Do you currently run or plan to run events that require co-ordinating registrations, such as seminars, training courses, charity fund raisers, social functions, 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?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups can be a time-consuming process. You will most likely need to co-ordinate calendar schedules, available dates and spaces, registration numbers, data collection and admin, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders and alerts, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and providing tickets to participants.
There are many advantages to setting up an online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce costs, help you easily duplicate previous events, give event managers more control, improve client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event booking system can be costly.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-based digital presence, you can set up a very inexpensive and highly professional online event registration solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily set up an event and begin processing registrations literally in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and receive online event bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed software that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize registration forms
You can employ a number of event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up selling tickets, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your event participants, or integrating your event registration forms with social media and email marketing software.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is impressively different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the platform has been revamped using a different structure to allow for future growth. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually transition completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
More info:
Benefits
Here are just some of the benefits 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 current website or blog into a fully-featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple pricing options 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 increase your business productivity by literally doing away with the need to process registrations manually.
Essentially, you are making it easier for participants to enrol themselves.
Letting your participants to do the data themselves frees you up from doing admin work and lets you invest more of your attention on delivering a memorable event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon learn, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and registration process that you want your clients to experience.
Additional benefits include the following:
- Reduced Costs: The Event Espresso plugin provides you with an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third party provider. The cost is kept low by using a model where users buy the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and purchase add-ons when you need additional features.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept new signups outside normal business hours. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing add ons (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event invite other people they know who may be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, the event signup process remains wholly in digital form, reducing typical paper waste from tasks related to enrollment.
- Own Your Data. You control all the information obtained from your event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
The Event Espresso software provides functionality to its customers through built-in features (these come with the software) and additional features that users can buy for an additional cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many features to WP users. Here are just some of these:
- Quick and simple to install and set up. Ready to use in no time.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In EE 4, events can have multiple dates and times (datetimes), which these can be managed from a single event.
- Customized Notification Emails. Configure automated booking and payment notification emails to communicate with event clients.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso integrates with several payment gateways, allowing you to collect payments before running the events.
- Smart Single Page Checkout. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is smart, fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically duplicate the primary attendee’s registration information for any additional participants.
- Spam Protection. Reduce the likelihood of spammers and bot software programs creating fake registrations on your web site by using reCAPTCHA tools to validate human activity.
- Mobile Registration & Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system enables you to authenticate tickets, speed up in-venue registrations, create various check-in “stations” and track attendees.
- Event Check-In List. Generate an exportable list of attendees and check in those who have attended.
- Event Manager Pre-approval. Be selective about who can register for your events.
- Private Contact Commenting. Record notes about contacts on their profile. Private commenting lets you keep records of when event attendees contacted you, your internal comments, and how you’ve interacted with them.
- Draft Events. Draft events enable you to build an event in your own time-frame without publishing it to your website. You can work on your event until you are ready to go live, or schedule to publish your event at a later time and date.
- 15+ Languages. Event Espresso is currently available in 15+ languages, and more translations are being added all the time.
- Default Tickets. If you find yourself creating similar tickets for your events, you can automatically set up as your default ticket for all new events simply by checking a box.
- Register Multiple Event Participants. Event Espresso 4 allows one person or people to book multiple participants at the same time. You control how many people are able to register in one registration by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso gives you access to a community of experienced event managers, software programmers, designers, web marketers and businesses who also use the plugin. You can network with other members of the Event Espresso community using their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Staff Manager. Save time and stay organized by reusing team member profiles for multiple events or displaying their profile using a shortcode in an event description.
- Accurate Event Participant Management. You control your participants’ date; who has registered, for what event and how much they’ve paid. With the attendee manager, you can get a quick overview of registered participants and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export an event attendee list to Excel for additional reports, send customizable payment reminders and receipts and send messages to your event participants on a person-by-person basis or collectively.
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.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registration capabilities for normal site visitors when website maintenance is needed. You can still work on the back-end of your site during maintenance mode.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & Value For Money: According to the mission statement on their site, Event Espresso’s aim 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 model 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 added features, including:
- Live-filtering when you search for events within the Event Espresso admin.
- Default surcharge (similar to adding a service fee to tickets).
- Option to skip the confirmation page in the registration process.
Add-Ons
In addition to a very large range of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow end-users to further enhance the capabilities of managing your event.
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, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Template Add-on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes events with many datetimes into a dropdown 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 be customized to display the event thumbnail instead of a date.
- Events Social Sharing Addon: This add on adds social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that lets your attendees to share a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after registration.
- Custom Template Add on: The Custom Template add on lets you display your event lists in a number of visually exciting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add-on Editions: This add on lets you involve other users 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 WP users roles and allow them different permissions with different privileges, allowing others to help you manage your events or the events that others create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain sections of your WP dashboard and/or certain parts 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 addon.
- Multi-Event Registration Add-on: The Multi-Event registration add-on gives potential attendees 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 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 Addon: The Events Table Template addon provides event managers 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 allows developers to build custom templates using one of the templates provided as a source template.
- EE4 Infusionsoft Integration Add on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft integration all-in-one sales and business marketing software add-on, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture registrant data, track registrations, and accept payments from your web site.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin, including new addons.
To learn more about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website:
User Feedback
Here are some of the testimonials that satisfied customers 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 have to say that it has been the right choice for me…I’ve been extremely pleased with the way my site is working.” Robin, RobinTime
”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
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, teacher, workshop promoter, or event consultant, there are simply unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed user, visit the support forum for useful ideas and practical suggestions to improve your event management and registration process or enhance the experience of your participants.
Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with most WordPress 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 support, as many of its clients confirm:
”No complaints here. Satisfied customer. You can teach us all few things about customer service. Thanks!” Charles
Event Espresso provides exceptional support that includes access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, custom development 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 solution you can rely on to run your events.
Software Cost
Event Espresso is available in a number of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin options, however, you should consider using one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This lets you install Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This enables you to install Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This option allows you to set up Event Espresso on 5 domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Pricing for the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, the plugin retails for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest price: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Note: The above reflects the pricing when this article was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin author when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Plugin Info
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the 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 pages for answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to a particular use-case, or to report bugs and share feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WP event registration and ticketing management software, used and trusted by thousands of companies.
If you own a WordPress-powered website and you plan to run an event that requires scheduling dates, times and venues (offline and online), registering participants, or reserving tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso
***