Does your company currently run or plan to run events that require co-ordinating bookings, such as seminars, community classes, not-for-profit fund raisers, social functions, or even a large-scale event like a school concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Managing event sign-ups is a complex process. You will probably need to co-ordinate scheduling, availability, registration numbers, data administration, collecting payments and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders and alerts, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to event attendees.
There are lots of 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 replicate previous events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable user experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be expensive.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-powered website, you can install an inexpensive and highly professional web-based event registration system.
Introducing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily create an event and begin receiving bookings in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and accept online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can employ 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 attendees, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing follow-ups.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Note: Currently, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is fundamentally different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the platform has been revamped using a different structure to enable future growth. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually phase out EE 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and features of using the plugin.
Learn more about the plugin here:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website or blog into a fully-featured and automated event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to attendee limits, multiple price options 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 improve your business productivity by practically eliminating the need to process registrations manually.
Basically, you are facilitating participants to enroll themselves.
Letting your customers to do the data entry frees you up from doing admin work and lets you focus more of your time on organizing a more unique event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will see shortly, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and registration process that you want your users to experience.
Additional plugin benefits include the following:
- Lower Costs: Event Espresso provides you with 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 by using a model where Event Espresso users buy the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then buy add ons when you need added features.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept online event registrations any time of day or night. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features and addons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event invite friends who may be interested in attending.
- Green Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign-up process can remain wholly online, significantly reducing traditional paper waste from tasks related to administration.
- Own Your Data. You own all the data you collect from your event participants.
Event Espresso Features
The Event Espresso plugin provides functionality to end-users via built-in features (these come with the plugin) and optional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many built-in to site owners. Here are just some of these:
- Fast and easy to install and configure. Be up and running in minutes.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso lets you configure as many kinds of tickets as you need and set prices, maximum number of tickets, etc.
- Event Calendar. Customers can easily see your upcoming events and add these to their schedule using a WordPress calendar.
- Ticket Selector. Present multiple ticket options to prospects so they can choose the ticket(s) that best suits their needs.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your WP theme and reuse contact data throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Prices. Create events quickly by pre-configuring default pricing.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 includes three useful in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of booking event attendees when they show up, or send in paper forms for manual registration later.
- Ticketless Events. Promote events without requiring participants to select tickets. Use Event Espresso for any type of event, not just when tickets are required.
- XML RSS Feeds. Keep your customers up-to-date about your events, bring in more visitors and reach a wider number of potential customers with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Draft Events. Draft events let you develop your event page at your own leisure without displaying it live on your site. You can continue developing your event until you are ready to go live, or schedule your event to publish at a later time and date.
- Country-specific Settings. You can configure the country and currency settings that will be used throughout Event Espresso, including currency, currency signs, decimal signs, characters and places, country codes, states or provinces, and so on.
- Bulk Edit Events. Event Espresso 4 provides an advanced importing feature that enables you to import a lot of event data at once. You can export, edit and upload data for events, datetimes, ticketing details, pricing, registration questions, venues, terminology, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Register Multiple Participants. Event Espresso 4 allows a single person or a group to book multiple attendees simultaneously. You control how many attendees can enrol in one registration by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso lets you network with an expert community of event managers and plugin users. You can engage with other members of the Event Espresso community through their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media pages on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential event registrants who have not fully paid for their enrollment 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 yet by name, display the balance they owe, and include a link to the event information, a payment url and a link to download the invoice.
- Transaction Reporting. Event reporting gives you data of all registrations and transactions, allowing you to track the performance of your events with the aggregate number of people who have registered and amount of revenue you’ve collected.
Additional features include:
- Hooks, Actions And Filters. These features allow developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso software that are compatible with the WordPress software platform.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registration capabilities for regular website visitors whenever you need to perform maintenance on your website. You can still work on your event pages during maintenance mode.
- Autonomy, Flexibility And Value For Money: Event Espresso states on their website that their mission 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 modular that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also includes 40+ additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – simplifies the need to re-enter event details when adding new events.
- Default surcharge (similar to applying a service tax to all tickets).
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow customers to significantly enhance the functionality of your event management process.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display the scheduled events by location. There are 4 maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Template Add-on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes many datetime events into a drop-down list.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add-on: The Category Accordion template displays event categories as a simple list. Clicking the category name shows the events associated with that category and closes previously open categories.
- EE4 Events Social Sharing Add-on: Add social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that allows your attendees to share a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after registration.
- Custom Template Addon: The Custom Template addon lets you display your events in a number of visually exciting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add on Versions: This add-on lets you include staff in the event management process and give new users permission 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 assign them different permissions with different privileges, allowing staff to help you manage your events or events that others create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain sections of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain areas of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to allow users to control factors geographically for events and users, use the Roles and Permissions Pro addon.
- Multiple Event Registration Add on: The Multiple Event registration addon gives your potential customers 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 Add-on: The Events Table Template addon provides event managers with an easy-to-use system that allows you to change 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 lets web developers build their own custom templates using one of the included templates as a source template.
- JSON API Add on: The Event Espresso JSON API addon permits other software applications, online tools, mobile applications, etc… to access your Event Espresso data through an Application Programming Interface (API).
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin, including new addons.
For more details about the newest Event Espreso features and add ons, visit the plugin website here:
Customer Feedback
Here are some of the many testimonials that satisfied users have posted about Event Espresso:
”Broadcasting my support for Event Espresso will be a pleasure. I recently helped the Webmaster at a sister church configure your event manager for their site, so I can say with confidence and from experience, that Event Espresso is the best Event Manager plugin ever!” Philip Simpson, The Charlotte Church
”I recently downloaded it to add to a nonprofit site for a Boy Scout troop and the features work wonderfully with what we wanted to accomplish for the site. It allows us to set up calendar, events, and even take payments for trips. At first, I thought that it would be overkill for such a small site, but now I see the possibilities and will definitely be offering Event Espresso to my clients that need an event organization system for their web sites.” Lucy Conn, Troop 462
”Hello. I wanted to say that I’ve purchased Event Espresso twice now for two different organizations and have had great success with the purchases. Outside of photography, I also build small websites with WordPress as the CMS. I built two websites for two different martial arts organizations who host yearly seminars and tournaments. The plug in has provided a way for attendees to sign up online from both Canada and the United States with ease, and also allowed the organizations to easily manage payments, attendee lists, and many other aspects of the events. Thanks to Seth for creating such a great plug in, and for your constant support!” James Zedd, James Zedd Photography
Useful Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, presenter, festival planner, or event management professional, there are just unlimited possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered user, visit the user forum for useful ideas and practical suggestions to streamline your event management and registration process and enhance the experience of your participants.
Support
Event Espresso works with with most WP plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress coding rules. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great user support, as so many of its users confirm:
”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 amazing support with access to a support forum, comprehensive 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.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts an established team of experienced WordPress web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can count on to run your events.
Event Espresso Pricing
Event Espresso is available in a range of editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software features, however, you should consider using one of the paid plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This allows you to configure Event Espresso on one site only. It includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This edition allows you to set up Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This edition enables you to run Event Espresso on 5 domains. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Pricing for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the plugin is selling for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this article was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin developer when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the plugin’s online documentation tools for answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to a specific situation, or to report issues and leave feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product site.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event booking and ticketing management plugin, used by thousands of people.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you plan to run an event that involves scheduling dates and venues, booking participants, or reserving seating, then you will probably not find a better software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management
***