Do you currently run or plan to run events that require co-ordinating registrations, such as seminars, group courses, charity fund-raisers, networking functions, or even a large-scale event such as an exhibition, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event bookings is a complex process. You may be required to manage calendar schedules, available dates and seating, attendee numbers, data collection, payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders and alerts, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to participants.
There are a number of benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower costs, help you easily duplicate similar events, give event managers more control, create a better customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event registration system can be expensive.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-powered web site, you can set up a very inexpensive and professional online event booking system.
Presenting …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress software allows you to easily set up multiple events and begin processing online bookings literally in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and receive online bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed software that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can employ multiple event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up ticket-selling, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media sites like Facebook.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is completely different than the older Event Espresso 3, as it has been redeveloped using a different structure to enable future growth and expansion. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually retire EE 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
More info:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just some of the many benefits and advantages 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 emails, to attendee limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by virtually doing away with the chore of processing registrations and bookings manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for event participants to perform the sign-up process themselves.
Letting your attendees to do all of the data themselves frees up your time and lets you direct more attention on organizing a more enjoyable event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn in a moment, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your participants to experience.
Additional plugin benefits include the following:
- Less Costs: Event Espresso gives you an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own system or using a 3rd party service provider. The cost is kept low through a model where users start with the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then purchase add-ons when you need extra functionality.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept online event bookings outside traditional business hours. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social and marketing features and add-ons (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event invite their friends who may also be interested.
- Paperless Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign-up process can remain wholly in digital form, significantly reducing traditional paper waste from tasks related to enrollment.
- Own Your Information. You control all the data obtained from your event attendees.
Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to its customers through standard features (these are included with the plugin) and additional features that users can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of features to website owners. Here are just some of these:
- Quick and simple to install and set up. Be up and running in very little time.
- Custom Event Registration Forms. With Event Espresso you can gather specific data using a custom event registration form on your website to prepare a tailored experience for your clients.
- Customized Notification Email Message. Easily configure automated booking and payment notification emails to communicate with your clients.
- Tax Administration Options. Event Espresso 4 provides a number of ways to administer taxes for your event and report tax fee components to registrants who purchase tickets. You can configure taxes globally or on a per-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your WP theme and display venue data throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Prices. Create events fast with pre-configured default ticket prices.
- Promotional Codes. Provide promotional and multiple discount codes to incentivize prospects to make a purchasing decision immediately, or make your events more appealing for others. Also useful if you want to sell-out events close to timelines.
- Event Check-In List. Generate an exportable list of participants and check-in those who attend.
- Waiting Lists. Prospective attendees can subscribe to a waiting list if your event has reached the maximum number of participants. You can also make it a requirement wait-list attendees pre-pay if you plan to expand numbers for your event.
- Private Contact Comments. Keep notes about a contact on their profile and how you have assisted them. Private commenting lets you keep a record of when event participants contacted you, your internal comments, and how you have interacted with them.
- Works With The Most Recent Version Of WP. The EE 4 user interface follows the WordPress guidelines to help you build highly aesthetic event pages that are easier to use and mobile-friendly.
- 15+ Languages. Event Espresso can be run in more than 15 languages, and more are being added all the time.
- Default Tickets. If you find yourself creating similar tickets for many of your events, you can automatically set one of those tickets as your default ticket for any new events simply by checking a box.
- WP WYSIWYG Editor. Event Espresso uses the default WP WYSIWYG editor, allowing you to quickly and easily add graphic images and create and edit your event descriptions without having to know HTML or CSS, just like any other WordPress post.
- 1-Click Upgrades. Event Espresso offers simple 1-click upgrades to ensure that you have the newest features and to keep your installation compatible with new versions of WordPress.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential event participants who have not paid in full for their admission with a standard but personalized invoice with one click. Your invoices will address pre-registered attendees who have not paid their registration yet by name, give them the amount they owe, and include links to the event, a payment link and a link to download a PDF invoice.
- Accurate Attendee Manager. You have control of your participants’ date; who has registered, which event they have registered for and what amount they 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 an event attendee list to an Excel spreadsheet for additional uses, send customized payment reminders and receipts and send messages to your customers individually or all at once.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows developers to have more control and options over your event page and how the information displays to your prospects.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. EE 4 lets you output a log file with debugging data which can be helpful for web developers who are troubleshooting.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And 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 mission, the company operates on a modular and effective model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also includes over 40 additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes for including attendee data in confirmation emails and updates.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse commonly asked questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As well as a comprehensive range of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow users to significantly enhance the capabilities 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 an event does not have a featured image available, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Custom Template Addon: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes the events with multiple datetimes into a dropdown list.
- Events Date Range Template Addon: The Date Range custom event list template allows your users to browse for events that take place within a certain date range.
- Social Media Buttons Addon: The social media add-on displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media add on is included free with any of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- Custom Files Addon: The Custom Files add-on allows you to bypass certain aspects of the plugin.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Addon Editions: This add-on lets you include others in the event management process 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 WordPress users roles and give them different permissions with different privileges, so others can help you manage your events or the events that other people create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain areas of your WordPress 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 Add on: The Ticketing add on adds the ability to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add on adds the capacity to scan ticket barcodes. 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. Customers 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.
- EE4 Events Calendar Addon: This addon 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 addon enables other applications, websites, mobile applications, 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 its plugin, including new add ons.
To learn more about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website:
Customer Feedback
Below are some of the many testimonials that customers have written about Event Espresso:
”My hope with this whole integration is to be able to show other school districts an affordable and easy solution to these registrations. I cannot believe how much money they are charged for less by other companies. This has the potential to save schools tens of thousands, which is huge right now.” Kelly, College Station Independent School District
”Event Espresso event management plugin for WordPress is really an awesome plugin.” Cheryl Smithem, Charleston PR & Design
”I’m so excited to fire Eventbrite! Event Espresso has an amazing WP plugin for event management. We’re testing it now & are very impressed! In a nutshell Event Espresso saves us money & does everything Eventbrite did before. :)” Dustin Nay
Useful Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, presenter, show promoter, or event management professional, there are simply countless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed user, visit the user forum for tips and practical ways to streamline your event management and registration workflow and enhance the experience of your attendees.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso works with with most WP plugins and themes that follow standard WP coding rules. If you do need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive end-user support, as so many of its plugin clients confirm:
”It’s magical. Support is amazing, plugin is simple to use, a 3 year old could use the iPhone app…it all is very impressive and professional.” David, House of Prayer
The Event Espresso plugin provides incredible support with access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, one-on-one support and even a monthly VIP member pass giving 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 developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely software you can count on to organize and manage your events.
Product Price
Event Espresso is available in different plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin options, however, you need to consider using one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal Edition – This license option lets you set up Event Espresso on 1 site only. It includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This allows you to configure Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This license allows you to install Event Espresso on five domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The cost of purchasing the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the plugin retails for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current price: Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticket Registration System For WordPress
Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this review was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the site.
Additional Info
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the software’s documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to a specific use-case, or to notify developers about errors and leave feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product web site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event booking and ticketing manager software, used and trusted by thousands.
If you own a WordPress-powered web site and you intend to run any event that involves managing dates and venues (offline and online), enrolling participants, and/or selling tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticket Registration System For WordPress
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