Event Espresso

Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that need to accept registrations, such as workshops, community classes, non-profit fund raisers, corporate conferences, or even a big event such as a music show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?

Co-ordinating event registrations is a time-consuming process. You may need to manage scheduling, availability, attendee numbers, data processing, payments and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to event attendees.

There are many advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower costs, help you easily copy settings for previously-run events, give you more control, improve user experience and increase your sales.

The problem is that this can be expensive.

The good news is that if you own a WordPress-based digital presence, you can download and install an inexpensive and highly professional online event registration solution.

Announcing …

Plugin Description

The Event Espresso online event registration WP software lets you easily create multiple events and begin receiving bookings in just minutes.

(Set up multiple events and receive online registrations with Event Espresso)

Event Espresso is a feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.

Customize event registration forms

You can use multiple event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up ticket sales, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media and autoresponders.

View detailed information about your event attendees

Please Note: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is significantly different than the older EE 3, as the software has been revamped using a different structure to accommodate future growth. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually retire Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and features of using this plugin.

More info:

Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Manager

Benefits

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

Hands-Free Event Registration Management

Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website into a feature-rich and professional event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to attendee limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.

Higher Business Productivity

By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically doing away with the chore of processing registrations manually.

Essentially, you are enabling attendees to enroll on their own.

Letting your customers to do all of the data entry frees up your time and lets you focus more of your energy on organizing a memorable event.

More Control Over The User Experience

As you will learn in a moment, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management process that you want your clients to experience.

Some additional plugin benefits include:

Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own solution or using a 3rd party service provider. The cost is kept low by using a model where you buy the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and purchase optional add ons only when you need added functionality.
Higher Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept online event registrations 24 hours a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social and marketing features and add ons (see below) let people interested in attending your event invite their friends who may also be interested.
Green And Paperless Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event registration process is transacted entirely online, eliminating traditional paper consumption from tasks related to enrollment.
All Data Belongs To You. You own all the information you obtain from your event attendees.

Event Espresso Features

Event Espresso provides functionality to its customers via built-in features (these come with the plugin) and additional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.

Event Espresso offers a number of great built-in to website owners. Here are just a few of these:

Fast and easy to install and set up. Be up and running in minutes.
Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In Event Espresso 4, events can have multiple dates and times (datetimes), that these can be managed from a single event.
Customizable Event & Registration Page Designs. You can customize your events and registrations page using Event Espresso’s template options and elements, and HTML or CSS.
Collect Payments. Event Espresso seamlessly integrates with leading payment gateways, allowing you to collect money before running the events.
Google Maps. Google Maps integration enables you to configure the display settings of Google Maps on the event listing and event details sections.
Spam Protection. Prevent the chance of spammers and bots creating false registrations on your site by using reCAPTCHA settings to provide human authentication.
Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system allows you to authenticate tickets, speed up in-venue registrations, set up multiple check-in “stations” and track attendees.
Manual Registration Option. you have the option of registering event participants when they show up, or send in paper-based forms for manual submission later.
No-Ticket Events. Promote events without the requirement for registrants to get tickets. Use Event Espresso for all forms of events, not only those that need tickets.
Private Contact Commenting. Keep observations about a contact on their profile. Private notes helps you keep records of when event attendees contacted you, your internal notes, and how you have assisted your customers.
SEO Friendly Page URLs. Keyword rich URLs leverage your WP site’s Permalinks configuration settings. SEO-friendly web links with relevant keywords enhance the context of your events and is favored by search engines, helping you get more traffic to your website.
Complete Control Of Your Event Management. Event Espresso puts event managers in full control of all aspects of your event’s registration and ticketing, and lets you automate this process with event management tools that include staff and venue manager, customizable event page designs, payment processing, list waiting, attendee limits, print-ready ticketing and more.
Default Tickets. If you create identical tickets for your events, you can automatically set up as your default ticket for any new events simply by ticking a checkbox.
Visual Editor. Event Espresso uses the default WP Visual editor, so you can quickly and easily add photos and format your event descriptions without knowing HTML or CSS, just like any other WordPress post or page.
Registrant Records. You can manage each customer’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their information organized and easily within reach.
Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential event registrants who have not paid yet for their enrollment with a standard but personalized invoice with one click of a button. Your invoices will reference pre-registered customers who have not paid their registration in full by name, display the amount owing, and include a link to the event details, a payment link and a url to download a PDF invoice.
Event Reports. Event reports provides you with information of all the registrations and transactions, enabling you to measure the performance of your events with the aggregate number of people who have registered and amount of revenue has been collected.

