Do you currently run or plan to run events that need to accept bookings or registrations, such as seminars, community courses, not-for-profit fundraisers, corporate events, or even a big event such as a food fair, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Managing event registrations can be a complex process. You have to co-ordinate scheduling, available dates and spaces, registration numbers, data entry, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders and alerts, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to attendees.
There are many advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce costs, help you easily copy settings for previous events, give you more control, create a better user experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that this can be quite expensive.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-based site, you can easily install a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event registration system.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticketing Registration Software For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily set up your event and start accepting online bookings literally in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and accept online bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed software that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize your event registration forms
You can use several event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up selling tickets, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with an autoresponder system for ongoing notifications.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Note: Currently, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is fundamentally different than the older EE 3, as it is being redeveloped using a different structure to allow for future growth and expansion. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually move completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
More info:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just some of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing online presence into a fully-featured and automated event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating limits, multiple pricing options 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 increase your business productivity by virtually eliminating the need to process registrations and sign-ups manually.
Basically, you are enabling attendees to enrol on their own.
Letting your enrollees to do all of the data themselves frees you up from doing admin work and lets you concentrate more of your attention on organizing a more unique event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover in a moment, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and registration process that you want your clients to experience.
Additional benefits of the plugin include the following:
- Less Costs: Event Espresso is a very inexpensive 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 needs of most users) and then buy add-ons only if you need additional features.
- More Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept new event bookings 24 hrs a day. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features and addons (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with friends who may be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, your event registration process remains wholly online, reducing traditional paper waste from tasks related to admin and record-keeping.
- Own Your Data. You control all the data you collect from your event participants.
Features
The Event Espresso plugin provides functionality to end-users through standard features (these come with the plugin) and additional features that you can buy for an additional cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers a number of great features to web site owners. Here are just some:
- Quick and easy to install and configure. Be up and running in no time.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In Event Espresso 4, events can have many dates and times (datetimes), that these can be managed from a single event.
- Custom Confirmation Emails. Easily configure customized automated registration and payment notification emails to communicate with event participants.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso seamlessly integrates with leading payment gateways, enabling you to collect money prior to running events.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your WordPress theme and display contact data throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Prices. Set up events quickly and easily by pre-configuring system-default ticket pricing.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 comes with three built-in in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Event Check-In List. Generate an exportable list of event attendees and check-in those who attend.
- Waiting Lists. Latecomers can subscribe to a waiting list if your event has reached maximum attendance. Additionally, you can specify that wait-list members pre-pay if you plan to add more capacity for the event.
- Private Commenting On Contacts. Keep observations about event participants on their profile. Private notes enables you to keep records of when users contacted you, your internal observations, and how you have helped them.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events allow you to build your event at your own leisure without displaying it live on your site. You can work on your event pages until you are ready to publish it live on your site, or schedule to publish your event at a future time and date.
- Easy Event Management. Event Espresso puts event managers in complete control of all aspects of your event’s registration and ticketing processes, and allows you to automate the process with event management tools that include staff and venue manager, customizable event page designs, payment processing, list waiting, limits on attendees, printable ticketing and more.
- Exportable Data. You can export all of your information gathered from event customers into Excel or CSV format for compiling advanced reports, devising new marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, etc..
- Visual Editor. Event Espresso uses the built-in WordPress WYSIWYG editor, allowing you to quickly and easily add images and create your content without having to learn HTML or CSS, just like any other WP post.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso gives you access to a community of experienced event managers, developers, web designers, internet marketers and businesses who also use the plugin. You can network with other members of the Event Espresso community using their community chat room, support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Staff Manager. Save time and keep your data organized by reusing team member profiles for multiple events or displaying profile information such as team member’s contact information, resume and photo using a shortcode in your event description.
- Event Reports. Quick-view event reports provides you with information of all 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.
Extra features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for general WP users, and also robust and customizable for higher end users and developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, Event Espresso 4 facilitates more complex extensions and customizations to the plugin.
- Control Box Management & Organization. Event Espresso leverages the WP user interface, which gives you the ability to reorder the user interface to suit your workflow. Each control box can be collapsed, re-arranged or deleted from your workflow configuration.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value For Money: According to the mission statement on their website, Event Espresso’s objective 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 model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also comes with 40+ additional features, including:
- Live-filtering when you search for events within the Event Espresso admin.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse a series of questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As well as a comprehensive array of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow software users to further expand the functionality of events.
Some of these addons 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, a default image will be used.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Template Add-on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes events with multiple datetimes into a drop-down list.
- 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 be customized to display an event thumbnail instead of the date.
- 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 addon provides PHP files that let you override certain aspects of the plugin.
- 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 WordPress users roles and allow them different permissions with different capabilities, allowing others to help you manage your events or events that others create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain parts of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain sections of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to allow users to have geographic responsibilities for events and users, use the Roles and Permissions Pro add-on.
- EE4 Event Ticketing And Bar Scanning Add-on: The Ticketing add-on adds the capacity to create 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 handling 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 registrants and to validate tickets.
- Events Table Template Add on: The Events Table Template add on gives you an easy-to-use system that allows you to change the look and feel of your event lists. It comes with a simple table template with category filters, table search, table paging and more. It also allows web developers to design their own custom templates using one of the templates provided as a source template.
- EE4 Infusionsoft Integration Add on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and business marketing software addon, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture registrant data, track enrollments, and accept payments from your website.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin, including new add ons.
To learn more about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, visit the plugin website here:
Customer Feedback
Below are some of the many great testimonials that satisfied customers have posted about Event Espresso:
”My clients have used Event Espresso for Transportation (Cadet Bus for leave), Parties (tailgates and brewery tours), and Horse-back riding lessons and camps. What a terrific plug-in and fantastic support from Seth!” Nina, Blue Iris Web Design
”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
”Event Espresso plugin still rocks. Saw you guys were up for the WP Honors too. Glad I paid for it! If you need event management on your WordPress site I recommend Event Espresso.” Patrick Allmond, Focus Consulting
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, teacher, seminar 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, search the forums for tips and practical ways to streamline your event management and registration workflow or enhance the experience of your event participants.
Support
Event Espresso works with with other WP plugins and themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent technical support, as so many of its satisfied plugin end-users confirm:
”No complaints here. Satisfied customer. You can teach us all few things about customer service. Thanks!” Charles
Event Espresso provides robust support including access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, premium 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 a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can depend on to manage your events.
Event Espresso Cost
Event Espresso is available in different editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software options, however, you will want to consider downloading one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This edition allows you to set up Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This option allows you to configure Event Espresso on 1 site only. It includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This edition enables you to configure Event Espresso on five domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Pricing for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Presently, the software is selling for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticket Registration Software For WordPress
Please Note: The pricing above was current at the time this review was written. This may not be the actual price 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 its software. 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 the support forums if you have questions related to your specific situation, or to notify developers about issues and share feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product web site.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event registration and ticketing management software, used by thousands.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you plan to run any event that involves managing dates and venues, registering attendees, or reserving tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better WP plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
***
