Event Espresso - WordPress Event Management Plugin

Do you currently run or plan to run events that need to accept registrations, such as seminars, community courses, charity fund raisers, corporate events, or even a large-scale event like a community festival, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?

Co-ordinating event registrations is a complex process. You have to manage scheduling, date availability, participant numbers, data entry, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders and alerts, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and issuing tickets to event registrants.

There are many benefits to setting up an automated web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower costs, help you easily replicate previous events, give you more control, create a better client experience and grow your sales.

The problem is that setting up an online event booking system can be costly.

Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-powered web site, you can download and install an inexpensive and highly professional online event booking solution.

Presenting …

Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticketing Registration Plugin For WordPress

Plugin Description

The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress plugin lets you easily create an event and start receiving online registrations literally in minutes.

(Set up multiple events and accept online event bookings with Event Espresso)

Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you full control of the event registration management process.

Create custom registration forms

You can employ several event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your event participants, or integrating your event bookings with social media and autoresponders.

View detailed information about your event attendees

Important: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their software: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is significantly different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the software is being redeveloped using a different structure to allow for future growth. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually retire EE 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.

For more details, visit the plugin site here:

Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticket Registration Plugin

Plugin Benefits

Here are just some of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:

Hands-Free Event Registration Management

Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website or blog into a fully-featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.

Higher Business Productivity

By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically doing away with the need to process registrations manually.

Essentially, you are facilitating participants to register themselves.

Allowing your participants to do the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you focus more of your energy on planning a more enjoyable event.

More Control Over The User Experience

As you will soon see, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and registration process that you want your customers to experience.

Additional plugin benefits include:

Reduced Costs: Event Espresso provides you with a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd party service. The cost is kept to a minimum through a model where you start with the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and purchase add-ons when you need extra functionality.
Higher Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept new signups any time of day or night. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social features (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event share your information with other people they know who may be interested in attending.
Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign-up process can be transacted wholly in digital form, eliminating typical paper waste from tasks associated with enrollment.
Own Your Information. You control all the information acquired from your event participants.

Event Espresso Features

Event Espresso delivers functionality to end-users via standard features (these come with the plugin) and additional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.

Event Espresso offers many features to web site owners. Here are just some:

Fast and simple to install and implement. Be up and running in minutes.
Customized Event Registration Form. With Event Espresso you can collect unique information using custom event registration forms on your web pages to plan a tailored experience for your users.
Customized Notification Emails. Set up automated registration and payment notification email messages to communicate with event participants.
Collect Payments. Event Espresso seamlessly integrates with leading payment gateways, allowing you to collect payments prior to running the events.
Google Maps. Google Maps integration enables event managers to customize the display settings of Google Maps on the event listing and event details pages.
Default Prices. Create events quickly with pre-configured system-default ticket pricing.
In-App Documentation Systems. Event Espresso 4 comes with three useful in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
Manual Registration. you have the option of booking event attendees at the door, or sending in paper registration forms for manual submission later.
Waiting Lists. Interested persons can join a waiting list if your event has reached the limit of participants. Additionally, you can make it a requirement wait-listed registrants pre-pay if you plan to expand numbers for your event.
Event RSS Feeds. Keep your customers updated about your events, drive quality traffic and reach a wider audience with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
Optimized For The Most Recent Version Of WordPress. The EE 4 user interface follows the WordPress guidelines to help you build beautifully-designed event pages that are easier to use and mobile-friendly.
Country Settings. You can configure the country and currency settings that will be used throughout Event Espresso, including currency name, currency symbols, decimal signs, characters and places, country codes, states or provinces, and so on.
Exportable Information. You can export all of your data gathered from event customers into Excel or CSV format for producing reports, devising marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, and so on.
Register Multiple Event Attendees. EE 4 allows a single person or people to enroll multiple attendees at once. Event managers decide how many attendees are able to enroll in a single registration by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
Registrant Profiles. You can manage each customer’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their data organized.
Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential attendees who have not fully paid for their admission with a standard but personalized PDF invoice with one click of a button. Your invoices will reference registered participants who have not paid their registration yet by name, give them the balance owing, and include a link to the event details, a payment link and a url where they can download the invoice.
Accurate Event Participant Manager. You have control of your attendees’ records; who has registered, which event they have booked and what amount they have paid. With the attendee manager, you can get an overview of registered attendees and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export an attendee list to a spreadsheet for additional uses, send customizable payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your event registrants on a person-by-person basis or collectively.

