Do you currently run or plan to run events that require handling bookings, such as seminars, community courses, not-for-profit fundraisers, social events, or even a large-scale event like a dance party, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Managing event bookings can be a complex process. You have to co-ordinate event schedules, available dates and seating allocations, registration numbers, data processing, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations, reminders and notifications, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to attendees.
There are lots of benefits to setting up an automated online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily reproduce recurring events, give you more control, improve customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that this can be quite expensive.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-based site, you can set up a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event booking system.
Introducing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily schedule multiple events and start accepting online bookings in just minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and process online event bookings)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed plugin that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can use a range of event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up ticket sales, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media sites like Facebook.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Note: Currently, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is considerably different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the platform is being rebuilt using a different structure to allow for future expansion. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually retire EE 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
Go here to learn more:
Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current online presence into a feature-rich and professional event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to attendee limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by virtually doing away with the chore of processing registrations and sign-ups manually.
Basically, you are enabling participants to perform the enrolment process by themselves.
Allowing your customers to do all of the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you invest more of your attention on delivering a memorable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon discover, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management and registration process that you want your participants to experience.
Some additional benefits include the following:
- Significantly Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin is a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own software or using a third-party provider. The cost is kept low through a model where you pay for the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then buy optional addons only if you need extra functionality.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new sign-ups 24/7. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social and marketing add-ons (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event share your information with others who may also be interested.
- Green Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event signup process remains wholly online, eliminating traditional paper waste from tasks associated with admin and record-storage.
- All Data Belongs To You. You control all the data you obtain from event attendees.
Features
The Event Espresso plugin provides functionality to end-users via standard features (these come with the plugin) and optional features that users can buy for an added cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many unique features to web site owners. Here are just some:
- Quick and easy to install and configure. Ready to start accepting registrations in no time.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In EE 4, events can have multiple dates and times (datetimes), and these can be managed from a single event.
- Custom Notification Emails. Easily set up customized automated registration and payment notification email messages to communicate with your customers.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso seamlessly integrates with payment gateways, enabling you to collect registration payments prior to running the events.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your theme and reuse attendee data throughout other areas of your site.
- Spam Protection. Prevent the chance of spammers and robots creating false registrations by using reCAPTCHA option to provide human validation.
- Mobile Registration & Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system lets you authenticate tickets, speed up in-venue registrations, set up multiple check-in “stations” and track your participants.
- Event Check-In List. Generate an exportable list of event attendees and confirm those who attend.
- No-Ticket Events. You can set up events without making it necessary for participants to select tickets. Use Event Espresso for any form of event, not just when tickets are required.
- Public Commenting. Add social a new level of social sharing to your events by encouraging potential prospects to interact with you online via commenting and previous attendees to post feedback that can help others choose whether or not to enroll. Moderation settings for public comments are specified in the WordPress commenting system.
- Keyword-Rich Event Page Web Links. Keyword rich event page Web links leverage your WordPress site’s Permalinks configuration settings. SEO-friendly urls with topic-relevant keywords enhance the context of your pages and is favored by search engines, helping you get more visitors to your events.
- Easy Event Management. Event Espresso puts you in complete control of every aspect of an event’s registration and ticketing processes, and allows you to automate this process with event management tools that include staff and venue manager, customizable event designs, payment processing, list waiting, attendee limits, print-ready tickets and more.
- Default Tickets. If you find yourself creating identical tickets for most of your events, you can set up as your default ticket for any new events simply by ticking a checkbox.
- Venue Manager. The venue manager in EE 4 lets information about venues to appear throughout the Event Espresso admin and the public areas of your site to inform potential participants of your event’s location. The venue profile has many standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also displays venue information like venue capacity, venue website, telephone number, venue address, location map, etc. You can also display venues throughout different areas on your WordPress theme as well as on a venue archive page on your website where you can set up and publish venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have listed for a specific venue.
- Attendee Profiles. Manage your registrant’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their information organized.
- Social Sharing. Event participants and site visitors can tell others about your events using social share buttons.
- Attendee Reporting. Quick-view event reporting provides you with data of all registrations and transactions, enabling you to track the performance of your events with the aggregate number of people who have registered and amount of revenue you have collected.
Extra features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for basic users, and also robust and customizable for higher end users and web-based software developers. The bottom line is that by using Object-oriented programming (OOP), Event Espresso 4 permits more complex developments and customizations to the application.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. EE 4 lets you output a log file with debugging data which can be helpful for developers when potential errors.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And Value: According to the philosophy stated on their web site, 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 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 version of Event Espresso also includes over 40 additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – limits the need to re-enter event details when creating new events.
- Default surcharge (similar to adding a service fee to tickets).
- Default payment status.
Addons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow end-users to further enhance 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 upcoming events by location. Four maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Management Add-on: The Recurring Events management addon lets you put 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 need. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close registrations for all of these recurring events.
- Events Calendar Table Template Add on: The Calendar Table template is a list template with a bold date and customizable “register now” button. The template can be customized to show an event thumbnail image instead of the date.
- Social Media Buttons Add-on: The social media addon displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media addon comes free with all of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- Custom Template Addon: The Custom Template add on lets you display your events in a range of exciting and interesting ways.
- Seating Chart Add on: The seating chart add-on is suitable for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is ideal 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 right from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart add on lets you manage the experience for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to each seat.
- Multi-Event Registration Add-on: The Multiple Event registration add-on gives your potential attendees the ability to register for 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 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.
- Events Table View Template Addon: The Events Table Template addon provides event managers with a simple and easy-to-use system that allows you to edit the look and feel of your event lists. It comes with a simple table template with category filters, table search, table paging and more. It also allows web developers to build their own custom templates using one of the templates included as a source template.
- JSON API Addon: The Event Espresso JSON API addon permits other applications, websites, mobile applications, etc… to access your Event Espresso information through an Application Programming Interface (API).
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add-ons.
For more details about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
Users – Feedback
Here are some of the many testimonials that satisfied users have written about Event Espresso:
“It is a very, very slick plugin. It’s one of those plugins where you install it, change a couple of settings, and boom you’re selling tickets.” Brad Williams, WebDevStudios
”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
”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
Useful Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, presenter, conference promoter, or event management professional, there are simply unlimited possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed user, search the forums for inspiration and practical suggestions to streamline your event management and registration process and enhance the experience of your registrants.
Support
Event Espresso works with with all WP plugins and WP themes that follow WP coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great user support, as so many of its customers attest:
”These guys are right on any problem or issue or even general questions. You can’t really put a value high enough on the kind of support these guys offer.” Mark Wigston, Muskoka Graphics
Event Espresso provides exceptional support with access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, premium 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 web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely software you can depend on to run and manage your events.
Product Cost
Event Espresso is available in various 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 ”Pro” plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This edition enables you to configure Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This option lets you configure Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Edition – This license enables you to install Event Espresso on five domains. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Pricing details 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 is being retailed for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing when this review was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin author when you visit the site.
Additional Plugin Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the software’s online documentation pages for answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to your particular use-case, or to notify developers about issues and give feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product site.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event registration and ticketing management software, used by thousands of WordPress users.
If you own a WordPress site and you currently run any event that requires scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), booking participants, and/or booking tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better WordPress plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso
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