Event Espresso - WordPress Event Management Plugin

Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that need to accept bookings, such as seminars, training classes, charity fundraisers, social conferences, or even a big event such as a dance party, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?

Managing event sign-ups is a complex process. You will most likely need to manage scheduling, event dates, registration numbers, data collection, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders and alerts, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and providing tickets to event registrants.

There are many advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower expenses, help you easily duplicate recurring events, give event managers more control, create a better client experience and grow your sales.

The problem is that setting this up can be very expensive.

The good news is that if you own a WordPress-powered web site, you can download and install a very inexpensive and professional web-based event booking solution.

Presenting …

Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Manager

Plugin Description

The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily set up your event and start accepting online bookings in just a few minutes.

(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and process online bookings)

Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.

Create custom event registration forms

You can use various event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media sites like Facebook.

View detailed information about your event attendees

Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their software: EE 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is considerably different than the older EE 3, as it is being revamped using a different structure to enable future expansion. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually move completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and advantages of using the plugin.

Go here to learn more about the plugin:

Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Ticketing Registration System

Benefits Of Using Event Espresso

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

Hands-Free Event Registration Management

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

Increased 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 chore of processing registrations and sign-ups manually.

Basically, you are enabling participants to complete the enrollment process themselves.

Letting your participants to do all of the data themselves frees up your time and lets you focus more of your resources on delivering a better event.

More Control Over The User Experience

As you will soon learn, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your attendees to experience.

Some additional benefits of the plugin include the following:

Less Costs: The Event Espresso plugin provides you with a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third-party service provider. The cost is kept to a minimum through a model where Event Espresso users purchase the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and purchase add ons when you need added features.
More Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept online event signups 24/7. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social features and addons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event share your information with others who may be interested.
Green And Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, the event registration process can remain wholly online, eliminating traditional paper waste from tasks associated with admin and record-keeping.
All Information Belongs To You. You control all the information you collect from event attendees.

Features

The Event Espresso software provides functionality to its users through standard features (these are included with the software) and optional features that users can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.

Event Espresso offers a number of great features to site owners. Here are just some:

Fast and simple to install and configure. Ready to start using in minutes.
Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In EE 4, events can have multiple dates and times (called datetimes), and these can be managed from a single event.
Customized Confirmation Email Message. Set up automatic registration and payment confirmation emails to communicate with event customers.
Ticket Selector. Present a number of ticket options to prospects and let them purchase the ticket(s) that will best fit their needs.
Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your theme and display registrant details throughout other areas of your site.
Default Prices. Set up events quickly by pre-configuring default ticket pricing.
Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system lets you authenticate tickets, speed up door registrations, set up multiple check-in “stations” and track your participants.
Manual Registration Option. you have the option of booking event participants at the door, or send in paper-based forms for manual registration later.
Event Manager Pre-approval. Be selective about who can register for your events.
Private Contact Commenting. Keep observations about users on their profile. Private notes lets you keep a record of when users contacted you, your internal notes, and how you’ve interacted with your customers.
Optimized For The Most Up-To-Date Version Of WP. The Event Espresso 4 user interface follows the WordPress guidelines to help you create visually enhanced event pages that are easier to use and mobile-friendly.
Country Settings. You can configure the country and currency settings to be used throughout Event Espresso, such as currency name, currency signs, decimal signs, characters and places, country codes, regions, etc.
Exportable Data. You can output all of your information gathered from event attendees into Excel or CSV format for producing reports, devising new marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, etc..
Register Multiple Event Participants. Event Espresso 4 allows one person or a group to register multiple participants simultaneously. You specify how many people are able to enroll in a single session by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
Attendee Records. You can manage each attendee’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their information organized and easily accessible.
Staff Member Management. Save time and keep your information organized by reusing staff member profiles for multiple events or displaying profile information such as team member’s contact information, resume and photo using a shortcode in an event description.
Accurate Participant Manager. You have control of your participants’ date; who has enrolled, which event they have booked and how much they’ve 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 Excel for additional reports, send custom payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your event participants on a person-by-person basis or all at once.

Extra features include:

Hooks, Actions & Filters. These features allow you to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso application that are compatible with the WordPress software platform.
Full Logging & Remote Logging. EE 4 allows you to create a log file with debugging data that can be useful for web developers who are troubleshooting.
Autonomy, Flexibility & Value: According to the philosophy stated on their site, 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 objectives, the company operates on a modular that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.

The premium version of Event Espresso also includes over 40 additional features, including:

Email shortcodes for including registrant data in notification emails and newsletters.
Default surcharge (similar to adding a service fee to all tickets).
Default payment status.

Add-Ons

As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow end-users to significantly enhance the capabilities of your event management system.

Some of these add ons include:

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 Template Addon: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize the events with multiple datetimes into a drop-down list.
Events Category Accordion Template Addon: The Category Accordion template shows the categories in a simple list. Clicking the category name displays the events associated with that category and closes previously open categories.
Social Coupons Integration Add-on: If your site uses Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can also specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
Custom Files Add-on: The Custom Files add-on allows you to bypass certain aspects of the plugin.
Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add-on Versions: This add-on lets you involve staff in your organization to help manage your events and give new users the capacity to create events or regional managers permission 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 your staff can help you manage your events or events that other people 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 create geographic regions for other people to manage events, use the Roles and Permissions Pro addon.
Multiple Event Registration Addon: The Multi-Event registration add-on gives potential attendees the ability to register for multiple events at once. In each event listing attendees 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 Table View Template Add-on: The Events Table Template add-on gives event managers a simple and 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 lets developers build their own custom templates using one of the templates included 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 marketing plugin add on, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture event attendee data, track bookings, and accept payments from your website.

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

For more information about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website:

Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Management Software

Customers – Feedback

Here are a few of the many testimonials that satisfied customers have written about Event Espresso:

”Congratulations on an absolutely fantastic plugin. I’m really impressed with its functionality and add on features and will definitely upgrade my client’s production site to the premium version (when ready for launch) to incorporate all the features. As I have told another client “this plugin is the cat’s meow”.” Pete Mansel

”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

”You guys have done an AWESOME job with this system…promise me to keep up the excellent work you guys are doing, for as long as you can… Respect!” Robert Jarnroth, Jarnroth Digital Productions

Plugin Tips

Whether you are a motivational speaker, teacher, festival planner, or event professional, there are simply unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.

After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, visit the user forum for useful ideas and practical suggestions to streamline your event management and registration process and enhance the experience of your customers.

Event Espresso Support

Event Espresso works with with most WP plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress coding rules. If you find that you need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive support, as many of its satisfied plugin end-users attest:

“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

Event Espresso provides exceptional support including access to support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, priority 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 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 Price

Event Espresso is available in various editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software functionality, however, you need to consider using one of the premium plugin versions below:

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

Pricing for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Presently, the plugin sells for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest price: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Management

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

Event Espresso – Additional Information

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

Search the software’s documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to your specific 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 preferred WP event registration and ticketing manager plugin, used and trusted by thousands.

If you own a WordPress web site and you currently run events that involve scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), registering attendees, or booking tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.