Event Espresso

Does your business currently run or plan to run events that require bookings, such as workshops, group courses, non-profit fund-raisers, social conferences, or even a big event such as a concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?

Co-ordinating event bookings is a time-consuming process. You will probably need to co-ordinate event schedules, date availability, attendee numbers, data collection and storage, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders and alerts, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and issuing tickets to participants.

There are a number of benefits to setting up an online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily copy settings for previous events, give you more control, improve user experience and increase your sales.

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

Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-based digital presence, you can install a very inexpensive and highly professional online event booking system.

Introducing …

Plugin Description

The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily create your event and start processing online bookings in a few minutes.

(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and receive online registrations)

Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed plugin that gives you full control over the event registration management process.

Create custom registration forms

You can use a range of event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up selling tickets, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media sites like Facebook.

Access detailed information about your event attendees

Important: Currently, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is fundamentally different than the older Event Espresso 3, as it is being revamped using a different structure to enable future growth. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software 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 read more about the benefits and features of using the plugin.

Learn more here:

Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Manager Plugin

Benefits Of Using Event Espresso

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

Automated Event Registration Management

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

Better Business Productivity

By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by virtually doing away with the chore of processing registrations and sign-ups manually.

Basically, you are facilitating event participants to register by themselves.

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

More Control Over The User Experience

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

Additional benefits include the following:

Reduced Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to building your own system or using a third party provider. This is made possible through a model where Event Espresso users pay for the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then buy optional addons only when you need additional functionality.
Higher Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online sign-ups outside traditional business hours. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing features and addons (see below) let people interested in registering for your event share your information with their friends who may be interested.
Paperless Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, the event registration process can be conducted entirely in digital form, reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks related to enrollment.
Own Your Information. You own all the data you collect from event attendees.

Plugin Features

The Event Espresso software provides functionality to its customers via standard features (these are included with the software) and additional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.

Event Espresso offers many built-in to WordPress users. Here are just some of these:

Quick and easy to install and use. Be up and running in minutes.
Custom Event Registration Form. With Event Espresso you can collect unique information using custom event registration forms on your web site to plan a unique experience for your event participants.
WordPress Event Calendar. Registrants can easily find your upcoming events and add these to their schedule using a WordPress calendar.
Tax Admin & Reporting Options. Event Espresso 4 gives you a number of ways to manage taxes for an event and provide reports of tax fees to customers who purchase tickets. Event managers can administer taxes globally or on a per-ticket basis.
Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your WordPress theme and reuse registrant details throughout other areas of your site.
Default Price Types. Price types allow you to create new prices that adjust the default ticket price for the system-default ticket.
Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system lets you validate tickets, speed up in-venue registrations, create multiple check-in “stations” and track attendees.
Contact Profiles And Contact List. EE 4 provides you with the tools to understand who your customers are and how they have done business with you.
No-Ticket Events. You can set up events without making it necessary for attendees to get tickets. Use Event Espresso for any type of event, not only those that need tickets.
Public Commenting. Add “social proof” by encouraging potential prospects to ask questions about your event and past attendees to post comments that can help others consider whether or not to register. Moderation settings for public comments are configured via the WP built-in commenting admin area.
SEO Friendly Event Page Web Links. Keyword-rich event page Web links leverage your WordPress site’s Permalinks configuration settings. “Pretty” urls with topic-relevant keywords enhance the context of your content and is favored by search engines, helping you bring more traffic to your events.
Your Organization Settings. Configure your organization’s profile to be deployed throughout the plugin and your WP themes. Your organization data include: business name, street address, city, state, country, zip/postal code, primary contact email address, telephone number, VAT/tax number, business logo, Facebook URL, Twitter URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest profile URL, Google+ URL, Instagram URL.
Exportable Data. You can output all of your information collected from event customers into Excel or CSV format for compiling reports, implementing new marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, and so on.
WordPress Visual Editor. Event Espresso uses the default WordPress WYSIWYG editor, allowing you to quickly and easily insert graphic images and write your event descriptions without having to learn HTML or CSS, just like any WordPress post.
Attendee Profiles. Manage your customer’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their data organized.
Team Member Manager. Save time and stay organized by reusing staff profiles for multiple events or displaying profile information such as staff member’s contact information, resume and photo using a shortcode in any event description.
Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post type features such as custom fields, post meta data, taxonomies, etc. You can even customize your page templates to display event information in your own custom way.

