Does your business currently run or plan to run events that require handling bookings or registrations, such as workshops, community courses, not-for-profit fund raisers, marketing events, or even a large-scale event like a dance 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 complex process. You will most likely have to co-ordinate scheduling, event dates, registration numbers, data entry, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to participants.
There are lots of benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily reproduce previously-run events, give event managers more control, improve client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event registration system can be expensive.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-based digital presence, you can easily install a very inexpensive and professional web-based event registration solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticketing Registration Software For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily create an event and start accepting registrations in just minutes.
(Set up multiple events and receive online event bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed software that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
Customize registration forms
You can employ multiple event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your event participants, or integrating your event registration forms with social media sites like Facebook.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their software: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is fundamentally different than the older EE 3, as the platform is being rebuilt using a different structure to allow for future growth and expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually move completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and features of using the plugin.
Learn more about the plugin here:
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 website or blog:
Automated Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing digital presence into a feature-rich and professional event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to attendee limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by practically doing away with the need to process registrations and sign-ups manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating participants to perform the registration themselves.
Allowing your participants to do the data entry frees you up from doing administration and lets you direct more resources on planning a memorable event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn shortly, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management process that you want your attendees to experience.
Additional benefits of the plugin include:
- Reduced Costs: The Event Espresso plugin is a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd-party service provider. The cost is kept to a minimum by using a model where users buy the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and purchase add-ons only when you need added functionality.
- Higher Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new signups any time of day or night. In addition, Event Espresso social features (see below) let people interested in registering for your event invite others who may also be interested in attending.
- Green Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign-up process can be performed wholly online, reducing typical paper waste from tasks associated with administration.
- All Data Belongs To You. You own all the information obtained from event participants.
Features
The Event Espresso software provides functionality to users via standard features (these come with the software) and optional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many built-in to WordPress users. Here are just some:
- Fast and easy to install and configure. Be up and running in minutes.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso lets you configure as many different types of tickets as you need and specify prices, limits on ticket quantities, and more.
- Customized Confirmation Email Message. Easily set up custom automatic registration and payment notification emails to communicate with event registrants.
- Tax Admin & Reporting Options. Event Espresso 4 gives you a number of ways to manage taxes for your event and provide reports of tax fee components to customers when purchasing tickets. You can configure taxes globally or on a per-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your theme and reuse attendee details throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow event managers to create new prices that adjust the default ticket price for your system-default ticket.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system lets you authenticate tickets, speed up door registrations, create multiple check-in “stations” and track attendees.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. EE 4 lets you gain a better understanding of who your clients are and how you’ve done past business with them. Your Contact Profile page records the name, biography, contact details, event registration history, comments, etc. about each client.
- No Ticket Events. Set up events without the requirement for registrants to book tickets. Use Event Espresso for all forms of events, not just those that accept tickets.
- Event RSS Feeds. Keep your customers updated about your events, drive quality traffic and expand your content distribution with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events allow you to develop an event page at your own pace without displaying it live on your site. You can keep developing your events until you are ready to go live, or schedule to publish your event at a future date and time.
- Multi-Language Software. Event Espresso has been translated into over 15 languages, with more translations coming soon.
- Exportable Information. You can output all the information collected from your event customers into Excel or CSV format for compiling reports, implementing new marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, etc..
- Visual Editor. Event Espresso uses the built-in WordPress WYSIWYG editor, so you can quickly and easily add photos and write your content without having to learn HTML or CSS, just like any WordPress post.
- Attendee Profiles. You can manage each attendee’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their data organized.
- Social Sharing. Event participants and your website visitors can help increase exposure for your event using social sharing buttons.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post types. You can also customize the page templates to display event information in your own custom way.
Additional features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming. Event Espresso is simple enough for basic users, and also robust and customizable for enterprise-level users and developers. The bottom line is that by using Object-oriented programming (OOP), Event Espresso 4 allows for more complex developments and customizations to the plugin.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. EE 4 lets you create a log file with debugging data which can be useful for web developers who are troubleshooting.
- Autonomy, Flexibility And Value For Money: 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 objectives, 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 edition of Event Espresso also comes with over 40 added features, including:
- Duplicating events – reduces the work of re-entering event information when adding new events.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing a common set of questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page in registration.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As well as an amazing array of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow plugin users to significantly expand the capabilities of managing an event.
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 available, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Custom Template Addon: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize the events with multiple datetimes into a dropdown list.
- Events Date Range Template Add-on: The Date Range custom event list template lets your users to browse for events that occur in a certain date range.
- Social Media Buttons Add-on: The social media add-on 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 Add-on: The Custom Template add on lets you display your events in a range of visually exciting ways.
- Seating Chart Addon: The seating chart add on is great 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 allows you to promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues right from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart add-on lets you control the environment for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to every seat.
- Event Ticketing Add on: The Ticketing addon adds the capacity to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add on adds the ability to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing add-on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for handling check-in scans at the door. Registrants 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 addon uses the WP calendar to display events and categories of events via an attractive graphical calendar.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp add-on lets you automatically register attendees to a selected mailing autoresponder list or group within your MailChimp account.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin, including new addons.
To learn more about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website:
User Feedback
Here are some of the many great testimonials that users have posted about Event Espresso:
”Event Espresso is so easy to use yet feature rich and stable. It is a cornerstone of our site and our success.” Fraser Barner, Speaker’s Lab
“I just completed my first event using Event Espresso. I really believe without Event Espresso my event would not have been the success it was.” Cathy Earle, Women Only Weekend
”I’m using it on multiple sites and enjoying it. It’s simple and as others have stated… fast service and real help.” Arlen Nagata
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, presenter, show promoter, or event management professional, there are just countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed user, spend a little time visiting the user forum for useful ideas and practical ways to streamline your event management and registration workflow and improve the experience of your event participants.
Support
Event Espresso works with with other WP plugins and WP themes that follow WP coding standards. If you do need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive technical support, as many of its satisfied plugin customers attest:
”No complaints here. Satisfied customer. You can teach us all few things about customer service. Thanks!” Charles
Event Espresso provides comprehensive support that includes access to a support forum, in-depth 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 a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can rely on to organize and manage your events.
Software Price
Event Espresso is available in different editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software options, however, you need to consider purchasing one of the ”Pro” plugin editions below:
- Personal License Edition – This allows you to set up Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This enables you to set up Event Espresso on one domain only. It includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This allows you to set up Event Espresso on five sites. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The cost to purchase the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the plugin is being retailed for the pricing 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 article was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin author when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Plugin Information
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the plugin’s online documentation tools for answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to a specific situation, or to notify developers about bugs and leave feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product website.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event booking and ticketing manager software, used by thousands of people.
If you are a WordPress user and you plan to run events that involve managing dates, times and venues (offline and online), registering attendees, and booking tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Ticket Registration Software
***