Do you currently run or plan to run events that require registrations, such as seminars, group courses, non-profit fund-raisers, marketing functions, or even a big event such as an arts & crafts, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event bookings can be a complicated and time-consuming process. You will most likely need to co-ordinate calendar schedules, available dates and seating allocations, participant numbers, data collection, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders and notifications, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and issuing tickets to event registrants.
There are lots of benefits to setting up an online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower costs, help you easily reproduce previous events, give event managers more control, improve customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event registration system can be quite costly.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-based web site, you can easily set up a very inexpensive and highly professional online event registration solution.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Registration System
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress software allows you to easily set up an event and begin accepting registrations literally in minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and accept online event registrations)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can use multiple event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media and autoresponders.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Important: Currently, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is completely different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the plugin is being redeveloped using a different structure to enable future expansion. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually phase out Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current website or blog into a feature-rich and professional event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by literally doing away with the chore of processing registrations and signups manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for attendees to perform the registration by themselves.
Letting your enrollees to do the data entry frees you up from doing administration and lets you spend more resources on organizing a better event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon see, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and registration process that you want your attendees to experience.
Some additional benefits include:
- 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 service provider. This is made possible by using a model where users purchase the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then buy addons only if you need added functionality.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new registrations 24/7. In addition, Event Espresso social and marketing add-ons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event invite their friends who may be interested.
- Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign-up process can be completed wholly online, significantly reducing typical paper waste from tasks associated with admin and record-storage.
- All Data Belongs To You. You control all the information gathered from your event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to users through built-in features (these are included with the software) and optional features that you can buy for an additional cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of great features to site owners. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and easy to install and configure. Ready to start using in minutes.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso allows you to set up as many different types of tickets as you need and specify unique pricing options, number of tickets, etc.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Attendees can easily see your upcoming events and add these to their schedule with the calendar.
- Tax Administration Options. Event Espresso 4 gives you a number of ways to handle taxes for an event and provide reports of tax fee components to registrants when purchasing tickets. Event managers can administer taxes globally and on a per-ticket basis.
- Smart Single Page Checkout. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically copy the primary attendee’s registration information for any additional registrants.
- Default Prices. Create events quickly with pre-configured system-default ticket pricing.
- Promotional Codes. Provide promotional and discount codes to incentivize visitors to take action without delays, or make your events more affordable for price-sensitive customers. Also useful if you want to increase sales of events close to timelines.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. EE 4 lets you understand who your customers are and how they have done business with you.
- No-Ticket Events. You can set up events without the requirement for registrants to get tickets. Use Event Espresso for any form of event, not just when tickets are needed.
- Private Comments On Contacts. Keep observations about contacts on their profile and how you have helped them. Private commenting lets you keep records of when users contacted you, your internal notes, and how you have helped them.
- Search Engine Friendly Event Page Web Links. Keyword-rich Web links take advantage of your Permalinks configuration settings. Search engine friendly web links that include topic-relevant keywords add to the context of your events and is favored by search engines, helping you bring more traffic to your site.
- Country Settings. You can configure the country and currency settings to be used when hosting events, such as currency name, currency signs, decimal characters and places, country codes, regions, etc.
- Bulk Import Events. EE 4 provides a CSV-based importing feature that allows you to import a lot of event data all at one time. You can export, edit and upload information about events, datetimes, ticketing information, prices, registration questions, venue info, terminology, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Event Venue Management. The venue management feature in Event Espresso 4 lets details about venues to be made available throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front end of your site to inform site visitors of your event’s location. The venue record has many standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also lets you add details like venue capacity, venue web address, venue phone number, physical, maps, etc. You can also display all of your event venues in specific parts of your theme as well as on a venue archive page on your website where you can set up and reuse venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a particular venue.
- Attendee Records. Manage your registrant’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their data organized.
- Staff Management. 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 an event description.