Extra features include:

Hooks, Actions And Filters. These allow developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso software that are compatible with WordPress.
Control Box Management & Organization. Event Espresso lets you leverage the WordPress user interface, which gives you the ability to reorder the user interface to match your workflow. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or deleted from the page.
Flexibility, Autonomy 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 goals, the company operates on a modular that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.

The premium version of Event Espresso also includes 40+ added features, including:

Live-filtering when you search for events in the Event Espresso admin.
Question groups that make it easy to reuse a group of questions for similar events.
Category titles and descriptions on event listings.

Addons

As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow customers to further enhance the functionality of the event management process.

Some of these add-ons include:

Events Vector Maps Template Add-on: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display all upcoming events by location. Four maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
Recurring Events Drop-down Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes the events with many datetimes into a drop-down list.
Events Calendar Table Template Add on: The Calendar Table template is a list template with a bold date and customizable “register now” button. The template can also be customized to show the event thumbnail instead of a date.
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 any of the Event Espresso support licenses.
Custom Files Addon: The Custom Files add on provides PHP files that allow you to override certain aspects of the Event Espresso plugin.
Seating Chart Add-on: The seating chart addon 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 add on lets you offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart add on lets you manage the experience for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to every seat.
Multi-Event Registration Addon: The Multiple Event registration add-on gives potential customers the ability to book multiple events at once. In each event listing registrants will be given the option to either register for a single event or add multiple events to their shopping cart. With the Multi-Event Registration addon, attendees can register for several events at once and even add additional attendees to any of the same events in the same checkout process.
EE4 Events Calendar Add-on: This add on uses the WP calendar to display events and categories of events in a nice graphical calendar.
MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp addon allows you to automatically register participants to a specified autoresponder list or group within MailChimp.

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 add-ons, visit the plugin website:

Event Espresso

User Testimonials

Below are a few of the many testimonials that satisfied plugin users have written about Event Espresso:

”Tri-South, Inc is using Event Espresso to manage the course catalog, event ticketing, and class registration. [As their developer] I have customized a few items to make the site and plugin a seamless integration. The client is very pleased!” Jenifer Design

”This really is a hell of a plugin. For me, it’s probably the final nail in the coffin for Joomla, as WP can now pretty much do EVERYTHING Joomla does, but better. Love the simplicity of this plugin!” Sam, Web Contempo

”Just bought an Event Espresso license for an upcoming conference website we are working on. The custom registration forms functionality rocks!” Eric Sopp, Inside Design

Plugin Tips

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

After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered owner, go through the forums for useful ideas and practical suggestions to improve your event management workflow or enhance the experience of your customers.

Support

Event Espresso works with with most WP plugins and WordPress themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you find that you need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent customer support, as so many of its 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

The software provides great support including access to support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, premium 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 web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can depend on to organize and manage your events.

Software Pricing

Event Espresso is available in a number of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin options, however, you will want to consider purchasing one of the premium plugin versions below:

Personal License – This license option enables you to configure Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
Everything License Edition – This edition enables you to set up Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
Developer License – This enables you to install Event Espresso on five sites. It includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 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. Presently, the plugin is selling for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticket Registration Software For WordPress

Please Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this review was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the website.

Event Espresso – Additional Information

Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.

Look up the plugin’s online documentation tools for answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to your specific situation, or to report problems and share feedback.

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

Our Recommendation

Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event booking and ticketing management software, used and trusted by thousands of users.

If you are a WordPress user and you plan to run events that require scheduling dates and venues, booking participants, or booking tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable WP plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.