Does your company currently run or plan to run events that require managing bookings, such as workshops, training classes, non-profit fund-raisers, corporate events, 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?
Managing event bookings is a complicated and time-consuming process. You need to manage event schedules, event dates, registration numbers, data administration, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to attendees.
There are many benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce costs, help you easily reproduce similar events, give event managers more control, create a more enjoyable client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event registration system can be very expensive.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-based web site, you can download and install a very inexpensive and professional online event booking system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Registration System
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily create an event and start accepting registrations in just a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and receive online event bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich application that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize event registration forms
You can use various event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up ticket-selling, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your event participants, or integrating your event registration forms with social media sites like Facebook.
View detailed information about event attendees
Note: Currently, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is completely different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the platform has been rebuilt using a different structure to accommodate future expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually retire Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
Learn more about the plugin here:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits 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 existing website into a feature-rich and professional event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to attendee limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by virtually eliminating the chore of processing registrations manually.
Basically, you are facilitating participants to complete the registration process on their own.
Allowing your participants to do the data themselves frees up your time and lets you spend more energy on planning a more unique event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn shortly, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management process that you want your customers to experience.
Some additional benefits include:
- Significantly Lower Costs: Event Espresso is a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd-party provider. The cost is kept to a minimum through a model where Event Espresso users pay for the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and buy add ons only when you need extra functionality.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept online event registrations outside traditional business hours. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with others who may also be interested in attending.
- Green Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign-up process remains wholly in digital form, significantly reducing typical paper consumption from tasks associated with enrollment.
- Own Your Information. You own all the data you acquire from your event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
The Event Espresso plugin provides functionality to users via standard features (these are included with the software) and optional features that you can buy for an additional cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many features to web site owners. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and simple to install and configure. Be up and running in no time.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In EE 4, events can have many dates and times (datetimes), which these can be managed from a single event.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Customers can easily find your events and add these to their schedule using the WordPress calendar.
- Ticket Selector. Present a number of ticket options to prospective registrants and let them choose the ticket(s) that will best fit their needs.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration allows you to customize the look and control settings of Google Maps on your event listing and event details pages.
- Default Price Types. Price types let you create new prices that adjust the default ticket pricing for your default ticket.
- Promotional Codes. Provide promotional and multiple discount codes to encourage people to make a purchasing decision now, or simply make your offerings more attractive for others. This is also practical if you want to sell-out events close to deadlines.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of participants and check in everyone who has attended.
- Admin Pre-approval. Control who can and cannot attend your events.
- Public Commenting. Add social engagement to your events pages by allowing potential attendees to ask questions about your event and past participants to post comments that can help others decide whether or not to sign up. Moderation settings for commenting are configured via the WP commenting settings.
- Draft Events. Draft events enable you to develop your event over time without displaying it live on your site. You can continue working on your events until you are ready to publish it on your site, or schedule to publish your event at a later date and time.
- Easy Event Management. Event Espresso puts event managers in complete control of all aspects of an event’s registration and ticketing processes, and also lets you automate the process with event management tools that include staff and venue management, custom event page designs, payment processing and handling, wait lists, attendee limits, printable ticketing and more.
- Bulk Import Event Information. Event Espresso 4 provides an advanced importing capability that enables you to upload bulk event data all at one time. You can export, edit and upload information about events, datetimes, tickets, prices, custom registration questions, venues, terms, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Event Venue Manager. The venue manager in EE 4 allows information about a venue to be made available throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front end of your website to inform attendees of your event’s location. The venue profile displays many of the standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also displays details such as venue capacity, venue website, phone number, physical, location map, etc. You can also display all of your event venues on different locations of your WordPress theme and on a venue archive page on your site where you can set up and publish venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a given venue.
- Automatic Software Updating. Event Espresso provides easy one-click plugin installation updating to make sure that you have the latest features and to keep your plugin installation working with new versions of WordPress.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential event customers who have not made payment for their booking with a standard but personalized PDF invoice with just one click of a button. Your invoices will reference pre-registered attendees who have not paid their registration in full by name, give them the balance they owe, and include a link to the event information, a payment link and a link where they can download a PDF invoice.
- Event Reports. Quick-view event reports provides you with information of all registrations and transactions, allowing you to measure the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and how much money has been collected.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows web developers to have more control and options over the content of your event page and how the information displays to your prospects.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. EE 4 lets you create a log file with debugging data that can be helpful for web developers who are diagnosing errors.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & Value: 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 objectives, the company operates on a modular and effective model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium version of Event Espresso also provides you with 40+ added features, including:
- Duplicating events – reduces the need to re-enter event data when adding new events.
- Default surcharge (the same as adding a service tax to tickets).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Add ons
In addition to an amazing range of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow you to significantly enhance the functionality of managing your event.
Some of these add ons 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 Drop-down Template Add-on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes events with multiple 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 also be customized to display the event thumbnail image instead of a date.
- Events Social Sharing Addon: Add 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 booking.
- Custom Template Add on: The Custom Template addon is capable of displaying your events in a variety of exciting and interesting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add-on Versions: This addon lets you include other users in your organization to help manage your events and give new users the ability 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 assign 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 users do not have access to certain parts of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain sections 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 add-on.
- Multiple Event Registration Add-on: The Multiple Event registration addon gives potential attendees 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 shopping cart. With the Multi-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.
- EE4 Events Calendar Add on: This addon uses the WP calendar to display events and categories of events via a nice graphical calendar.
- EE4 Infusionsoft Integration Add on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and marketing software add on, you can completely automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture registrant data, track enrollments, and accept payments from your website.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add-ons.
For full details about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website here:
Plugin Users – Feedback
Here are just some of the many great testimonials that satisfied plugin users 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
”Event Espresso event management plugin for WordPress is really an awesome plugin.” Cheryl Smithem, Charleston PR & Design
”Event Espresso plugin still rocks. Saw you guys were up for the WP Honors too. Glad I paid for it! If you need event management on your WordPress site I recommend Event Espresso.” Patrick Allmond, Focus Consulting
Plugin Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, trainer, concert promoter, or event professional, there are simply unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a registered owner, visit the support forum for inspiration and practical ways to streamline your event management and registration process or improve the experience of your customers.
Product Support
Event Espresso is compatible with other 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 plugin users attest:
”These guys are right on any problem or issue or even general questions. You can’t really put a value high enough on the kind of support these guys offer.” Mark Wigston, Muskoka Graphics
Event Espresso provides incredible support including access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, one-on-one 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 a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can rely on to run your events.
Plugin Price
Event Espresso is available in a range of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software options, however, you may want to consider purchasing one of the premium plugin versions below:
- Personal Edition – This enables you to configure Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This edition enables you to set up 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 – This edition lets you configure Event Espresso on 5 domains. It includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Pricing details of the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the plugin is being retailed for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Manager
Please Note: The pricing above was current at the time this article was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the site.
Additional Info
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the software’s online documentation tools for answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to your particular use-case, or to report issues and leave feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product website.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event registration and ticketing manager plugin, used and trusted by thousands.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you plan to run any event that involves scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), booking attendees, or booking seating, then you will probably not find a better plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso
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