Do you currently run or plan to run events that require bookings, such as seminars, group courses, not-for-profit fundraisers, social events, or even a big event like a trade show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups is a complex process. You will most likely need to manage event schedules, event dates, attendee numbers, data entry, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders and alerts, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to participants.
There are lots of advantages to setting up an online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily duplicate similar events, give event managers more control, improve client experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event booking system can be very expensive.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-powered digital presence, you can download and install a very inexpensive and professional online event registration system.
Presenting …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily create an event and start accepting online registrations in a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and take online event registrations)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed software that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Customize registration forms
You can employ several event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your event attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media and autoresponders.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is significantly different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the plugin has been revamped using a different structure to allow for future growth. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually retire EE 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and features of using 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 web site:
Automated Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current website into a fully-featured event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to attendee limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by literally eliminating the need to process registrations and sign-ups manually.
Basically, you are enabling event attendees to enrol by themselves.
Letting your customers to do the data themselves frees you up from doing admin work and lets you concentrate more time on creating a more enjoyable event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon see, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and booking process that you want your attendees to experience.
Some additional benefits and advantages include the following:
- Reduced Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own solution or using a third party service. The cost is kept to a minimum through a model where you purchase the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then purchase optional addons when you need additional features.
- More Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept online sign-ups any time of day or night. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing features (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event invite their friends who may also be interested.
- Paperless Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event booking process remains wholly online, reducing traditional paper waste from tasks related to enrollment.
- All Data Belongs To You. You control all the information acquired from your event participants.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to end-users via standard features (these come with the plugin) and optional features that customers can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of features to WP users. Here are just some of these:
- Fast and simple to install and implement. Be up and running in minutes.
- Customized Event Registration Forms. With Event Espresso you can collect specific data using a custom event registration form on your web pages to create a great experience for your clients.
- Customized Confirmation Emails. Configure automated booking and payment confirmation email messages to communicate with your clients.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso seamlessly integrates with payment gateways, allowing you to collect money before running the events.
- Intelligent Single Page Checkout Process. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is smart, fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically duplicate the primary attendee’s registration details for any additional attendees.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow you to create new prices that adjust the default ticket pricing for your system-default ticket.
- Discount And Promotional Codes. Leverage promotional and discount codes to incentivize prospects to register now, or make your offerings more attractive for price-sensitive customers. This is also practical if you want to sell out events close to timelines.
- Event Check-In List. Generate an exportable list of attendees and check in everyone who has attended.
- Waiting Lists. Interested persons can join a waiting list if your event has reached capacity. Additionally, you can specify that wait-listed registrants pre-pay if you plan to add more capacity for your event.
- Event RSS Feeds. Provide automatic updates to users, bring in more visitors and expand your content reach with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Keyword-Rich Event Page Web Links. Keyword rich URLs leverage your WP Permalinks configuration settings. SEO-friendly permalinks with topic-relevant keywords add to the context of your pages and is favored by search engines, helping you bring more potential customers to your site.
- Country-specific Settings. Event managers can configure the country and currency settings to be used when hosting your events, including currency name, currency signs, decimal characters and places, country codes, regions, etc.
- Exportable Data. You can output all the information gathered from event participants into Excel or CSV format for creating reports, devising marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, and so on.
- Venue Profiles. The venue manager feature in EE 4 allows information about venues to be published throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front-end of your site to inform potential attendees of the location of your event. The venue profile has many standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also lets you add information such as venue capacity, venue web address, phone number, venue address, maps, etc. You can also display all of your venues in specific sections of your WordPress theme and on a venue listing page on your site where you can set up and publish venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a given venue.
- Attendee Profiles. Manage each registrant’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their data organized.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential clients who have not paid yet for their booking with a standard but personalized invoice with one click. Your invoices will address registered customers who have not paid their registration yet by name, give them the amount they owe, and include a link to the event information, a payment link and a link to download the 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 your page templates to display events in your own unique way.
Extra features include:
- Hooks, Actions & Filters. These features allow developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso software that are completely compatible with WordPress.
- Metabox Management & Organization. Event Espresso leverages the WordPress user interface, which brings the ability to reorganize the user interface to suit your workflow. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or entirely removed from your page.
- Autonomy, Flexibility And Value: According to the philosophy stated on their website, Event Espresso’s aim 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 model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also provides you with 40+ additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes that includes registrant data in emails and email newsletters.
- Default surcharge (similar to adding a service fee to tickets).
- Option to skip the confirmation page in the registration process.
Add-Ons
As well as a comprehensive number of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow users to further enhance the capabilities of events.
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 Dropdown Template Addon: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes the events with many datetimes into a drop-down list.
- Events Date Range Template Add-on: The Date Range custom event list template enables your users to browse for events that occur in a certain date range.
- Social Media Buttons Add on: The social media addon displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media add on comes free with all of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration add-on lets you take advantage of the WP user system. With the WP User Integration addon you can give your users a special incentive by offering member prices and overriding event prices when members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered users of the website can have access to your special events. Members can also store personal information into their profile page allowing them to quickly register for events by auto-filling in the personal information on the event booking form. Users can also view event history and make payment for events.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add-on Versions: This add on lets you involve others 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 WordPress users roles and give 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 a user does not have access to certain parts of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain parts 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.
- Multi-Event Registration Add on: The Multiple Event registration addon gives your potential attendees the ability to register for 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 addon, 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.
- EE4 Infusionsoft Integration Addon: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft integration all-in-one sales and business marketing software add on, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture customer data, track bookings, and accept payments from your web site.
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 newest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
Testimonials
Below are just some of the many great testimonials that users 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
”Probably the best event management plugin available.” Materia Inspiration Centre
”Event Espresso is very nice and functional plugin. Set it up is not very easy for a beginner like me, but you have one of the best support team in your side. They answer all questions in a timely manor. I didn’t know anything about setting up the plugins, Thanks to Event Espresso Support team that now I can find my way around this plugin. Event Espresso helps our company to manage the workshops, keep track of our students, manage the emails, and much more. We upgrade from personal License to Business license in just two weeks of using Personal license. I strongly recommend the Business license.” Ted Karlsalr, Omnilargess
Useful Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, trainer, concert promoter, or event consultant, there are just countless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered user, visit the user forum for tips and practical suggestions to improve your event management and registration workflow or improve the experience of your attendees.
Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with all WP plugins and themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great user support, as so many of its satisfied end-users attest:
“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
The software provides incredible support that includes access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, priority 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 plugin you can rely on to organize and manage your events.
Plugin Cost
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software options, however, you need to consider downloading one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This allows you to install Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License – This allows you to set up Event Espresso on one domain only. Price 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 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 can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. When we last checked, the software sells for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing: Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticketing Registration Plugin For WordPress
Note: The pricing above was current when this article was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin developer when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Plugin Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the software’s online documentation tools for answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to a particular situation, or to notify developers about issues and share feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event booking and ticketing management software, used by thousands.
If you own a WordPress site and you intend to run any event that requires scheduling dates, times and venues (offline and online), booking participants, and/or booking seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticketing Registration Software For WordPress
***