Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management Plugin

Event Espresso is a complete event registration and ticketing management automation software solution for WordPress …

Event EspressoDo you currently run or plan to run events that require managing bookings or registrations, such as workshops, community classes, charity fund-raisers, social functions, or even a large-scale event such as a school concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?

Co-ordinating event sign-ups is a complex process. You will probably have to manage calendar schedules, available dates and spaces, participant numbers, data processing and storage, payments and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to participants.

There are many advantages to setting up an online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce costs, help you easily reproduce repeat events, give you more control, improve customer experience and grow your sales.

The problem is that setting up a web-based event registration system can be quite expensive.

The good news is that if you own a WordPress-powered web site, you can easily set up a very inexpensive and highly professional online event booking system.

Event Espresso - WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Manager Software

Presenting …

Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Management

Event Espresso - WordPress Event Management And Ticketing Registration Plugin

Plugin Description

The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress lets you easily set up your event and start processing bookings in just minutes.

Event Espresso - Event Registration & Ticketing Management

(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and receive online event registrations)

Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed plugin that gives you full control of your event registration management process.

Event Espresso - WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Management Software

Event Espresso lets you customize registration forms

You can employ several event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up selling tickets, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media sites like Facebook.

Event Espresso - WordPress Event Manager And Ticketing Registration Software

Access detailed information about your 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 fundamentally different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the plugin has been redeveloped using a different structure to allow for future growth and expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually phase out EE 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.

Learn more here:

Benefits

Here are just a few of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your site:

Automated Event Registration Management

Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current web site into a fully-featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to attendee limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.

Higher Business Productivity

By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by virtually doing away with the need to process registrations manually.

Basically, you are enabling attendees to enroll by themselves.

Allowing your participants to do all of the data entry frees you up from doing admin work and lets you invest more resources on delivering a more enjoyable event.

Complete Control Over The User Experience

As you will learn shortly, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and registration process that you want your participants to experience.

Some additional plugin benefits include the following:

  • Significantly Lower Costs: Event Espresso is a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own solution or using a 3rd party service. This is made possible through a model where you pay for the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and purchase add ons only when you need added functionality.
  • More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new signups 24 hrs a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing features (see below) let people interested in registering for your event share your information with friends who may be interested.
  • Green And Paperless Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, your event signup process remains wholly online, significantly reducing typical paper consumption from tasks associated with enrollment.
  • All Information Belongs To You. You own all the information you acquire from event attendees.

Features

Event Espresso provides functionality to its users through standard features (these are included with the plugin) and additional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.

Event Espresso

Event Espresso offers many features to website owners. Here are just a few:

  • Quick and simple to install and use. Be up and running in minutes.
  • Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In EE 4, events can have multiple dates and times (called datetimes), and these can be managed from a single event.
  • Event Calendar. Customers can easily find your events and add these to their schedule with the calendar.
  • Tax Administration. Event Espresso 4 gives you several options to administer taxes for an event and provide reports of tax fee components to customers when purchasing tickets. Event managers can configure taxes globally or on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
  • Smart Single Page Checkout. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically copy the primary registrant’s information for any added participants.
  • Default Price Types. Price types allow event managers to create new prices that adjust the default ticket pricing for the default ticket.
  • Mobile Registration And Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system lets you validate tickets, speed up door registrations, set up multiple check-in “stations” and track all participants.
  • Event Check-In List. Generate a list of event attendees and check-in everyone who has attended.
  • No-Ticket Events. Set up events without the requirement for participants to book tickets. Use Event Espresso for all forms of events, not just those that accept tickets.
  • Private Contact Comments. Keep comments about users on their profile and how you’ve helped your customers. Private notes allows you to keep records of when event participants contacted you, your internal notes, and how you’ve interacted with them.
  • Optimized For The Latest Version Of WordPress. The Event Espresso 4 user interface follows the WordPress guidelines to help you build highly aesthetic event pages that are responsive and mobile-friendly.
  • Country-specific Settings. Event managers can configure the country and currency settings that will be used when running your events, including currency, currency signs, decimal characters and places, country codes, states or provinces, and so on.
  • Exportable Data. You can output all the information gathered from your event attendees into Excel or CSV format for compiling reports, implementing new marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, and so on.
  • Multiple Participant Enrollments. EE 4 allows an individual or people to enroll multiple attendees at the same time. Event managers decide how many attendees can register in one registration by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
  • Event Espresso Community. Event Espresso lets you engage with a community of experienced event managers, web developers, designers, digital marketers and businesses who also use the software. You can network with other members of the Event Espresso community via their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media pages on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
  • Social Sharing. Event attendees and site visitors can tell others about your events using social share buttons.
  • Accurate Event Attendee Manager. You have control of your attendees’ information; who has registered, which event they have registered for and how much they have paid. With the attendee manager, you can get an overview of registered participants and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export a list of attendees to a spreadsheet for additional reports, send customized payment reminders and receipts and send messages to your customers on a person-by-person basis or as a group.

