Does your business currently run or plan to run events that require handling bookings or registrations, such as workshops, group courses, not-for-profit fund raisers, corporate functions, or even a large-scale event such as a dance party, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event registrations can be a time-consuming process. You will probably need to manage calendar schedules, availability, registration numbers, data collection, payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders and alerts, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to participants.
There are a number of benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily copy settings for recurring events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be very expensive.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-based site, you can install an inexpensive and professional online event booking solution.
Presenting …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily create multiple events and start receiving online registrations in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and accept online event bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed application that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can use a number of event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up selling tickets, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your event attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media and autoresponders.
View detailed information about event attendees
Important: Currently, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is significantly different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the software 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 transition completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and features of using this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages 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 current website into a fully-featured and automated event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by virtually doing away with the need to process registrations manually.
Essentially, you are making it easier for participants to enroll on their own.
Allowing your attendees to do the data entry frees you up from doing admin work and lets you focus more of your energy on organizing a better event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will see in a moment, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and booking process that you want your clients to experience.
Some additional plugin benefits include the following:
- Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin is an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third-party service. The cost is kept low by using a model where you buy the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then purchase optional add ons when you need extra functionality.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept online event registrations 24 hours a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social features (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with their friends who may also be interested.
- Green And Paperless Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign up process is transacted entirely online, eliminating typical paper consumption from tasks related to enrollment.
- All Information Belongs To You. You control all the data you obtain from your event participants.
Event Espresso Features
The Event Espresso software delivers functionality to its users through standard features (these come with the software) and optional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many unique features to web site owners. Here are just a few:
- Quick and easy to install and set up. Ready to use in minutes.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In Event Espresso 4, events can have multiple dates and times (called datetimes), which these can be managed from a single event.
- Event Calendar. Customers can easily find your events and add these to their schedule using a calendar.
- Tax Administration. Event Espresso 4 gives you several ways to manage taxes for your event and provide reports of tax fees to registrants who purchase tickets. You can configure taxes globally or on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration enables you to configure the look and control settings of Google Maps on the event listing and event details sections.
- Default Price Types. Price types let event managers create new prices that adjust the default ticket pricing for your system-default ticket.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system enables you to validate tickets, speed up in-venue registrations, set up multiple check-in “stations” and track participants.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. EE 4 provides you with the tools to gain a better understanding of who your clients are and how you’ve previously done business with your clients. Your Contact Profile section stores updated records like the name, biography, contact information, event registration history, private comments, and more about each registrant.
- Waiting Lists. Prospective attendees can subscribe to a waiting list if your event is full. You can also specify that waiting list attendees pre-pay if you plan to add more capacity for your event.
- RSS Event Feeds. Keep your customers up-to-date about your events, drive quality traffic and reach a wider number of prospects with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Draft Events. Draft events let you develop your event page over multiple work sessions without publishing it to your site. You can continue working on your events until you are ready to take things live, or schedule to publish your event at a later time and date.
- Multi-Language Software. Event Espresso is being translated into more than 15 languages, with more languages coming soon.
- Default Tickets. If you create similar tickets for many of your events, you can easily set one of those tickets as your default ticket for your new events simply by ticking a checkbox.
- Venue Manager. The venue manager in EE 4 allows information about venues to be published throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front end of your website to inform attendees of the location of your event. The venue record displays many of the standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also displays venue details like venue capacity, venue web address, telephone number, venue address, maps, etc. You can also list all of your event venues throughout specific sections in your theme and on a venue archive page on your site where you can set up and publish venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have listed for a given venue.
- Registrant Profiles. Manage your attendee’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their data organized and easily accessible.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential event registrants who have not fully paid for their booking 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 in full by name, display the balance they owe, and include a link to the event, a payment link and a url to download the invoice.
- Transaction Reports. Event reports gives you information of all the registrations and transactions, enabling you to track the performance of your events with the aggregate number of people who have registered and how much money you’ve collected.
Additional features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming. Event Espresso is simple enough for basic users, and also extremely robust and customizable for enterprise-level users and web-based software developers. The bottom line is that by using Object-oriented programming (OOP), EE 4 permits more complex enhancements and customizations to the software.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 allows you to create a log file with debugging data which can be useful for web developers who are diagnosing application errors.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value: According to the philosophy stated on their 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 company operates on 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 comes with 40+ added features, including:
- Live-filtering when you search for events inside the Event Espresso admin.
- Default surcharge (the same as adding a service tax to all tickets).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Add ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow you 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 the event does not have a featured image available, a default image will be used.
- Recurring Events Manager Add-on: The Recurring Events management add on lets you put events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years in advance. You can add as many events in the future as you need. Event Espresso will automatically open and close registrations for all of these recurring events.
- Events Date Range Template Add on: The Date Range custom event list template enables your users to search for events that take place in a certain date range.
- EE4 Events Social Sharing Add on: This addon adds social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that lets your attendees to share a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after booking.
- Custom Template Add-on: The Custom Template addon lets you display your event lists in a number of exciting and interesting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add on Editions: This add on lets you involve your staff in the event management process and give new users permission to create events or regional managers the ability to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WP users roles and give them different permissions with different privileges, allowing others 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 create geographic regions for other people to manage events, use the Roles and Permissions Pro add-on.
- Multiple Event Registration Addon: The Multiple Event registration addon gives potential customers the ability to register for 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 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 provides you with a simple and easy-to-use system that allows you to 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 web developers build custom templates using one of the templates included as a source template.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp add on allows you to automatically register participants to a particular mailing list or group within MailChimp.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software, including new add ons.
For complete details about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
Plugin Users – Feedback
Here are a few of the testimonials that customers have posted 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
”I have to say that it has been the right choice for me…I’ve been extremely pleased with the way my site is working.” Robin, RobinTime
”I can’t even imagine what I would want the plugin to do that it doesn’t already do. I’m really happy with the features.” Jim Harmer, Improve Photography
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, presenter, festival promoter, or event consultant, there are just countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a registered owner, go through the user forum for new ideas and practical suggestions to streamline your event management and registration process and improve the experience of your event registrants.
Event Espresso Support
Event Espresso is compatible with other 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 so many of its plugin customers attest:
”No complaints here. Satisfied customer. You can teach us all few things about customer service. Thanks!” Charles
The plugin provides comprehensive support with access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, email 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 web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can depend on to run and manage your events.
Plugin Price
Event Espresso is available in various editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software functionality, however, you will want to consider downloading one of the premium plugin versions below:
- Personal Edition – This edition lets you configure Event Espresso on 1 site only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This enables you to set up Event Espresso on 1 site only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This enables you to set up Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Current pricing for the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the software is selling for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Management And Registration System For WordPress
Please Note: The pricing above was current at the time this article was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Plugin Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the software’s online documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to your particular situation, or to report bugs and leave feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event booking and ticketing manager software, used and trusted by thousands of users.
If you own a WordPress-powered website and you plan to run any event that involves managing dates, times and venues, booking attendees, and/or booking tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
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