Do you currently run or plan to run events that require co-ordinating bookings or registrations, such as workshops, training courses, not-for-profit fundraisers, marketing events, 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 sign-ups can be a time-consuming process. You have to manage scheduling, date availability, attendee numbers, data processing, collecting payments and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to event registrants.
There are lots of benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce costs, help you easily replicate recurring events, give you more control, create a better customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event registration system can be quite costly.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-powered website, you can set up a very inexpensive and highly professional online event registration solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress software allows you to easily create your event and start accepting bookings in a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and accept online event bookings)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can employ various event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up selling tickets, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event participants, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing notifications.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is significantly different than the older EE 3, as the platform is being revamped using a different structure to accommodate future growth. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually phase out Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
Go here to learn more about the plugin:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current website or blog into a fully-featured and automated event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by practically doing away with the chore of processing registrations manually.
Basically, you are facilitating attendees to complete the enrolment process on their own.
Allowing your clients to do all of the data entry frees you up from doing admin work and lets you direct more attention on planning a more unique event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon learn, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management process that you want your participants to experience.
Some additional plugin benefits include:
- Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin provides you with an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third-party service. This is made possible by using a model where you purchase the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and buy add ons only if you need additional features.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept new event signups any time of day or night. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing addons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event share your information with their friends who may also be interested in attending.
- Green Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event registration process is performed wholly online, eliminating traditional paper consumption from tasks associated with admin and record-keeping.
- Own Your Data. You own all the data you acquire from event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to its users through standard features (these come with the plugin) and optional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of great built-in to WordPress users. Here are just some of these:
- Quick and simple to install and configure. Be up and running in minutes.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In EE 4, events can have many dates and times (datetimes), that these can be managed from a single event.
- Custom Notification Email Message. Set up automated registration and payment notification email messages to communicate with your customers.
- Ticket Selector. Present a number of ticket options to prospective attendees so they can purchase the ticket(s) that will best fit their needs.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your theme and reuse events information throughout other areas of your site.
- Spam Protection. Reduce the risk of spamming and robots making false registrations with reCAPTCHA features that validate human activity.
- Mobile Registration & Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system allows you to validate tickets, speed up in-venue registrations, create multiple check-in “stations” and track your attendees.
- Manual Registration Option. you have the option of registering event participants when they show up, or sending in paper registration forms for manual submission later.
- Admin Pre-approval. Control who can and can’t register for your events.
- Private Comments On Contacts. Keep notes about event participants on their profile. Private commenting enables you to keep a record of when event registrants contacted you, your internal observations, and how you’ve assisted your contacts.
- Draft Events. Draft events let you build your event in your own time-frame without publishing it to your website. You can work on your event pages until you are ready to publish it on your site, or schedule your event pages to publish at a future time and date.
- Country-specific Settings. You can configure the country and currency settings that will be used to promote events, including currency name, currency signs, decimal signs, characters and places, country codes, regions, and so on.
- Default Tickets. If you create similar tickets for your events, you can set up as your default ticket for all new events simply by ticking a checkbox.
- Register Multiple Event Attendees. EE 4 allows an individual or an organization to buy multiple tickets and different types of tickets at the same time. You can control how many people can enrol in one registration session by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso lets you interact with an expert community of event managers and plugin users. You can interact with other members of the Event Espresso community via their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Social Sharing. Event attendees and site visitors can spread the word about your event using social share buttons.
- Attendee Reports. Event reporting provides you with information of the registrations and transactions, allowing you to analyze the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and how much money you’ve collected.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows you to have more control and options over your content and how your information displays to your site visitors.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registration capabilities for normal site visitors when site maintenance is needed. You can still work on your content during maintenance mode.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & Value For Money: According to the mission statement on their 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 goals, the company operates on a modular and highly effective model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium version of Event Espresso also includes over 40 additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – simplifies the work of re-entering event data when adding new events.
- Default surcharge (the same as applying a service fee to tickets).
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
In addition to an incredible number of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow customers to significantly enhance the capabilities of managing your event.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display scheduled events by location. Four maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Template Addon: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize multiple datetime events into a drop-down list.
- Events Date Range Template Add-on: The Date Range custom event list template allows your users to search for events that take place in a certain date range.
- Social Media Buttons Add on: The social media addon displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media add-on comes free with all of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- Custom Template Addon: The Custom Template add-on is capable of displaying your event lists in a number of visually exciting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Addon Editions: This add on lets you involve your staff 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 capabilities, so your staff can help you manage your events or events that others create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain parts of your WP dashboard and/or certain sections of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to allow users to have geographic responsibilities for events and users, use the Roles and Permissions Pro add on.
- EE4 Event Ticketing Add on: The Ticketing add-on adds the ability to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add on adds the ability to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing addon includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode types are included for managing check-in scans at the venue door. Attendees can either print out their tickets or display them on their mobile devices. The barcode scanner can be used for checking in or checking out attendees and to validate tickets.
- Events Table Template Add on: The Events Table Template addon provides you with a simple and easy-to-use system that lets you change the design 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 design their own custom templates using one of the templates provided as a source template.
- EE4 Infusionsoft Integration Add-on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and marketing software add on, you can completely automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture customer data, track bookings, and accept payments from your Event Espresso powered website.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software, including new addons.
For full details about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
User Feedback
Below are a few of the testimonials that satisfied users have written about Event Espresso:
”Broadcasting my support for Event Espresso will be a pleasure. I recently helped the Webmaster at a sister church configure your event manager for their site, so I can say with confidence and from experience, that Event Espresso is the best Event Manager plugin ever!” Philip Simpson, The Charlotte Church
”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
”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, presenter, workshop planner, or event consultant, there are simply countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered owner, go through the support forum for inspiration and practical ways to streamline your event management and registration workflow and enhance the experience of your event attendees.
Product Support
Event Espresso is compatible with most WP plugins and WordPress themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent technical support, as so many of its clients 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
Event Espresso provides great support including access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase 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 a solution you can depend on to organize and manage your events.
Product License Pricing
Event Espresso is available in different editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software functionality, however, you should consider using one of the ”Pro” plugin editions below:
- Personal License Edition – This edition allows you to run Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License – This edition enables you to run Event Espresso on 1 domain 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 five domains. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Current pricing for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, the software retails for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Note: The above reflects the pricing when this review was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin developer when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Information
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Use 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 a specific use-case, or to report issues and leave feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product web site.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event booking and ticketing manager software, used by thousands of users.
If you own a WordPress web site and you currently run an event that requires scheduling dates and venues, booking attendees, and reserving tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – Event Management And Registration Software For WordPress
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