Does your business currently run or plan to run events that require managing registrations, such as workshops, training classes, charity fundraisers, corporate events, or even a big event like an art exhibition, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Managing event registrations is a complex process. You have to co-ordinate calendar schedules, availability, registration numbers, data processing and storage, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to event participants.
There are a number of advantages to setting up an automated web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower costs, help you easily duplicate recurring events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable client experience and grow 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 website, you can set up a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event booking solution.
Presenting …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP allows you to easily set up multiple events and begin accepting online bookings in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and accept online event registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can use various event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up ticket-selling, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media sites like Facebook.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is considerably different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the plugin has been redeveloped using a different structure to accommodate future expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually move completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
Learn more here:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just some of the benefits 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 current online presence into a fully-featured and automated event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by virtually eliminating the chore of processing registrations and bookings manually.
Essentially, you are making it easier for attendees to enrol themselves.
Allowing your customers to do all of the data entry frees up your time and lets you spend more of your resources on organizing a more unique event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon discover, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your users to experience.
Additional benefits of the plugin include the following:
- Lower Costs: Event Espresso provides you with a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd-party service provider. The cost is kept low through a model where users pay for the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then purchase add ons only when you need additional functionality.
- Higher Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new registrations 24/7. In addition, Event Espresso social add-ons (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event invite others who may also be interested in attending.
- Green & Paperless Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, your event registration process can be performed entirely in digital form, eliminating typical paper consumption from tasks related to administration.
- All Information Belongs To You. You control all the information you obtain from your event attendees.
Plugin Features
The Event Espresso plugin delivers functionality to its users through built-in features (these come with the plugin) and additional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many built-in to WP users. Here are just a few:
- Fast and easy to install and set up. Be up and running in minutes.
- Customized Event Registration Forms. With Event Espresso you can gather unique information using a custom event registration form on your web pages to prepare a tailored experience for your users.
- Customizable Event And Registration Page Designs. You can customize your events and bookings page using Event Espresso’s template options and parts, and HTML or CSS.
- Tax Administration. Event Espresso 4 gives you a number of options to administer taxes for an event and report tax fee components to registrants when purchasing tickets. Event managers can administer taxes globally or on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your theme and display registrant information throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types let you create new prices that adjust the default ticket pricing of the system-default ticket.
- Discount Codes. You can leverage promotional and discount codes to encourage visitors to make a buying decision immediately, or make your offerings more attractive for others. Also useful if you want to sell-out events close to deadlines.
- Manual Registration Option. you have the option of booking event participants at the door, or sending in paper-based registration forms for manual inputting later.
- Waiting Lists. Interested persons can subscribe to a waiting list if your event is completely sold out. You can also specify that waiting list members pay for their spots if you plan to expand numbers for the event.
- Private Contact Comments. Record comments about users on their profile and how you’ve interacted with them. Private notes lets you keep records of when users contacted you, your internal observations, and how you’ve interacted with your customers.
- Search Engine Friendly Page URLs. Keyword rich URLs take advantage of your WP Permalinks configuration settings. SEO-friendly urls that use topic-relevant keywords add to the context of your pages and is favored by search engines, helping you bring a more targeted audience to your website.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your profile to be deployed throughout Event Espresso and your front-end templates. Organization data include: organization name, street address, city, state, country, zip/postal code, email, telephone, VAT/tax number, logo, Facebook profile URL, Twitter URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest profile URL, Google+ profile URL, Instagram profile URL.
- Import Events. Event Espresso 4 provides an advanced importing capability that lets you upload a lot of event data all at one time. You can export, edit and import data for events, datetimes, tickets, pricing, registration questions, venues, terms, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Multiple Participant Enrolments. Event Espresso 4 allows an individual or a group to buy multiple tickets and different types of tickets simultaneously. Event managers can control how many people can enrol in a single registration session by specifying either a limit 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 other plugin users. You can interact 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 Member Manager. 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 your event description.
- Attendee Reporting. Event reporting gives you data of the registrations and transactions, allowing you to measure the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and amount of revenue you’ve 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 pages and how your information displays to your site visitors.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 allows you to create a log file with debugging data that can be useful for web developers who are troubleshooting.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value: According to the mission statement on their 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 software has been built using a modular and efficient 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+ additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – eliminates the work of re-entering event details when creating new events.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse a group of questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page in registration.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
In addition to a very large number of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow you to significantly expand 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 available, a default image will be used instead.
- Recurring Events Manager Add-on: The Recurring Events management addon allows you to put your events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months … even years ahead. You can add as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in advance as you want. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close registrations for all of your recurring events.
- 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 an event thumbnail image instead of a date.
- Social Media Buttons Add-on: The social media addon displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media add-on is included free with all of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- Custom Template Addon: The Custom Template add-on can display your events in a variety of visually exciting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add on Versions: This add-on lets you include others in your organization to help manage your events 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 WP users roles and assign them different permissions with different privileges, so others can help you manage your events or the events that other people create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain parts of your WP dashboard and/or certain sections 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 add on.
- Event Ticketing & Bar Scanning Addon: The Ticketing add on gives you the capacity to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add on adds the ability to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing addon includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for managing check-in scans at the door. Customers 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 attendees and to validate tickets.
- Events Table View Template Addon: The Events Table Template add on gives event managers a simple and easy-to-use system that lets you edit the design of your event lists. It comes with a simple table template with category filters, table search, table paging and more. It also lets developers build their own custom templates using one of the templates provided as a base template.
- EE4 Infusionsoft Integration Add on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft integration all-in-one sales and marketing software add-on, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture event attendee data, track enrollments, and accept payments from your website.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software, including new add ons.
For full details about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, visit the plugin website here:
Customer Feedback
Here are a few of the testimonials that satisfied users have posted about Event Espresso:
“It is a very, very slick plugin. It’s one of those plugins where you install it, change a couple of settings, and boom you’re selling tickets.” Brad Williams, WebDevStudios
”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
“Love the plugin, we only use it once a year for a race we have in February. This saved us tons of time in data entry. In addition, we had more runners register than any other year. We attribute that to the ease of registering online. Thanks for your work.” Ed, Friends of Oscar Scherer Park
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, presenter, concert planner, or event professional, there are simply countless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered user, spend a little time visiting the support forum for inspiration and practical suggestions to streamline your event management process and improve the experience of your event customers.
Event Espresso Support
Event Espresso is compatible with other WP plugins and themes that follow standard WP development guidelines. If you do need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive support, as so many of its satisfied end-users confirm:
”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
The plugin provides great support including access to support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, email 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 developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can rely on to manage your events.
Event Espresso Price
Event Espresso is available in a number of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you should consider using one of the paid plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This lets you install Event Espresso on 1 site only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This enables you to run Event Espresso on one domain only. It includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This lets you configure Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Current pricing for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. When we last checked, the plugin retails for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Manager
Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this article was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin developer when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – 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 using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to your particular use-case, or to notify developers about issues and give feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product information pages.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the leading WP event registration and ticketing management software, used and trusted by thousands of WordPress users.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you currently run events that involve scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), registering participants, or selling seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Manager
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