Extra features include:

Define Extra Meta Information. This allows developers to have more control and options over the content of your events and how your information displays to your visitors.
Maintenance Mode. Pause registrations for regular website visitors when site maintenance is needed. You can still work on your content during maintenance mode.
Flexibility, Autonomy & Value: 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 edition of Event Espresso also includes over 40 additional features, including:

Live-filtering when searching for events within the Event Espresso admin.
Question groups that make it easy to reuse the same group of questions for similar events.
Default payment status.

Add-Ons

As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow you to further expand 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 allows you to display scheduled events by location. There are 4 maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
Recurring Events Drop-down Custom Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize multiple datetime events into a dropdown list.
Events Category Accordion Template Add on: The Category Accordion template shows categories in a simple list. Clicking a category name displays all events associated with that category and closes any previously open categories.
Social Media Buttons Addon: 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 add-on provides PHP files that allow you to override certain aspects of the Event Espresso plugin.
Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add-on Editions: This add on lets you include staff 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 WP users roles and give them different permissions with different privileges, so others can help you manage your events or events that others create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain areas of your WP dashboard and/or certain areas 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.
Multi-Event Registration Add on: The Multiple Event registration add-on gives potential customers the ability to register for 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 cart. With the Multiple Event Registration add on, attendees can register for several events at once and even add additional attendees to any of the same events in the same checkout process.
Events Table View Template Add on: The Events Table Template add-on provides you with an easy-to-use system that allows you to change the design of your event lists. It comes with a simple table template with category filters, table search, table paging and more. It also enables web developers to design their own custom templates using one of the included templates as a base template.
Infusionsoft Integration Add-on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and marketing plugin addon, you can completely automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture registrant data, track enrollments, and accept payments from your web site.

Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software, including new add-ons.

For complete details about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:

Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticketing Registration System

User Feedback

Below are some of the many great testimonials that satisfied users have posted about Event Espresso:

“It is a very, very slick plugin. It’s one of those plugins where you install it, change a couple of settings, and boom you’re selling tickets.” Brad Williams, WebDevStudios

”Over the next 5-6 years we should be able to claim that we saved the company over $100,000 – Thanks Event Espresso!” David Waterman, KT Benefits & InkItDigital.com

”Event Espresso is very nice and functional plugin. Set it up is not very easy for a beginner like me, but you have one of the best support team in your side. They answer all questions in a timely manor. I didn’t know anything about setting up the plugins, Thanks to Event Espresso Support team that now I can find my way around this plugin. Event Espresso helps our company to manage the workshops, keep track of our students, manage the emails, and much more. We upgrade from personal License to Business license in just two weeks of using Personal license. I strongly recommend the Business license.” Ted Karlsalr, Omnilargess

Event Espresso Tips

Whether you are an education services provider, trainer, conference planner, or event management consultant, there are simply endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.

After downloading the plugin and becoming a registered user, visit the forums for tips and practical suggestions to streamline your event management process or improve the experience of your event attendees.

Plugin Support

Event Espresso is compatible with all WordPress plugins and themes that follow WP coding standards. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive user support, as so many of its clients attest:

”Your plugin saved our client nearly $9000 in development costs because it handled the majority of the functionality we were looking for at a much lower cost. EventEspresso’s staff have been very responsive to our needs when we have them (which has been rare, because the plugin is so well coded). Great job on a great plugin!” Brandon P., Experience Farm

The Event Espresso software provides amazing 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.

Additionally, Event Espresso boasts an established team of experienced web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can depend on to organize and manage your events.

Software Cost

Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin features, however, you will want to consider using one of the ”Pro” plugin editions below:

Personal License – This lets you run Event Espresso on one domain only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
Everything License – This lets you set up Event Espresso on 1 site only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
Developer License – This enables you to set up Event Espresso on 5 sites. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.

Price details for the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Presently, the software retails for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing: Event Espresso – Event Espresso

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 Info

Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.

Use the plugin’s documentation pages for answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to a particular use-case, or to report bugs and give feedback.

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

We Recommend

Event Espresso is the leading WP event registration and ticketing management software, used and trusted by thousands.

If you are a WordPress site owner and you currently run events that involve scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), enrolling attendees, or reserving tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable solution for your needs than Event Espresso.