Do you currently run or plan to run events that need co-ordinating bookings or registrations, such as seminars, training classes, not-for-profit fund raisers, social functions, or even a large-scale event such as a show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Managing event bookings is a complex and time-consuming process. You may be required to co-ordinate scheduling, available dates and seating allocations, attendee numbers, data collection and admin, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to participants.
There are many benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower costs, help you easily reproduce repeat events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable client experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be costly.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-powered website, you can easily set up a very inexpensive and highly professional online event registration system.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Management System
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily create your event and start accepting online bookings in just minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and take online event bookings)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed software that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can employ a range of event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event participants, or integrating your event registration forms with an autoresponder system for ongoing notifications.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Please Note: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is considerably different than the older Event Espresso 3, as it has been redeveloped using a different structure to allow for future expansion. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually migrate completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
Learn more 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 into an automated and fully featured event management website … 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.
Increased 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 manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for event participants to perform the enrolment process themselves.
Letting your clients to do the data entry frees up your time and lets you invest more energy on organizing a memorable event.
Full 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 attendees to experience.
Some additional benefits and advantages include:
- Reduced Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own software or using a 3rd-party service. The cost is kept to a minimum through a model where users pay for the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then purchase add-ons when you need extra features.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online registrations any time of day or night. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing add ons (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with their friends who may be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, the event registration process is kept wholly in digital form, significantly reducing traditional paper waste from tasks related to administration.
- All Information Belongs To You. You control all the information collected from event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
The Event Espresso software provides functionality to its users through built-in features (these are included with the plugin) and additional features that customers can buy for an additional cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many unique built-in to site owners. Here are just a few of these:
- Fast and easy to install and set up. Be up and running in no time.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso allows you to configure multiple ticket types and specify unique pricing options, maximum number of tickets, etc.
- Customized Confirmation Email Message. Easily set up customized automatic booking and payment notification email messages to communicate with event registrants.
- Tax Admin & Reporting Options. Event Espresso 4 gives you several options to manage taxes for an event and provide reports of tax fee components to registrants when purchasing tickets. Event managers can administer taxes globally or on a per-ticket basis.
- Smart Single Page Checkout Process. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically duplicate the primary registrant’s details for any additional attendees.
- Spam Protection. Prevent the chance of spamming and robots making bogus registrations with reCAPTCHA option that provide human authentication.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 provides 3 built-in in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. EE 4 lets you know who your customers are and how you’ve done business with them. Your Contact Profile section stores the name, biography, contact details, event registration data, private comments, and more about each client.
- Event Manager Pre-approval. Control who can and cannot attend your events.
- XML RSS Event Feeds. Automatically update users, drive quality traffic and reach a wider audience with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Works With The Latest Version Of WP. The EE 4 user interface follows all WordPress guidelines to help you create visually attractive event pages that are responsive and mobile-friendly.
- Your Organization Settings. Configure your organization’s profile to display throughout Event Espresso and your front-end templates. Your organization fields include: organization name, address, city, state, country, zip/postal code, primary contact email address, telephone number, VAT/tax number, logo, Facebook profile URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn URL, Pinterest profile URL, Google+ profile URL, Instagram profile URL.
- Exportable Data. You can export all of your data gathered from your event customers into Excel or CSV format for producing reports, implementing new marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, and so on.
- WordPress Visual Editor. Event Espresso uses the native WordPress WYSIWYG editor, so you can quickly and easily add images and write your event descriptions without knowledge of HTML or CSS, just like any typical WordPress post or page.
- Automatic Plugin Installation Upgrades. Event Espresso provides simple 1-click plugin upgrading to make sure that you have the newest features and to keep your installation working with the latest version of WordPress.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential attendees who have not made payment for their booking with a standard but personalized invoice with one click of a button. Your invoices will address pre-registered attendees who have not paid their registration yet by name, display the balance owing, and include a link to the event, a payment url and a link to download a PDF invoice.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post type features such as custom fields, post meta data, taxonomies, etc. You can also customize the templates to display events in your own unique way.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows you to have more control and options over the content of your event page and how the information displays to visitors.
- Maintenance Mode. Pause registration capabilities for regular website visitors whenever website maintenance is required. You can continue to work on your content during maintenance mode.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value: 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 software has been built using a modular and highly efficient model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also provides you with over 40 additional features, including:
- Live-filtering when searching for events inside the Event Espresso admin.
- Default surcharge (the same as adding a service tax to each ticket).
- Option to skip the confirmation page during registration.
Add-Ons
As well as a comprehensive number of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow you 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 an event does not have a featured image available, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Manager Add on: The Recurring Events manager add on lets you put your events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years in advance. You can schedule as many future events as you like. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close bookings 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 also be customized to display an event thumbnail instead of the date.
- Social Coupons Integration Addon: If your web site uses 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 addon lets you display your event lists in a number of visually exciting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add-on Versions: This addon lets you involve other users 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 WP users roles and allow them different permissions with different privileges, allowing staff to help you manage your events or events that other people create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain sections of your WP dashboard and/or certain parts 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 Multi-Event registration addon gives potential customers the ability to book multiple events at once. In each event listing attendees 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.
- Events Calendar Addon: This WordPress events calendar displays events and event categories in a nice graphical calendar.
- MailChimp Integration Add-on: The MailChimp addon lets you auto-register participants to a specific 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 more information about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
Customer Feedback
Here are just some of the many great testimonials that customers have posted about Event Espresso:
”Tri-South, Inc is using Event Espresso to manage the course catalog, event ticketing, and class registration. [As their developer] I have customized a few items to make the site and plugin a seamless integration. The client is very pleased!” Jenifer Design
”I searched long and hard to find something that would serve my needs. This is, by far, the most complete and comprehensive solution I have found.” Bill Hepper, We Teach Live
”Loving the functions and support from Event Espresso. One of the best plugins I’ve ever bought!” Nathan
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, teacher, show planner, or event management consultant, there are simply endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a licensed user, search the user forum for inspiration and practical suggestions to streamline your event management process and improve the experience of your event customers.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso works with with all WordPress plugins and themes that follow WP coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent end-user support, as many of its plugin end-users confirm:
“I’m really impressed with not only the application itself but the support. I have rarely seen such a responsive support staff than at EE. They rock…I highly recommend this plugin!” sock2me
Event Espresso provides great support with access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, custom development 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 an established team of experienced WordPress web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely software you can count on to run and manage your events.
Product Licensing Price
Event Espresso is available in a range of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software features, however, you will want to consider downloading one of the paid plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This edition lets you install Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This edition lets you run Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License – This enables you to run Event Espresso on 5 sites. It includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Pricing for the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Presently, the plugin sells for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Manager
Please Note: The pricing above was current at the time this article was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin developer when you visit the website.
Additional Information
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the plugin’s online documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to your particular situation, or to report problems and share feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event registration and ticketing manager software, used by thousands.
If you own a WordPress-powered site and you currently run an event that requires managing dates, times and venues, registering attendees, and booking seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Ticket Registration Software
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