Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that need to accept bookings or registrations, such as workshops, group courses, not-for-profit fund-raisers, networking functions, 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?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups can be a time-consuming process. You will most likely have to co-ordinate calendar schedules, available dates and spaces, registration numbers, data collection, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to event attendees.
There are a number of benefits to setting up an automated web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily duplicate similar events, give event managers more control, improve client experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event registration system can be expensive.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-based web site, you can install a very inexpensive and professional online event booking solution.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Management Plugin
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WP software enables you to easily create an event and begin accepting registrations in just a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and receive online bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control of the 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 creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media sites like Facebook.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Note: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is impressively different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the platform is being revamped using a different structure to allow for future growth and expansion. 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.
To learn more about the plugin go here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just a few of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current digital presence into a fully-featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple pricing options 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 practically eliminating the need to process registrations and signups manually.
Essentially, you are enabling event participants to enrol themselves.
Letting your clients to do the data themselves frees up your time and lets you direct more of your time on creating a more unique event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will see shortly, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management process that you want your users to experience.
Some additional benefits and advantages include:
- Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd party service. The cost is kept low by using a model where Event Espresso users pay for the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and purchase addons only if you need extra functionality.
- Higher Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new event registrations outside traditional business hours. In addition, Event Espresso social and marketing addons (see below) let people interested in registering for your event share your information with friends who may also be interested.
- Green Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, your event booking process remains wholly in digital form, significantly reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks related to admin and record-keeping.
- Own Your Data. You own all the information you obtain from event participants.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to its customers via built-in features (these are included with the plugin) and optional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many great built-in to WP users. Here are just some of these:
- Fast and simple to install and configure. Be up and running in very little time.
- Custom Event Registration. With Event Espresso you can gather specific information using custom event registration forms on your web site to create a great experience for your event participants.
- Custom Notification Email Message. Set up automated registration and payment confirmation emails to communicate with your attendees.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso provides integration with payment gateways, enabling you to collect payments prior to running the events.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your WP theme and display registrant details throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow event managers to create new prices that adjust the base ticket pricing of your default ticket.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 comes with three comprehensive in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. EE 4 provides you with the tools to gain a better understanding of who your customers are and how you’ve previously done business with your customers. The Contact Profile section stores the name, biography, contact details, event registration details, comments, etc. about each customer.
- Administrative Pre-approval. Be selective about who can and can’t attend your events.
- Private Contact Notes. Keep comments about contacts on their profile and how you’ve assisted your customers. Private commenting allows you to keep records of when event attendees contacted you, your internal observations, and how you have assisted them.
- Draft Events. Draft events let you build an event page over multiple sessions without displaying it live on your website. You can work on your events until you are ready to take it live, or schedule your event to publish at a later date and time.
- Multi-Language Plugin. Event Espresso is currently available in 15+ languages, and more languages are being added all the time.
- Exportable Data. You can output all the information collected from your event attendees into Excel or CSV format for compiling reports, devising new marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, etc..
- Venue Manager. The venue manager in Event Espresso 4 allows information about venues to be published throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front-end of your site to inform registrants of the location of your event. The venue profile has many standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also includes venue details like venue seating capacity, venue site URL, phone number, venue location details, map, etc. You can also display venue profiles on various sections in your theme as well as on a venue archive page on your site where you can set up and display venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have listed for a given venue.
- Registrant Records. You can manage each registrant’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their records organized.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential event customers who have not paid yet for their admission with a standard but personalized PDF invoice with just one click. Your invoices will address registered participants who have not paid their registration yet by name, display the amount they owe, and include links to the event information, a payment link and a link to download a PDF invoice.
- Categorize Events. If you have several different types of events like free and paid, workshops and breakout sessions, different kinds of exercise classes, etc. you can categorize them to make it easier for your participants to locate what they’re looking for. You can list all the events in a category on an event category page, make all events searchable by category, and colour-code your events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make them easier to find, in addition to suggesting other events in the categories that interest your existing customers.
Additional features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for non-technical users, and also extremely robust and customizable for higher end users and developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, Event Espresso 4 permits more complex developments and customizations to the application.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. EE 4 lets you generate a log file with debugging data which can be useful for developers who are troubleshooting.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value For Money: According to the philosophy stated on their web site, Event Espresso’s goal 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 modular that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also comes with 40+ added features, including:
- Live-filtering when searching for events within the Event Espresso admin.
- Default surcharge (the same as adding a service fee to every ticket).
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
In addition to a very large number of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow users to significantly expand the capabilities of your event management process.
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 an event does not have a featured image available, a default image will be used.
- Recurring Events Manager Add on: The Recurring Events management add on lets you put your events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months in advance. You can add as many events in advance as you like. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close registrations for all of your 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 within a certain date range.
- Social Coupons Integration Add on: If your web site 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 Add-on: The Custom Template add on is capable of displaying your events in a number of exciting and interesting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Addon Editions: This addon lets you involve other users in your organization to help manage your events 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 WP users roles and assign 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 a user does not have access to certain areas of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain sections of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to allow users to control factors geographically for events and users, use the Roles and Permissions Pro add-on.
- Multiple Event Registration Add on: The Multiple Event registration add-on 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.
- EE4 Events Calendar Addon: This WordPress events calendar displays events and categories of events via a nice graphical calendar.
- Infusionsoft Integration Add-on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft integration all-in-one sales and business marketing software add-on, you can completely 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 its software, including new add-ons.
For complete details about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, visit the plugin website here:
Customer Feedback
Below are some of the many testimonials that satisfied customers have posted about Event Espresso:
”EventEspresso saves us money, saves our secretary 16-24 hours and looks so professionally done that people ask us how we do it; which we happily tell them, “Event Espresso, and be sure to get the ticketing add-on.”” David, House of Prayer
”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
”I am in love with your product, I work with many educational institutions that hold classes/events and I will definitely recommend this to all of them, the only time I have seen a system this comprehensive and sophisticated is when an organization I worked with paid a programmer nearly $8,000 for a custom solution, and yet still there are features in your registration system that his didn’t have. Thank you so much for your help and patience.” Abdullah J.
Useful Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, teacher, concert promoter, or event professional, there are just countless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed user, visit the user forum for inspiration and practical ways to streamline your event management and registration workflow and improve the experience of your event registrants.
Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with all WordPress plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress coding guidelines. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great support, as many of its users confirm:
”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 plugin provides incredible support including access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, custom development 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.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts an established team of experienced WordPress developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can depend on to run your events.
Product License Cost
Event Espresso is available in a range of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin options, however, you should consider downloading one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This option lets you install Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This lets you set up Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This edition allows you to run Event Espresso on five sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Pricing for the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the plugin sells for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Please Note: The pricing above was current at the time this article was written. This may not be the actual price 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 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 setting up and using Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to your particular situation, or to notify developers about issues and give feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event registration and ticketing management plugin, used by thousands of users.
If you own a WordPress web site and you intend to run events that require scheduling dates, times and venues, booking attendees, and booking tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Management & Registration System For WordPress
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