Do you currently run or plan to run events that require co-ordinating bookings, such as seminars, group classes, not-for-profit fundraisers, marketing conferences, or even a large-scale event such as a concert, 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 will probably have to co-ordinate scheduling, event dates, attendee numbers, data collection and storage, payments and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to event attendees.
There are many 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 duplicate repeat events, give event managers more control, improve user experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that this can be very expensive.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-based website, you can easily install an inexpensive and highly professional web-based event registration solution.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticketing Registration Software For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress plugin enables you to easily create your event and begin receiving online registrations literally in minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and take online bookings)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize your event registration forms
You can use multiple event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up selling tickets, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your participants, or integrating your event registration forms with social media and autoresponders.
View 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 EE 4 is fundamentally different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the platform is being redeveloped using a different structure to enable future growth and expansion. The EE 4 plugin software 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 the benefits and features of using the plugin.
To learn more about the plugin go here:
Benefits
Here are just some of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing digital presence into a fully-featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by virtually doing away with the need to process registrations manually.
Essentially, you are enabling attendees to perform the enrollment process by themselves.
Allowing your participants to do all of the data entry frees up your time and lets you spend more resources on creating a memorable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon see, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management process that you want your customers to experience.
Some additional benefits and advantages include the following:
- Significantly Lower Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third-party service. This is made possible through a model where Event Espresso users purchase the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and buy optional addons only when you need additional functionality.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new signups outside normal business hours. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social features (see below) let people interested in registering for your event invite other people they know who may also be interested in attending.
- Green Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign up process remains entirely online, reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks associated with administration.
- All Data Belongs To You. You own all the data you acquire from your event participants.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to its users via built-in features (these are included with the plugin) and optional features that you can buy for an additional cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of great built-in to WP users. Here are just some:
- Quick and simple to install and configure. Ready to start accepting registrations in very little time.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In Event Espresso 4, events can have multiple dates and times (called datetimes), which these can be managed from one single event.
- Customizable Event Designs. Customize your events and enrollments page using Event Espresso’s unlimited template options and components, and HTML and/or CSS.
- Tax Admin & Reporting. Event Espresso 4 provides several ways to administer taxes for your event and report tax fee components to customers who purchase tickets. Event managers can configure taxes globally and on a per-ticket basis.
- Smart Single Page Checkout Process. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is smart, fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically copy the primary registrant’s details for any added registrants.
- Spam Protection. Prevent the chance of spamming and bots creating fake registrations on your site by using reCAPTCHA option that authenticate human activity.
- In-App Documentation Systems. Event Espresso 4 provides 3 useful in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of registering event attendees when they show up, or send in paper forms for manual processing later.
- Event Manager Pre-approval. Be selective about who can attend your events.
- Public Commenting. Add “social proof” by allowing potential attendees to ask questions about your event and previous attendees to post reviews that can help others choose whether or not to register. Moderation settings for public comments are set using the WordPress built-in commenting system.
- Keyword-Rich Event Page Web Links. Keyword rich URLs leverage your Permalinks configuration settings. Search engine friendly permalinks that include relevant keywords enhance the context of your content and is favored by search engines, helping you bring more potential customers to your events.
- Country Settings. You can configure the country and currency settings that will be used in events, including currency name, currency symbols, decimal signs, characters and places, country codes, regions, and so on.
- Exportable Information. You can export all of your information collected from event attendees into Excel or CSV format for creating advanced reports, implementing marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, etc..
- Multiple Participant Enrollments. Event Espresso 4 allows one person or a group to buy multiple tickets and different types of tickets simultaneously. Event managers decide how many attendees are able to enrol in one registration by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Attendee Records. Manage each attendee’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their records organized and easily accessible.
- Social Sharing. Event attendees and site visitors can help increase exposure for your event using social share buttons.
- Transaction Reporting. Quick-view event reporting gives you data of the registrations and transactions, enabling you to track the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and amount of revenue has been collected.
Additional features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming. Event Espresso is simple enough for general WordPress users, and also robust and customizable for higher end users and web developers. The bottom line is that by using Object-oriented programming (OOP), Event Espresso 4 makes possible more complex developments and customizations to the application.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registration capabilities for regular site traffic when website maintenance is required. You can continue to work on your event pages during maintenance mode.
