Do you currently run or plan to run events that need to accept bookings, such as seminars, group classes, non-profit fund raisers, corporate functions, or even a large-scale event such as a regional festival, 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 complex process. You will most likely have to co-ordinate calendar schedules, dates, registration numbers, data processing, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and issuing tickets to attendees.
There are many advantages to setting up an online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower costs, help you easily replicate recurring events, give event managers more control, improve customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event registration system can be very expensive.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-based web site, you can easily set up an inexpensive and highly professional online event registration system.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticket Registration Software For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily schedule multiple events and begin accepting online registrations in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and accept online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize your event registration forms
You can use a number of event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up ticket sales, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your event attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media sites like Facebook.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is significantly different than the older EE 3, as the software has been redeveloped 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 company plans to eventually phase out EE 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
Learn more here:
Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current website into a feature-rich and professional event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating limits, multiple price levels 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 literally eliminating the need to process registrations manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for event participants to perform the registration by themselves.
Letting your enrollees to do all of the data themselves frees up your time and lets you spend more time on planning a memorable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon see, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management process that you want your customers to experience.
Additional benefits include the following:
- Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin provides you with a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third party service. This is made possible by using a model where Event Espresso users pay for the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and purchase add-ons when you need extra functionality.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new event signups 24 hours a day. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing features (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event share your information with others who may be interested.
- Green Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, your event registration process can be completed entirely in digital form, significantly reducing typical paper consumption from tasks related to admin and record-keeping.
- All Data Belongs To You. You own all the information you obtain from your event participants.
Features
The Event Espresso plugin provides functionality to end-users via built-in features (these are included with the plugin) and additional features that users can buy for an added cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many built-in to site owners. Here are just a few:
- Fast and easy to install and implement. Be up and running in minutes.
- Customized Event Registration. With Event Espresso you can collect unique information using a custom event registration form on your site to plan a customized experience for your attendees.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Attendees can easily find your upcoming events and add these to their schedule using a calendar.
- Ticket Selector. Present several ticket options to prospects and let them choose the ticket(s) that best suits their needs.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your WP theme and display venue information throughout other areas of your site.
- Spam Protection. Eliminate the risk of spamming and bots creating bogus registrations by using reCAPTCHA features to provide human authentication.
- In-App Documentation Systems. Event Espresso 4 includes 3 comprehensive in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of participants and confirm those who attend.
- No Ticket Events. Set up events without the requirement for attendees to book tickets. Event Espresso can be used for any type of event, not just those that need tickets.
- Event RSS Feeds. Keep your website visitors updated about your events, bring in more visitors and widen your content reach with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Draft Events. Draft events let you develop an event at your own pace without publishing it to your website. You can keep working on your event until you are ready to take it live, or schedule your event pages to publish at a later date and time.
- 15+ Languages. Event Espresso is is available in over 15 languages, and more translations are being added all the time.
- Default Tickets. If you create identical tickets for your events, you can set one of those tickets as your default ticket for your new events simply by ticking a checkbox.
- Event Venue Management. The venue manager in EE 4 lets information about a venue to display throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front end of your website to inform attendees of the location of your event. The venue profile has many of the standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also displays venue details such as venue capacity, venue website, venue phone number, physical and virtual location, Google map, etc. You can also display all of your event venues throughout various sections in your WP theme as well as on a venue listing page on your website where you can set up and display venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have listed for a particular venue.
- Automatic Software Installation Upgrades. Event Espresso offers easy one-click plugin installation upgrades to make sure that you have the latest features and to keep your software installation up-to-date with the latest version of WordPress.
- Staff Management. Save time and keep your data organized by reusing staff profiles for multiple events or displaying profile information such as team member’s contact information, resume and photo using a shortcode in an event description.
- Event Reporting. Quick-view event reporting provides you with data of all of your registrations and transactions, allowing you to track the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and amount of revenue has been collected.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows web-based software developers to have more control and options over your content and how your information displays to site visitors.
- Maintenance Mode. Pause registration capabilities for normal site visitors whenever you need to carry out maintenance on your website. You can still work on the back-end of your site during maintenance mode.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & Value For Money: According to the philosophy stated 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 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 includes over 40 added features, including:
- Live-filtering when searching for events in the Event Espresso admin.
- Default surcharge (the same as adding a service fee to every ticket).
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow users to significantly expand the functionality of managing your 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 the event does not have a featured image, a default image will be used.
- Recurring Events Management Add on: The Recurring Events manager addon allows you to put your events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months ahead. You can add as many future events as you want. Event Espresso will automatically open and close registrations for all 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 also be customized to display an event thumbnail instead of the date.
- Events Social Sharing Add-on: Add social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that lets your registrants to post a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after booking.
- Custom Template Add-on: The Custom Template add on is capable of displaying your events in a variety of exciting and interesting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add-on Versions: This add-on lets you involve other users in the event management process and give new users the ability to create events or regional managers the ability to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WordPress users roles and give them different permissions with different capabilities, so your staff can help you manage your events or the events that others create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain sections of your WP dashboard and/or certain areas 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.
- Event Ticketing & Bar Scanning Add on: The Ticketing add-on gives you the ability to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add on gives you the ability to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing add on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode types are included for managing check-in scans at the venue door. Registrants can either print out their tickets or display them on their mobile devices. The mobile app can be used for checking in or checking out attendees and to validate tickets.
- Events Calendar Add on: This add on uses the WordPress calendar to display events and categories of events in an attractive graphical calendar.
- JSON API Add-on: The Event Espresso JSON API add on lets other applications, online tools, mobile apps, etc… to access your Event Espresso content through an Application Programming Interface (API).
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add ons.
To learn more about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
Customers – Feedback
Here are some of the many great testimonials that satisfied users have written about Event Espresso:
”Tri-South, Inc is using Event Espresso to manage the course catalog, event ticketing, and class registration. [As their developer] I have customized a few items to make the site and plugin a seamless integration. The client is very pleased!” Jenifer Design
”When you can get a company to expend more money switching systems just to use your plugin…you’ve really accomplished something.” David, House of Prayer
”Loving the functions and support from Event Espresso. One of the best plugins I’ve ever bought!” Nathan
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, teacher, festival promoter, or event management professional, there are just countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a licensed user, visit the user forum for inspiration and practical ways to improve your event management and registration workflow and enhance the experience of your event registrants.
Support
Event Espresso works with with all WP plugins and WP themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you find that you need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive support, as so many of its end-users attest:
”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 comprehensive support with access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, one-on-one 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.
In addition, Event Espresso boasts an established team of experienced WordPress developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can depend on to manage your events.
Plugin Cost
Event Espresso is available in a range of editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software options, however, you may want to consider downloading one of the premium plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This allows you to run Event Espresso on 1 site only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This license option lets you configure Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This license allows you to configure Event Espresso on 5 domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The price of the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. When we last checked, the software is being retailed for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Manager And Registration System For WordPress
Note: The pricing above was current at the time this review was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin developer when you visit the website.
Additional Plugin Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding 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.
Use the software’s online documentation tools for answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to your particular use-case, or to notify developers about issues and share feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product website.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event registration and ticketing manager software, used and trusted by thousands.
If you own a WordPress website and you intend to run any event that requires scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), registering attendees, or booking seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
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