Additional features include:

  • Hooks, Actions And Filters. These features allow web-based software developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso plugin that are compatible with WordPress.
  • Full Logging & Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 lets you create a log file with debugging data that can be helpful for web developers who are troubleshooting.
  • Autonomy, Flexibility & 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 software has been built using a modular and 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 over 40 added features, including:

  • Email shortcodes for including customer data in emails and newsletters.
  • Default surcharge (similar to applying a service fee to tickets).
  • Option to skip the confirmation page in registration.

Event Espresso

Event Espresso Add-Ons

As well as an amazing array of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow software users to further expand the functionality of managing your event.

Some of these add ons include:

  • Events Vector Maps Template Addon: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display scheduled events by location. There are four maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
  • Recurring Events Drop-down Custom Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize events with multiple datetimes into a drop-down list.
  • Events Category Accordion Template Add on: The Category Accordion template shows categories in a simple list. Clicking the category name shows the events associated with that category and closes any previously open categories.
  • Social Media Buttons Add-on: The social media addon displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media add-on is included free with all of the Event Espresso support licenses.
  • Custom Files Add-on: The Custom Files add on lets you bypass certain aspects of the plugin.
  • Seating Chart Add on: The seating chart add on is great 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 addon allows you to offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart add on lets you control the experience for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to each seat.
  • Event Ticketing And Bar Scanning Addon: The Ticketing addon gives you the capacity to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add-on gives you the ability to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing addon includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for handling 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 registrants and to validate tickets.
  • EE4 Events Table Template Addon: The Events Table Template add on provides you with a simple and easy-to-use system that allows you to edit 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 build their own custom templates using one of the included templates as a source template.
  • JSON API Add on: The new Event Espresso JSON API add-on lets other applications, online tools, mobile apps, etc… to access your Event Espresso data through an API (Application Programming Interface).

Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin, including new add ons.

Event Espresso - Event Registration & Ticketing Management

For full details about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website here:

Customer Feedback

Below are some of the many testimonials that plugin users have posted about Event Espresso:

”Event Espresso rocks! I use it for my dance class registrations. Unlike most dance studios where people have to call or send an email in advance, Event Espresso puts a registration form right there in front of the user and allows me to collect valuable information from the user during the registration process with custom questions such as “Do you have previous dance experience?” or “How did you hear about us?”. It also gives my site a professional look and feel.” Ral, Ral’eau Salsa Dance Company

”I have been using Event Espresso to run my festival and have been very happy with how it has worked out. They have provided tremendous support and their iPhone app is amazing and easy to use. I suggest using it for your event.” Alex Grant, Byron Spirit Festival

”I can’t even imagine what I would want the plugin to do that it doesn’t already do. I’m really happy with the features.” Jim Harmer, Improve Photography

Event Espresso - WordPress Event Management And Registration Software

Plugin Tips

Whether you are a motivational speaker, trainer, workshop planner, or event consultant, there are simply unlimited possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.

After purchasing the plugin and becoming a licensed user, go through the user forum for tips and practical suggestions to streamline your event management process and improve the experience of your customers.

Event Espresso

Plugin Support

Event Espresso works with with most WordPress plugins and WP themes that follow standard WP coding rules. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive user support, as so many of its satisfied end-users confirm:

“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

Event Espresso provides great support that includes access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, custom development 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 solid track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can depend on to run and manage your events.

Plugin Pricing

Event Espresso is available in a range of editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software options, however, you will want to consider using one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:

  • Personal License Edition – This license enables you to run Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
  • Everything Licensing – This license option enables you to run Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
  • Developer License – This lets you install Event Espresso on five sites. 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 specials being offered. Currently, the software sells for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest price: Event Espresso – Event Espresso

Note: The pricing above was current at the time this review was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin author when you visit the site.

Additional Plugin Info

The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin. Make sure to remain 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 setting up and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to a specific situation, or to report issues and leave feedback.

For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.

We Recommend

Event Espresso is the preferred WP event booking and ticketing manager plugin, used by thousands of WP website owners.

If you own a WordPress site and you plan to run events that involve managing dates, times and venues (offline and online), enrolling participants, and/or selling tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.

Event Espresso

To learn more, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Management Plugin

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