- Autonomy, Flexibility And Value For Money: According to the mission statement on their web site, Event Espresso’s objective is to “empower business and organization leaders with the event registration, ticketing and management tools that maximize the success of events.” To achieve their mission, the software has been built using a modular 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 40+ added features, including:
- Duplicating events – streamlines the work of re-entering event data when adding new events.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse commonly asked questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Add-Ons
As well as an amazing range of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow customers to significantly expand the functionality of events.
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 manager add on lets you put your events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months ahead. You can add as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in advance as you like. Event Espresso will automatically open and close bookings for all of your recurring events.
- Events Category Accordion Template Addon: The Category Accordion template shows event categories in a simple list. Clicking on a category name shows the events related to that category and closes any previously open categories.
- EE4 Events Social Sharing Add on: Add social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that lets your registrants to share a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after booking.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration addon allows you to take advantage of the WP user system. With the WP User Integration addon you can give your users a special incentive by offering member pricing and overriding event pricing when your members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered users of the site will have access to these special events. Members can also input personal details into their profile page allowing them fast registration for events by auto-filling in the personal information on the event booking form. Users can also look up previous events and pay for events.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add on Editions: This add on lets you include staff in your organization to help manage your events and give new users the capacity to create events or regional managers the ability to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WordPress users roles and give them different permissions with different capabilities, allowing staff to help you manage your events or the events that others create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain parts of your WP dashboard and/or certain areas 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 Addon: The Multi-Event registration addon gives potential attendees 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 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.
- EE4 Events Table View Template Add-on: The Events Table Template add-on gives event managers a simple and easy-to-use system that lets you edit 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 developers design their own custom templates using one of the included templates as a source template.
- MailChimp Integration Addon: The MailChimp add-on allows you to automatically register participants to a specific mailing autoresponder list or group within your MailChimp account.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software, including new addons.
To learn more about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
Customers – Feedback
Below are just some of the testimonials that satisfied plugin users have written about Event Espresso:
”It’s been very comprehensive and covers exactly the aspects of event registration that we needed for our site plus some features that we didn’t even need but could still use in the future. Very Excellent Plugin!” Tristan Hall, Area 12:2 Youth Group
”You can tell that the Event Espresso team is really passionate about their work, and that they care and spend a lot of time helping people work with their plugin and use it with their events – it’s something every WordPress service should aim for.” Ryan Imel, WPCandy
”I am in love with your product, I work with many educational institutions that hold classes/events and I will definitely recommend this to all of them, the only time I have seen a system this comprehensive and sophisticated is when an organization I worked with paid a programmer nearly $8,000 for a custom solution, and yet still there are features in your registration system that his didn’t have. Thank you so much for your help and patience.” Abdullah J.
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, teacher, seminar promoter, or event management professional, there are simply countless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered owner, spend a little time going through the forums for tips and practical suggestions to streamline your event management and registration process or improve the experience of your event attendees.
Support
Event Espresso works with with most WordPress plugins and WP themes that follow standard WordPress development rules. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent support, as many of its plugin end-users attest:
”Thank you Seth for being so responsive and going above and beyond the call of duty with your app! I highly recommend Event Espresso for its functionality and for the stellar support. Seth has a deep knowledge and understanding of WordPress and has built a tool that is seamless to use for both organizer and attendee alike! After looking at a bunch of alternatives, Event Espresso far surpasses the other apps that are available.” Wendy Troupe, ICS North Pole Express
The software provides robust support including access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase 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.
In addition, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can depend on to manage your events.
Plugin Price
Event Espresso is available in different editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin features, however, you should consider downloading one of the paid plugin editions below:
- Personal License Edition – This license allows you to install Event Espresso on one domain only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This lets you run Event Espresso on one domain only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This allows you to install Event Espresso on 5 domains. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The price of the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, the plugin sells for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Please Note: The pricing above was current when this article was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin seller when you visit the site.
Additional Plugin Information
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.
Use the plugin’s online documentation pages for answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to a particular use-case, or to notify developers about issues and leave feedback.
For all 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 by thousands of companies.
If you own a WordPress-powered web site and you intend to run any event that requires scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), registering participants, and/or booking seating, then you will probably not find a better plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Management & Registration Plugin For WordPress
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