Does your company currently run or plan to run events that need co-ordinating bookings, such as seminars, training courses, charity fund raisers, networking functions, or even a large-scale event such as a music show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Co-ordinating event bookings is a complex process. You may be required to manage calendar schedules, dates, registration numbers, data processing, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to event participants.
There are a number of benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily duplicate similar events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that this can be very expensive.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-based digital presence, you can download and install an inexpensive and professional web-based event registration solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – Event Manager And Registration Plugin For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily create an event and start receiving online bookings in just a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and process online bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich software that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize your event registration forms
You can employ a number of event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media and email marketing solutions.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Note: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is completely different than the older EE 3, as the software is being redeveloped using a different structure to accommodate future expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually move completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and features of using the plugin.
More info:
Benefits
Here are just some of the many benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing online presence into a fully-featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by virtually eliminating the need to process registrations and signups manually.
Essentially, you are enabling event attendees to register by themselves.
Letting your participants to do the data entry frees you up from doing administration and lets you focus more energy on organizing a better event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will see shortly, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and booking process that you want your customers to experience.
Some additional benefits of the plugin include the following:
- Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin is a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd party service. The cost is kept to a minimum through a model where you pay for the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then purchase addons when you need new functionality.
- Higher Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online event registrations any time of day or night. In addition, Event Espresso social features (see below) let people interested in attending your event invite others who may also be interested.
- Green And Paperless Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event registration process remains wholly in digital form, reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks related to enrollment.
- All Information Belongs To You. You own all the data obtained from event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to its users via built-in features (these come with the plugin) and additional features that customers can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of great features to WordPress users. Here are just a few:
- Quick and easy to install and configure. Be up and running in no time.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso lets you set up as many different types of tickets as you need and set different pricing options, limits on ticket quantities, and more.
- Customized Confirmation Emails. Easily set up automated registration and payment confirmation emails to communicate with your attendees.
- Tax Administration Options. Event Espresso 4 gives you several ways to administer taxes for your event and report tax fee components to registrants when purchasing tickets. You can administer taxes globally or on a per-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your theme and display venue details throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Prices. Set up events fast by pre-configuring system-default ticket pricing.
- Discount And Promotional Codes. Set up promotional and multiple discount codes to incentivize visitors to make a buying decision immediately, or make your offers more appealing for others. Also useful if you want to sell-out events close to deadlines.
- Event Check-In List. Generate an exportable list of event participants and check in those who attend.
- Event Manager Pre-approval. Be selective about who can register for your events.
- RSS Feeds. Provide automatic updates to your customers, drive quality traffic and reach a wider number of prospects with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Optimized For The Latest Version Of WordPress. The Event Espresso 4 user interface follows the WordPress guidelines to help you build beautifully-designed event pages that are responsive and mobile-friendly.
- Your Organization Settings. Configure your organization’s profile to display throughout the software and your front-end templates. Organization information include: organization name, address, city, state, country, zip code, email, telephone number, VAT/tax number, company logo, Facebook profile URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest profile URL, Google+ URL, Instagram profile URL.
- Default Tickets. If you create identical tickets for your events, you can set one of those tickets as your default ticket for all new events simply by ticking a checkbox.
- WordPress Visual Editor. Event Espresso uses the native WordPress Visual editor, so you can quickly and easily add graphic images and stylize your content without knowing HTML or CSS, just like any WordPress post or page.
- Registrant Records. You can manage each registrant’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their records organized and easily accessible.
- Staff Management. Save time and keep your data organized by reusing staff profiles for multiple events or displaying their profile using a shortcode in an event description.
- Attendee Reports. Event reports gives you information of your registrations and transactions, allowing you to measure the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and how much money has been collected.
Extra features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for general users, and also extremely robust and customizable for enterprise-level users and web developers. The bottom line is that by using Object-oriented programming (OOP), Event Espresso 4 allows for more complex enhancements and customizations to the plugin.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. EE 4 lets you generate a log file with debugging data that can be helpful for web developers when diagnosing problems.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value: 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 as a result.
The premium version of Event Espresso also provides you with 40+ added features, including:
- Email shortcodes that includes attendee data in confirmation emails and updates.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse commonly asked questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Add ons
In addition to an incredible array of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow software users to significantly enhance the functionality of managing an event.
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, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Template Addon: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes multiple datetime events into a drop-down list.
- Events Date Range Template Addon: The Date Range custom event list template lets your users to search for events that occur within a certain date range.
- Events Social Sharing Add-on: This add-on adds social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that lets your attendees to share a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after booking.
- Custom Files Add-on: The Custom Files add-on lets you bypass certain aspects of the plugin.
- Seating Chart Addon: The seating chart addon is 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 lets you offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues directly from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart addon lets you control 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 registrants will be given the option to either register for a single event or add multiple events to their 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 Add on: This WordPress events calendar displays events and categories of events via a nice graphical calendar.
- JSON API Add-on: The new Event Espresso JSON API add on lets other applications, web tools, mobile apps, etc… to access your Event Espresso data through an API (Application Programming Interface).
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software, including new addons.
For more details about the latest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
User Testimonials
Below are just some of the many great testimonials that satisfied users have written 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 gym owner, trainer, seminar promoter, or event management professional, there are just unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, spend a little time researching the user forum for inspiration and practical ways to streamline your event management workflow or enhance the experience of your event registrants.
Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with other WP plugins and themes that follow standard WP development guidelines. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great support, as many of its satisfied plugin end-users attest:
”Your plugin saved our client nearly $9000 in development costs because it handled the majority of the functionality we were looking for at a much lower cost. EventEspresso’s staff have been very responsive to our needs when we have them (which has been rare, because the plugin is so well coded). Great job on a great plugin!” Brandon P., Experience Farm
The software provides great support that includes access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, priority 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 web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can rely on to run your events.
Plugin Pricing
Event Espresso is available in a number of editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software functionality, however, you will want to consider using one of the premium plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This lets you configure Event Espresso on 1 domain only. It includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This enables you to configure Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This lets you set up Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 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 plugin is selling for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Manager
Please Note: The pricing above was current when this review was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin developer when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Plugin Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the plugin’s online documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to your particular use-case, or to report bugs and give feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event booking and ticketing manager software, used and trusted by thousands of people.
If you are a WordPress user and you plan to run events that require scheduling dates and venues, enrolling attendees, and/or booking seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable WP plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticket Registration System For WordPress
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