Does your business currently run or plan to run events that need to accept bookings, such as workshops, group classes, charity fund-raisers, corporate functions, or even a large-scale event such as a rave party, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Managing event registrations is a complicated and time-consuming process. You will most likely have to manage scheduling, event dates, attendee numbers, data collection, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders and alerts, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and providing tickets to attendees.
There are many advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower costs, help you easily duplicate previously-run events, give you more control, improve user experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that this can be very expensive.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-based site, you can easily install an inexpensive and professional online event booking solution.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily set up your event and begin accepting bookings in just a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and take online event bookings)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
Customize registration forms
You can use various event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your participants, or integrating your event registration forms with social media and autoresponders.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Note: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso supports 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 it is being redeveloped using a different structure to enable future growth. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software 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 this plugin.
Learn more here:
Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Automated Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing web site into a fully-featured and automated event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to attendee limits, multiple price levels 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 eliminating the chore of processing registrations and sign-ups manually.
Basically, you are facilitating attendees to complete the sign-up process by themselves.
Allowing your clients to do all of the data themselves frees up your time and lets you direct more resources on delivering a more unique event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon see, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and booking process that you want your users to experience.
Some additional benefits include:
- Significantly Lower Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing 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 needs of most users) and purchase add ons only if you need additional functionality.
- More Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept online bookings 24 hrs a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing features and addons (see below) let people interested in attending your event invite their friends who may be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, the event booking process can be conducted entirely in digital form, reducing typical paper consumption from tasks associated with administration.
- All Information Belongs To You. You control all the information gathered from event attendees.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to end-users via built-in features (these come with the software) and additional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers a number of great features to WP users. Here are just some of these:
- Quick and simple to install and use. Be up and running in minutes.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso allows you to create as many kinds of tickets as you want and set prices, ticket quantity limits, etc.
- Event Calendar. Customers can easily see your events and add these to their schedule with the WordPress calendar.
- Tax Administration. Event Espresso 4 provides several options to manage taxes for an event and provide reports of tax fees to customers when purchasing tickets. Event managers can administer taxes globally or on a per-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your WordPress theme and reuse attendee details throughout other areas of your site.
- Spam Protection. Prevent the risk of spammers and bots making fake registrations by using reCAPTCHA settings to provide human validation.
- Discount Codes. You can leverage promotional and discount codes to incentivize visitors to register now, or simply make your offerings more attractive for price-sensitive customers. Also useful if you want to sell out events close to deadlines.
- Manual Registration Option. you have the option of registering event attendees at the door, or send in paper-based registration forms for manual processing later.
- Administrative Pre-approval. Control who can attend your events.
- Private Commenting On Contacts. Record notes about event participants on their profile and how you have interacted with your contacts. Private notes helps you keep a record of when users contacted you, your internal notes, and how you have interacted with your customers.
- Keyword Rich Page URLs. Keyword-rich event page URLs leverage your WordPress Permalinks configuration settings. Search engine friendly urls with relevant keywords add to the context of your content and improves your search rankings, helping you bring a more targeted audience to your events.
- Your Organization Settings. Configure your organization’s profile to display throughout the software and your WordPress themes. Your organization fields include: business name, address, city, state, country, zip/postal code, email, telephone number, tax number, logo, Facebook URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ profile URL, Instagram URL.
- Exportable Data. You can output all of your data gathered from your event attendees into Excel or CSV format for compiling advanced reports, planning marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, etc..
- Event Venue Profiles. The venue manager feature in EE 4 lets information about a venue to appear throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front-end of your site to inform potential registrants of your event’s location. The venue profile displays many of the standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also includes details like venue seating capacity, venue site URL, phone number, venue address, maps, etc. You can also display all of your venues throughout different locations in your WP theme and on a venue listing page on your site where you can set up and reuse venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a specific venue.
- One-Click Updates. Event Espresso provides easy one-click plugin installation updating to make sure that you have the newest features and to keep your plugin installation up-to-date with the latest version of WordPress.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential event registrants who have not fully paid for their admission with a standard but personalized invoice with one click. Your invoices will reference registered customers who have not paid their registration in full by name, display the balance owing, and include a link to the event, a payment link and a link where they can download the invoice.
- Accurate Event Participant Management. You have control of your attendees’ information; who has enrolled, which event they have booked and what amount they have paid. With the attendee manager, you can get a quick overview of registered participants and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export a list of attendees to an Excel spreadsheet for additional uses, send custom payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your clients individually or as a group.
Extra features include:
- Hooks, Actions And Filters. These features allow you to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso plugin that are compatible with WordPress.
- Metabox Management & Organization. Event Espresso leverages the WP user interface, which brings the ability to reorganize the user interface to match your workflow processes. Each control box can be collapsed, re-arranged or removed from your workflow configuration.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & Value For Money: According to the philosophy stated on their web 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 software has been built using a modular and highly efficient 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 40+ added features, including:
- Duplicating events – reduces the need to re-enter event details when adding new events.
- Default surcharge (the same as applying a service tax to all tickets).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow plugin users to significantly enhance the functionality of events.
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 available, a default image will be used instead.
- Recurring Events Management Add-on: The Recurring Events management addon lets you put your events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months ahead. You can schedule as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in advance as you need. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close registrations for all of your recurring events.
- Events Date Range Template Add on: The Date Range custom event list template allows your users to search for events that occur in a certain date range.
- Social Media Buttons Addon: The social media addon displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media addon comes free with all of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- Custom Template Addon: The Custom Template add on can display your event lists in a variety of visually exciting ways.
- Seating Chart Add on: The seating chart add on is for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart add-on lets you promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues directly from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart addon lets you manage the environment for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to every seat.
- Event Ticketing And Bar Scanning Addon: The Ticketing addon gives you the ability to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon gives you the capacity 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 venues. 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.
- Events Calendar Add-on: This add-on uses the WordPress calendar to display events and categories of events in a nice graphical calendar.
- JSON API Add-on: The new Event Espresso JSON API add on allows other software applications, web tools, mobile applications, etc… to access your Event Espresso details through an Application Programming Interface (API).
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software, including new addons.
For more information about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website:
Customers – Testimonials
Here are some of the many great testimonials that plugin users have posted about Event Espresso:
”Congratulations on an absolutely fantastic plugin. I’m really impressed with its functionality and add on features and will definitely upgrade my client’s production site to the premium version (when ready for launch) to incorporate all the features. As I have told another client “this plugin is the cat’s meow”.” Pete Mansel
”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
”Loving the functions and support from Event Espresso. One of the best plugins I’ve ever bought!” Nathan
Plugin Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, trainer, workshop promoter, or event professional, there are simply 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 tips and practical suggestions to streamline your event management and registration workflow and improve the experience of your event registrants.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with most WP plugins and WP themes that follow WP coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent technical support, as so many of its satisfied plugin customers 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
Event Espresso provides incredible support with access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase 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 developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can depend on to run and manage your events.
Software Price
Event Espresso is available in various editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you will want to consider using one of the ”Pro” plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This license allows you to run Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This license option enables you to run Event Espresso on 1 site only. It includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License – This option lets you install Event Espresso on 5 sites. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The cost of purchasing the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. When we last checked, the software is selling for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Manager
Please Note: The pricing above was current when this article was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin developer when you visit the site.
Additional Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the plugin’s documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to your specific use-case, or to report bugs and leave feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event registration and ticketing manager plugin, used by thousands of WP users.
If you own a WordPress web site and you plan to run events that involve scheduling dates, times and venues (offline and online), booking participants, or reserving seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable WordPress plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management
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