Do you currently run or plan to run events that require handling bookings, such as workshops, group classes, non-profit fund-raisers, marketing events, or even a large-scale event such as a school concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Managing event registrations can be a time-consuming process. You have to manage scheduling, available dates and spaces, participant numbers, data processing and storage, payments and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders and notifications, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to participants.
There are many benefits to setting up an automated online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower costs, help you easily copy settings for previously-run events, give you more control, create a better customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be very costly.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-powered web site, you can set up a very inexpensive and highly professional online event registration solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP lets you easily create your event and start accepting online bookings in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and take online event bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
Customize registration forms
You can use multiple event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up selling tickets, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your participants, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing follow-ups.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is considerably different than the older EE 3, as it is being rebuilt using a different structure to accommodate future expansion. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually move completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and features of using this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing online presence into a feature-rich and professional event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple pricing 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 doing away with the chore of processing registrations manually.
Essentially, you are enabling participants to register themselves.
Allowing your customers to do all of the data entry frees up your time and lets you concentrate more resources on delivering a better event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will see in a moment, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management and booking process that you want your participants to experience.
Some additional benefits include the following:
- Reduced Costs: The Event Espresso plugin is an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own system or using a 3rd-party service. This is made possible through a model where Event Espresso users buy the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and purchase add ons only when you need extra features.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new event registrations 24/7. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing features and addons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event invite others who may be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event registration process is transacted wholly online, reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks associated with enrollment.
- Own Your Data. You own all the information acquired from your event attendees.
Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to end-users through built-in features (these are included with the software) and additional features that users can buy for an added cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers a number of features to WP users. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and easy to install and implement. Ready to use in no time.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso allows you to set up multiple ticket types and set separate prices, maximum number of tickets, etc.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Customers can easily see your events and add these to their schedule using the calendar.
- Ticket Selector. Present multiple ticket options to prospective registrants so they can purchase the ticket(s) that will best fit their needs.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration allows you to configure the display of Google Maps on the event listing and event details sections.
- Spam Protection. Reduce the chance of spamming and robots making fake registrations on your site with reCAPTCHA tools that validate human activity.
- Discount Codes. Leverage promotional and multiple discount codes to encourage visitors to take action immediately, or simply make your offers more affordable for others. Also useful for helping to sell out events close to timelines.
- Manual Registration Option. you have the option of registering event participants at the door, or sending in paper-based registration forms for manual registration later.
- Administrative Pre-approval. Control who can register for your events.
- Public Commenting. Add social a new level of social sharing to your event pages by allowing potential prospects to ask questions about your event and past customers to post feedback that can help others decide whether or not to sign up. Moderation settings for public commenting are configured via the WordPress default commenting system.
- Optimized For The Latest WordPress Version. The EE 4 user interface follows all WordPress guidelines to help you build highly aesthetic event pages that are easier to use and mobile-friendly.
- Country Settings. You can configure the country and currency settings to be used throughout Event Espresso, such as currency, currency signs, decimal signs, characters and places, country codes, regions, etc.
- Exportable Information. You can export all the information collected from event customers into Excel or CSV format for compiling advanced reports, implementing marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, and so on.
- Register Multiple Attendees. Event Espresso 4 allows a single person or people to order multiple tickets and different ticket types at once. You decide how many people are allowed to enroll in a single registration session by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso lets you engage with an expert community of event managers and plugin users. You can engage with other Event Espresso users via their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Staff Management. Save time and stay organized by reusing staff member 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.
- Transaction Reports. Event reports gives you information of all of your registrations and transactions, allowing you to measure the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and amount of revenue has been collected.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows you to have more control and options over your content and how your information displays to your prospective event attendees.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 allows you to generate a log file with debugging data which can be useful for web developers when potential problems.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & Value For Money: According to the mission statement on their website, 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 model 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 over 40 added features, including:
- Live-filtering when searching for events within the Event Espresso admin.
- Default surcharge (similar to adding a service tax to tickets).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Add ons
As well as a very large number of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow plugin users to further enhance the functionality of the event management process.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add-on: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display the scheduled events by location. There are 4 maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Custom Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize many datetime events into a drop-down list.
- Events Category Accordion Template Addon: The Category Accordion template shows categories as a simple list. Clicking on a category name shows the events associated with that category and closes previously open categories.
- EE4 Events Social Sharing Add on: Add social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that allows your attendees to share a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after booking.
- Custom Template Add-on: The Custom Template add-on can display your events in a variety of exciting and interesting ways.
- Seating Chart Add on: The seating chart addon is for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is ideal for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart add-on lets you 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 attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach single pricing to each seat.
- Multiple Event Registration Addon: The Multiple Event registration addon gives your 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 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.
- EE4 Events Calendar Add-on: This WordPress events calendar displays events and event categories in a nice graphical calendar.
- Infusionsoft Integration Addon: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft integration all-in-one sales and business marketing plugin add-on, you can completely automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture customer data, track bookings, and accept payments from your website.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add-ons.
To learn more about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, visit the plugin website:
User Testimonials
Here are a few of the many testimonials that satisfied customers have written about Event Espresso:
”EventEspresso saves us money, saves our secretary 16-24 hours and looks so professionally done that people ask us how we do it; which we happily tell them, “Event Espresso, and be sure to get the ticketing add-on.”” David, House of Prayer
”…it really does blow everything else that’s out there out of the water.” Chris Reynolds, Arcane Palette Creative Design
“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
Useful Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, teacher, workshop planner, or event consultant, there are just unlimited possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a registered user, search the support forum for tips and practical ways to improve your event management and registration process and improve the experience of your registrants.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with other WordPress plugins and WordPress themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you do need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive user support, as many of its customers confirm:
”By far, the customer service experience with Event Espresso has been the best of any WordPress Theme or Paid Plugin that I’ve used in the past two years!” Megan Murray, Boys & Girls Club of Lake Tahoe
Event Espresso provides robust support including access to support forums, 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.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts an established team of experienced web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can count on to run your events.
Plugin Pricing
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you need to consider downloading one of the paid plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This lets you install Event Espresso on one site only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This license option enables you to run Event Espresso on one site only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This allows you to install 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 special offers. Presently, the plugin sells for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Management
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this article was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin developer when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional 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 software’s online documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to a particular situation, or to report problems and share feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event booking and ticketing management plugin, used and trusted by thousands of WordPress website owners.
If you own a WordPress-powered website and you plan to run events that require scheduling dates and venues, booking participants, or reserving seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Manager
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