for Joomla, as WP can now pretty much do EVERYTHING Joomla does, but better. Love the simplicity of this plugin!” Sam, Web Contempo
”Loving the functions and support from Event Espresso. One of the best plugins I’ve ever bought!” Nathan
Useful Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, presenter, seminar planner, or event management consultant, there are simply unlimited possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered owner, go through the forums for inspiration and practical suggestions to improve your event management process or improve the experience of your customers.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso is compatible with most WP plugins and WP themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive support, as many of its end-users attest:
”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 Event Espresso plugin provides great support including access to support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, premium 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 a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can count on to manage your events.
Plugin Pricing
Event Espresso is available in a number of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin features, however, you may want to consider using one of the paid plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This allows you to configure Event Espresso on one domain only. It includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This enables you to configure Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License – This allows you to run Event Espresso on 5 domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Price details for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. When we last checked, the software sells for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Management
Please Note: The pricing above was current at the time this article was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin developer when you visit the website.
Additional Info
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the software’s documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to your particular situation, or to report errors and give feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WP event registration and ticketing manager plugin, used and trusted by thousands of users.
If you own a WordPress-powered web site and you intend to run any event that involves managing dates and venues (offline and online), enrolling participants, and/or booking tickets, then you will probably not find a better solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management
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