Additional features include:

Hooks, Actions And Filters. These allow web-based software developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso application that are fully compatible with the WordPress development platform.
Full Logging, Remote Logging. EE 4 allows you to output a log file with debugging data which can be helpful for web developers who are potential problems.
Autonomy, Flexibility And Value: According to the philosophy stated 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 in the process.

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

Duplicating events – eliminates the need to re-enter event details when creating new events.
Default surcharge (similar to applying a service tax to all tickets).
Default payment status.

Addons

In addition to a comprehensive number of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow software users to significantly enhance 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, it will use a default image.
Recurring Events Management Add on: The Recurring Events management add on enables you to put events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months ahead. You can schedule as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in advance as you want. Event Espresso will automatically open and close registrations for all of your recurring events.
Events Date Range Template Addon: The Date Range custom event list template enables your users to search for events that take place within a certain date range.
Social Media Buttons Addon: The social media addon displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media add on comes free with any of the Event Espresso support licenses.
WP User Integration: The WP User Integration addon lets you take advantage of the WordPress user system. With the WP User Integration addon you can give users a special incentive by offering member pricing and overriding event pricing when your members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered users of the website can have access to your special events. Members can also store personal data into their profile page allowing them fast registration for events by auto-filling in their personal information on the event registration form. Your users can also view past events and make payment for events.
Seating Chart Add on: The seating chart add-on is 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 directly from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart add-on lets you manage the environment for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach single prices to every seat.
Event Ticketing And Bar Scanning Addon: The Ticketing addon adds the capacity to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon gives you the capacity 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. Attendees 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 attendees and to validate tickets.
EE4 Events Table Template Add-on: The Events Table Template add on gives event managers a simple and easy-to-use system that allows you to edit 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 developers to build their own custom templates using one of the included templates as a source template.
Infusionsoft Integration Add on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and business marketing plugin add-on, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture customer data, track bookings, and accept payments from your website.

Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software, including new addons.

For full details about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, visit the plugin website:

Event Espresso

User Feedback

Here are just some of the many testimonials that satisfied customers have written about Event Espresso:

”EventEspresso saves us money, saves our secretary 16-24 hours and looks so professionally done that people ask us how we do it; which we happily tell them, “Event Espresso, and be sure to get the ticketing add-on.”” David, House of Prayer

”…it really does blow everything else that’s out there out of the water.” Chris Reynolds, Arcane Palette Creative Design

”At first we looked at CVENT for one of our clients and they wanted $16,000 per year for 3000 event attendees + fees totaling $22k. That is before Staff and Webinar fees. Worst of all we had to prepay the $16k amount even if we never used all 3000 attendees. That was when we looked at Event Espresso and we realized we could build our own event system for less than 16K. For the most part we have been very satisfied with our decision. The real ROI will come next year when they don’t have to pay another 16k-22K! 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 (Long Version), KT Benefits & InkItDigital.com

Useful Tips

Whether you are a motivational speaker, teacher, workshop promoter, or event management consultant, there are simply countless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.

After purchasing the plugin and becoming a registered user, go through the forums for useful ideas and practical ways to improve your event management process and enhance the experience of your attendees.

Event Espresso Support

Event Espresso is fully compatible with most WP plugins and themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive end-user support, as many of its plugin users 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

Event Espresso provides comprehensive support that includes access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, priority 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.

In addition, 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 manage your events.

Event Espresso Pricing

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

Personal Licensing – This allows you to set up Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
Everything Licensing – This lets you configure Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
Developer License Edition – This allows you to install Event Espresso on 5 domains. It includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 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 special offers. When we last checked, the plugin is being retailed for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso

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.

Event Espresso – Additional Plugin Info

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 software’s online documentation tools for answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to a particular situation, or to report problems and leave feedback.

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

Our Recommendation

Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event booking and ticketing manager software, used by thousands.

If you own a WordPress-powered website and you plan to run events that require managing dates and venues (offline and online), booking participants, and/or selling tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable WordPress plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.