- Categorize Events. If you have a number of types of events like free and paid, conference speakers and breakout sessions, different types of exercise classes, etc. you can categorize these to help event participants to find what they’re searching for. You can display all events in a category on an event category page, make events searchable by category, and colour-code your events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make them easier to find, as well as suggesting new events in the categories that interest your visitors.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows web developers to have more control and options over your events and how the information displays to your prospective customers.
- Metabox Management & Organization. Event Espresso lets you leverage the WP user interface, which gives you the ability to reorder the user interface to suit your workflow. Each control box can be collapsed, re-arranged or deleted from your workflow configuration.
- Flexibility, Autonomy 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 objectives, the software has been built using 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+ added features, including:
- Live-filtering when you search for events in the Event Espresso admin.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing commonly asked questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page during the registration process.
Addons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow end-users to significantly expand the functionality of your event management system.
Some of these add-ons include:
- Events Grid Template Addon: Displays events in a pure CSS grid-like structure using the featured image. Hovering over the image will display further information. If the event does not have a featured image, a default image will be used.
- Recurring Events Management Add on: The Recurring Events management add-on enables you to put events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years ahead. You can schedule as many events in the future as you need. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close bookings for all of these recurring events.
- Events Calendar Table Template Addon: The Calendar Table template is a list template with a bold date and customizable “register now” button. The template can be customized to show the event thumbnail instead of a date.
- Social Coupons Integration Add on: If your web site is featured on Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can even specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- Custom Template Addon: The Custom Template add-on is capable of displaying your event lists in a range of exciting and interesting ways.
- Seating Chart Addon: The seating chart addon is suitable for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is perfect 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 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 pricing to each seat.
- Event Ticketing & Bar Scanning Add on: The Ticketing add on gives you the ability to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add on gives you the ability to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing add on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for managing check-in scans at the venue door. Registrants 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 registrants and to validate tickets.
- Events Calendar Add-on: This WordPress events calendar displays events and categories of events via an attractive graphical calendar.
- JSON API Add-on: The Event Espresso JSON API add on allows other software applications, online tools, mobile applications, etc… to access your Event Espresso data through an Application Programming Interface (API).
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software, including new add-ons.
To learn more about the newest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
User Feedback
Here are some of the testimonials that satisfied customers have posted about Event Espresso:
”I want to commend you on a fabulous product which is just the right price for a small non-profit. People are happy with the registration process, as are we! …Thank you SO much for a great product.” Sandra Forero Bush, World Trade Center Tacoma
”Event Espresso event management plugin for WordPress is really an awesome plugin.” Cheryl Smithem, Charleston PR & Design
”Thank you, we just did 2 sell out seminars of 50 attendees in 48 hours using Event Espresso and it was awesome. My wife was able to pick up on the processing backend with ease. You have done a great job on getting this system together – very simple, clear and well laid out With powerful functionality. I am so glad I dumped the old booking application we had and gave Event Espresso a go. Just wanted to say thanks, and thanks for the very patient, friendly and speedy assistance in helping me to get it all set up at the start. Many thanks to you and your team. A grateful customer.” Nicholas de Castella, Emotional Intelligence Trainings
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, trainer, show planner, or event professional, there are simply endless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered owner, visit the user forum for useful ideas and practical ways to streamline your event management and registration process or enhance the experience of your customers.
Event Espresso Support
Event Espresso is compatible with all WP plugins and WordPress themes that follow standard WP coding guidelines. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great 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 robust support that includes access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, priority 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 a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely software you can rely on to run and manage your events.
Software Pricing
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you need to consider using one of the premium plugin versions below:
- Personal Edition – This edition lets you configure Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This license option enables you to configure Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This lets you configure Event Espresso on 5 domains. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Pricing for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, the software retails for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management
Please Note: The pricing above was current when this article was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin developer when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Info
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list 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 the support forums for questions related to a specific situation, or to notify developers about errors and share feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WP event booking and ticketing management software, used and trusted by thousands of people.
If you are a WordPress user and you plan to run an event that requires scheduling dates, times and venues, registering participants, and/or selling tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Management Software
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