Does your business currently run or plan to run events that require managing registrations, such as seminars, community courses, not-for-profit fundraisers, networking events, or even a large-scale event like a food fair, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups is a complex and time-consuming process. You will probably need to co-ordinate calendar schedules, date availability, participant numbers, data processing, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders and alerts, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to event attendees.
There are a number of benefits to setting up an online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily reproduce similar events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable client experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that this can be very expensive.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-powered web site, you can download and install a very inexpensive and highly professional online event registration system.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Manager
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily schedule an event and start processing online bookings literally in a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and process online bookings)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed plugin that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can employ a range of event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up ticket-selling, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event participants, or integrating your event registration forms with an autoresponder system for ongoing updates.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Please Note: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is completely different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the plugin is being revamped using a different structure to enable 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 migrate completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about 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 website:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing online presence into a fully-featured event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically eliminating the need to process registrations manually.
Basically, you are enabling event attendees to enroll on their own.
Letting your clients to do all of the data entry frees up your time and lets you spend more of your time on planning a more enjoyable event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover shortly, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and booking process that you want your clients to experience.
Additional benefits include:
- Less Costs: The Event Espresso plugin is an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own system or using a 3rd-party service provider. This is made possible through a model where users pay for the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then purchase optional add-ons when you need extra functionality.
- Higher Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new registrations any time of day or night. In addition, Event Espresso social features and add ons (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with other people they know who may also be interested.
- Green Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, the event booking process is completed wholly in digital form, eliminating typical paper consumption from tasks related to administration.
- Own Your Data. You control all the information you collect from event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to its users via standard features (these come with the software) and optional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers a number of great features to WP users. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and easy to install and use. Be up and running in very little time.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In EE 4, events can have multiple dates and times (called datetimes), which these can be managed from a single event.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Attendees can easily find your upcoming events and add these to their schedule using the calendar.
- Tax Admin And Reporting Options. Event Espresso 4 provides a number of options to handle taxes for an event and provide reports of tax fees to customers who purchase tickets. Event managers can configure taxes globally and on a per-ticket basis.
- Intelligent Single Page Checkout. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically duplicate the primary registrant’s details for any additional participants.
- Default Prices. Create events quickly by pre-configuring default ticket prices.
- Discount Codes. Leverage promotion and multiple discount codes to encourage people to register immediately, or simply make your offerings more affordable for price-sensitive customers. This is also practical for helping to sell out events close to deadlines.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of event registrants and check-in those who have attended.
- Waiting Lists. Interested persons can subscribe to a waiting list if your event has reached the limit of participants. You can also specify that waiting list attendees pay for their spots if you plan to expand capacity for the event.
- XML RSS Feeds. Keep your customers up-to-date about your events, bring in more visitors and expand your content distribution with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- SEO Friendly URLs. Keyword-rich Web links take advantage of your Permalinks configuration settings. “Pretty” web links that use relevant keywords enhance the context of your pages and improves your search rankings, helping you get a more targeted audience to your site.
- 15+ Languages. Event Espresso is being translated into over 15 languages, and more languages are being added all the time.
- Exportable Information. You can export all the data collected from your event customers into Excel or CSV format for compiling advanced reports, implementing marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, etc..
- Event Venue Profiles. The venue management feature in EE 4 allows information about a venue to be made available throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front end of your website to inform registrants of your event’s location. The venue profile has many standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also includes venue information such as venue capacity, venue web address, telephone number, physical, map, etc. You can also display venue profiles in various sections on your WordPress theme and on a venue listing page on your site where you can set up and display venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a particular venue.
- Event Espresso Community. Event Espresso lets you engage with an expert community of event managers and plugin users. You can interact with other Event Espresso users through their community chat room, support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Social Sharing. Event participants and your site visitors can tell others about your events using social share buttons.
- Accurate Event Attendee Management. You have control of your participants’ date; who has registered, for what event and what amount they have paid. With the attendee manager, you can get a quick 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 customized payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your customers individually or as a group.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows web-based software developers to have more control and options over the content of your event page and how the information displays to site visitors.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 allows you to create a log file with debugging data which can be useful for developers who are diagnosing errors.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And Value: 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 mission, the company operates on a modular that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also provides you with 40+ additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – limits the work of re-entering event details when creating new events.
- Default surcharge (the same as applying a service tax to all tickets).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As well as a very large number of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow users to significantly enhance the functionality of managing an event.
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 the event does not have a featured image, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Manager Addon: The Recurring Events manager add-on lets you put your events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years in advance. You can create 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 your recurring events.
- Events Calendar Table Template Addon: The Calendar Table template is a list template with a bold date and customizable “register now” button. The template can also be customized to display the event thumbnail image instead of a date.
- Social Coupons Integration Addon: If your site is featured on Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can even specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration addon allows you to take full advantage of the WP user system. With the WP User Integration add-on you can give users a special incentive by offering member pricing and overriding event pricing when your members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered site users will have access to these special events. Members can also input personal data into their profile page allowing them to quickly register for events by auto-filling in the personal information on the event registration form. Your users can also view event history and make payment for new events.
- 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 perfect for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart addon allows you to offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart addon lets you manage the experience for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to every seat.
- Multi-Event Registration Add on: The Multi-Event registration add-on gives your potential customers the ability to book 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 Multi-Event Registration addon, 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 categories of events using a nice graphical calendar.
- JSON API Addon: The Event Espresso JSON API addon enables other software applications, online tools, mobile apps, etc… to access your Event Espresso content through an API (Application Programming Interface).
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software, including new add-ons.
For full details about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, visit the plugin website here:
Customer Feedback
Here are some of the many testimonials that satisfied plugin users have posted about Event Espresso:
”My hope with this whole integration is to be able to show other school districts an affordable and easy solution to these registrations. I cannot believe how much money they are charged for less by other companies. This has the potential to save schools tens of thousands, which is huge right now.” Kelly, College Station Independent School District
”You can tell that the Event Espresso team is really passionate about their work, and that they care and spend a lot of time helping people work with their plugin and use it with their events – it’s something every WordPress service should aim for.” Ryan Imel, WPCandy
“Love the plugin, we only use it once a year for a race we have in February. This saved us tons of time in data entry. In addition, we had more runners register than any other year. We attribute that to the ease of registering online. Thanks for your work.” Ed, Friends of Oscar Scherer Park
Useful Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, teacher, workshop promoter, or event management professional, there are just endless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a registered user, visit the forums for tips and practical ways to improve your event management and registration process and improve the experience of your attendees.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with all WordPress plugins and themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you find that you need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent support, as many of its clients confirm:
”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
Event Espresso provides robust support including access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, custom development 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 a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can depend on to run your events.
Plugin Price
Event Espresso is available in a range of editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software features, however, you need to consider downloading one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This license option enables you to install Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This enables you to run Event Espresso on one site only. It includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This license lets you run Event Espresso on 5 domains. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Current pricing for the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. When we last checked, the software sells for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Please Note: The pricing above was current when this article was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin author when you visit the site.
Additional Info
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the software’s online documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to a particular situation, or to report issues and leave feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product website.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event booking and ticketing management plugin, used by thousands.
If you own a WordPress-powered site and you plan to run events that involve managing dates and venues (offline and online), enrolling attendees, or booking tickets, then you will probably not find a better WordPress plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticket Registration System For WordPress
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