Do you currently run or plan to run events that need managing registrations, such as workshops, training classes, charity fund raisers, social events, or even a big event like a community fair, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Managing event sign-ups can be a complex process. You may need to co-ordinate calendar schedules, availability, attendee numbers, data administration, payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to event participants.
There are many benefits to setting up an online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce costs, help you easily replicate recurring events, give event managers more control, improve customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be very costly.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-powered website, you can download and install a very inexpensive and professional online event booking system.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticketing Registration Plugin
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily set up your event and start receiving bookings in just a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and process online bookings)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich plugin that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Customize registration forms
You can use a number of event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your event participants, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing follow-ups.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their software: EE 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is considerably different than the older EE 3, as the software has been revamped using a different structure to accommodate future expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform 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 learn more about this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
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 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.
Increased Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically eliminating the chore of processing registrations and sign-ups manually.
Essentially, you are enabling participants to enroll themselves.
Letting your customers to do all of the data entry frees you up from doing administration and lets you concentrate more of your time on planning a better event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will see in a moment, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and booking process that you want your participants to experience.
Some additional benefits include the following:
- Lower Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third-party service provider. The cost is kept to a minimum through a model where Event Espresso users pay for the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then purchase addons only if you need new functionality.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept online event signups outside traditional business hours. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with their friends who may be interested in attending.
- Green Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event booking process remains entirely online, eliminating typical paper consumption from tasks related to admin and record-keeping.
- All Data Belongs To You. You own all the data gathered from event participants.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to its customers via built-in features (these are included with the software) and additional features that users can buy for an added cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many unique built-in to WordPress users. Here are just a few:
- Quick and easy to install and implement. 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 pages to create a great experience for your customers.
- Customized Notification Emails. Easily set up automated registration and payment confirmation email messages to communicate with event customers.
- Tax Administration. Event Espresso 4 provides several ways to manage taxes for your event and provide reports of tax fees to customers who purchase tickets. Event managers can administer taxes globally or on a per-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your theme and reuse registrant data throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types let event managers create new prices that adjust the default ticket pricing of your default ticket.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 provides three useful in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of event participants and check-in everyone who has attended.
- Waiting Lists. Latecomers can subscribe to a waiting list if your event is full. Additionally, you can specify that wait-listed attendees pre-pay if you plan to add more capacity for the event.
- Private Contact Notes. Keep observations about contacts on their profile. Private commenting allows you to keep a record of when users contacted you, your internal comments, and how you’ve helped your contacts.
- Works With The Most Recent WordPress Version. The Event Espresso 4 user interface follows all WordPress guidelines to help you build beautifully-designed event pages that are easier to use and mobile-friendly.
- Country Settings. Event managers can configure the country and currency settings that will be used throughout Event Espresso, such as currency name, currency signs, decimal signs, characters and places, country codes, regions, and so on.
- Bulk Edit Event Information. EE 4 provides a CSV-based importing feature that enables you to easily import a lot of event data all at one time. You can export, edit and upload data for events, datetimes, ticketing details, pricing, registration questions, venues, terms, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- WordPress Visual Editor. Event Espresso uses the built-in WordPress Visual editor, allowing you to quickly and easily add images and stylize your event descriptions without knowing HTML or CSS, just like any WordPress post or page.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso lets you engage with an expert community of event managers and plugin users. You can engage with other members of the Event Espresso community using their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media pages on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Social Sharing. Event participants and website visitors can tell others about your event using social sharing buttons.
- Event Reporting. Event reports gives you information of the registrations and transactions, enabling you to track the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and how much money has been collected.
Additional features include:
- Hooks, Actions & Filters. These features allow developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso software that are compatible with WordPress.
- Maintenance Mode. Pause registration capabilities for normal website visitors when site maintenance is needed. You can still work on the back-end of your site during maintenance mode.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value: According to the mission statement on their website, 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 software has been built using a modular and highly effective model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium version of Event Espresso also provides you with 40+ added features, including:
- Email shortcodes for including attendee data in emails and email updates.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing a series of questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
In addition to an incredible number of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow users to significantly expand the capabilities of events.
Some of these add ons include:
- EE4 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 an event does not have a featured image available, a default image will be used instead.
- Recurring Events Manager Addon: The Recurring Events management add on enables you to put events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months ahead. You can schedule as many future events as you want. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close bookings for all 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 an event thumbnail image instead of the date.
- EE4 Events Social Sharing Add on: This add-on adds social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that allows your registrants to post a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after registration.
- Custom Template Add-on: The Custom Template addon is capable of displaying your events in a range of visually exciting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add-on Versions: This add on lets you include other users in your organization to help manage your events and give new users permission to create events or regional managers the capacity to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WP users roles and give them different permissions with different capabilities, so others can help you manage your events or the events that other people create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain sections of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain sections of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to create geographic regions for other people to manage events, use the Roles and Permissions Pro add on.
- Multiple Event Registration Addon: The Multi-Event registration add-on gives your potential attendees 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 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 Table Template Add-on: The Events Table Template add-on provides you with a simple and easy-to-use system that lets you modify the design of your event lists. It comes with a simple table template with category filters, table search, table paging and more. It also lets developers design their own custom templates using one of the included templates as a source template.
- JSON API Add-on: The Event Espresso JSON API add-on enables other applications, websites, mobile applications, etc… to access your Event Espresso content through an Application Programming Interface (API).
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software, including new add-ons.
For complete details about the latest Event Espreso features and add-ons, visit the plugin website:
Customer Feedback
Here are some of the many testimonials that satisfied plugin users 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
”I searched long and hard to find something that would serve my needs. This is, by far, the most complete and comprehensive solution I have found.” Bill Hepper, We Teach Live
”I’m using it on multiple sites and enjoying it. It’s simple and as others have stated… fast service and real help.” Arlen Nagata
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, teacher, show planner, or event management professional, there are just unlimited possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, spend a little time researching the user forum for useful ideas and practical suggestions to improve your event management process or enhance the experience of your attendees.
Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with all WP plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress development guidelines. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent user support, as so many of its end-users attest:
“I’m really impressed with not only the application itself but the support. I have rarely seen such a responsive support staff than at EE. They rock…I highly recommend this plugin!” sock2me
The plugin provides amazing support including access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, priority 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 a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can rely on to run and manage your events.
Software Price
Event Espresso is available in different editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software options, however, you need to consider using one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This allows you to set up Event Espresso on 1 site only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This lets you set up Event Espresso on one site only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This allows you to install Event Espresso on five domains. Price 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 special offers. Currently, the software sells for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Manager
Please Note: The pricing above was current when this article was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin author when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding 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 plugin’s documentation tools for answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to your specific use-case, or to report errors and share feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product web site.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event booking and ticketing management software, used by thousands of people.
If you are a WordPress user and you intend to run events that involve scheduling dates and venues, enrolling participants, or booking tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better WP plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso
***