Do you currently run or plan to run events that require registrations, such as workshops, group courses, not-for-profit fund raisers, social events, or even a big event such as a food fair, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Managing event registrations can be a complex process. You need to manage scheduling, available dates and seating, participant numbers, data entry, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to attendees.
There are lots of benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower costs, help you easily duplicate repeat events, give you more control, improve client experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event booking system can be very costly.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-powered website, you can easily set up a very inexpensive and professional online event registration system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily set up multiple events and begin processing online bookings in just a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and accept online event registrations)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize event registration forms
You can use a range of event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your participants, or integrating your event registration forms with social media and autoresponders.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is fundamentally different than the older EE 3, as it has been rebuilt using a different structure to enable future growth. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually phase out Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and features of using this plugin.
Learn more here:
Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Automated Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website or blog into a fully-featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by virtually doing away with the need to process registrations manually.
Basically, you are enabling participants to perform the registration by themselves.
Allowing your attendees to do all of the data entry frees up your time and lets you invest more resources on planning a more enjoyable event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon learn, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management process that you want your clients to experience.
Additional benefits and advantages include the following:
- Significantly Lower Costs: Event Espresso is a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to building your own solution or using a 3rd party provider. This is made possible through a model where users buy the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then purchase add ons when you need added features.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept new bookings outside traditional business hours. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing addons (see below) let people interested in attending your event invite others who may be interested.
- Paperless Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, the event booking process is completed entirely in digital form, reducing typical paper consumption from tasks associated with administration.
- All Information Belongs To You. You own all the information gathered from event attendees.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to users via standard features (these are included with the software) and additional features that customers can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of features to WordPress users. Here are just some of these:
- Quick and simple to install and implement. Ready to start accepting registrations in no time.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso allows you to configure as many types of tickets as you need and specify separate prices, limits on ticket quantities, etc.
- Custom Notification Emails. Configure automatic registration and payment confirmation emails to communicate with event clients.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso integrates with payment gateways, enabling you to collect payments prior to running the events.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your theme and display contact details throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow you to create new prices that adjust the default ticket price of the system-default ticket.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system lets you authenticate tickets, speed up door registrations, create various check-in “stations” and track participants.
- Manual Registration Option. you have the option of registering event participants at the door, or sending in paper-based registration forms for manual registration later.
- Admin Pre-approval. Be selective about who can participate in your events.
- Private Commenting On Contacts. Record comments about contacts on their profile. Private commenting allows you to keep records of when users contacted you, your internal observations, and how you’ve helped them.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events let you build an event page at your own pace without displaying it live on your site. You can work on your event until you are ready to publish it live on your site, or schedule your event to publish at a future time and date.
- Easy Event Management. Event Espresso puts event managers in full control of all aspects of an event’s registration and ticketing processes, and lets you automate the process with event management tools that include staff and venue manager, customizable event designs, payment processing and handling, list waiting, limits on attendees, printable ticketing and more.
- Exportable Data. You can export all the information collected from event attendees into Excel or CSV format for creating reports, implementing marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, and so on.
- WordPress WYSIWYG Editor. Event Espresso uses the standard WP Visual editor, so you can quickly and easily add images and write your content without knowledge of HTML or CSS, just like any typical WordPress post.
- Automatic Plugin Upgrading. Event Espresso offers simple one-click software updating to make sure that you have the latest features and to keep your software installation compatible with new versions of WordPress.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential customers who have not made payment for their registration with a standard but personalized PDF invoice with one click of a button. Your invoices will address registered participants who have not paid their registration in full by name, give them the balance owing, and include a link to the event, a payment link and a url to download a PDF invoice.
- Categorize Events. If you have several different event types like free and paid, workshops and breakout sessions, different kinds of exercise classes, etc. you can categorize them to help event attendees to locate what they’re searching for. You can list all the events in a category on an event category page, make events searchable by category, and colour-code events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make them easier to find, in addition to suggesting other events in the categories that interest your existing customers.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows web-based software developers to have more control and options over your content and how the information displays to prospective event attendees.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. EE 4 allows you to create a log file with debugging data which can be helpful for developers who are troubleshooting.
- Autonomy, Flexibility And Value For Money: According to the mission statement on their web site, Event Espresso’s goal 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 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 40+ added features, including:
- Email shortcodes that includes registrant data in notification emails and email newsletters.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse the same group of questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow end-users to significantly expand the functionality of your event management process.
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 available, a default image will be used.
- Recurring Events Manager Add-on: The Recurring Events management addon enables you to put events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months ahead. You can schedule as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in advance as you need. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close bookings for all recurring events.
- Events Category Accordion Template Addon: The Category Accordion template shows categories in a simple list. Clicking the category name displays the events associated with that category and closes previously open categories.
- Social Media Buttons Add-on: The social media addon displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media add-on comes free with all of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- Custom Files Addon: The Custom Files addon allows you to bypass certain aspects of the Event Espresso plugin.
- Seating Chart Add on: The seating chart add on is great 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 addon allows you to promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues right from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart add-on lets you control the experience for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach single prices to each seat.
- Multiple Event Registration Add-on: The Multi-Event registration add-on gives your 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 cart. With the Multiple 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 provides you with a simple and easy-to-use system that lets you modify 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 design custom templates using one of the templates provided as a source template.
- MailChimp Integration Add on: The MailChimp add-on lets you automatically register attendees to a specified autoresponder list or group within your MailChimp account.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin, including new add ons.
For complete details about the newest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
User Testimonials
Below are some of the many great testimonials that plugin users 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
”I can’t even imagine what I would want the plugin to do that it doesn’t already do. I’m really happy with the features.” Jim Harmer, Improve Photography
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, presenter, event promoter, or event professional, there are just endless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a registered owner, spend a little time going through the user forum for tips and practical suggestions to streamline your event management and registration workflow and improve the experience of your event registrants.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with other WordPress plugins and WP themes that follow standard WP coding rules. If you find that you need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent support, as 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
Event Espresso provides robust support that includes access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base 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 WordPress web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely software you can depend on to organize and manage your events.
Plugin Cost
Event Espresso is available in a range of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software functionality, however, you should consider downloading one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This enables you to configure Event Espresso on one site only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This license lets you run Event Espresso on one site only. It includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Edition – This edition enables you to configure Event Espresso on five sites. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The cost of purchasing the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the software sells for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing: Event Espresso – Event Management & Registration Software For WordPress
Please Note: The pricing above was current when this article was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding 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.
Search the software’s documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to your particular situation, or to report problems and give feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event booking and ticketing management software, used by thousands of people.
If you own a WordPress web site and you plan to run an event that involves managing dates and venues, registering participants, and selling tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticket Registration System For WordPress
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