Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that need co-ordinating bookings or registrations, such as seminars, community courses, not-for-profit fundraisers, social events, or even a large-scale event like a community festival, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?

Managing event sign-ups can be a complex and time-consuming process. You will most likely be required to co-ordinate scheduling, dates, participant numbers, data processing, collecting payments and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to attendees.

There are lots of benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower expenses, help you easily replicate recurring events, give event managers more control, improve customer experience and grow your sales.

The problem is that setting up a web-based event booking system can be quite costly.

Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-based digital presence, you can easily set up an inexpensive and professional online event registration solution.

Introducing …

Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Registration Plugin

Plugin Description

The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily schedule an event and start processing online bookings literally in minutes.

(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and receive online event bookings)

Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed software that gives you full control of the event registration management process.

Create custom registration forms

You can employ several event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your event participants, or integrating your event bookings with social media and email marketing software.

View detailed information about your event attendees

Note: Currently, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is completely different than the older EE 3, as the plugin is being rebuilt 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 move completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.

For more details, visit the plugin site here:

• Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Manager

Plugin Benefits

Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:

Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing System

Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing digital presence into a feature-rich and professional event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.

Higher Business Productivity

By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by virtually eliminating the chore of processing registrations and bookings manually.

Basically, you are enabling participants to perform the registration on their own.

Letting your customers to do all of the data themselves frees up your time and lets you direct more of your resources on delivering a memorable event.

More Control Over The User Experience

As you will discover shortly, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management process that you want your clients to experience.

Additional plugin benefits include the following:

• Lower Costs: Event Espresso provides you with an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own solution or using a 3rd party service provider. This is made possible by using a model where users buy the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and purchase add ons when you need new features.
• Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online event sign-ups any time of day or night. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social and marketing addons (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event share your information with others who may be interested in attending.
• Paperless Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, the event signup process can be completed wholly in digital form, significantly reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks associated with admin and record-keeping.
• Own Your Data. You control all the information collected from your event participants.

Plugin Features

The Event Espresso plugin provides functionality to its users through built-in features (these are included with the plugin) and additional features that users can buy for an additional cost, called add-ons.

Event Espresso offers many built-in to web site owners. Here are just some of these:

• Fast and easy to install and configure. Be up and running in minutes.
• Custom Event Registration Forms. With Event Espresso you can gather specific information using a custom event registration form on your website to create a great experience for your clients.
• Customizable Event Page Designs. Customize your events and signup page using Event Espresso’s limitless template options and parts, and HTML or CSS.
• Tax Admin & Reporting. Event Espresso 4 provides several options to administer taxes for your event and report tax fees to customers when purchasing tickets. Event managers can configure taxes globally or on a per-ticket basis.
• Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your WordPress theme and display venue details throughout other areas of your site.
• Spam Protection. Prevent the chance of spamming and bots making false registrations on your site with reCAPTCHA settings to provide human authentication.
• Discount Codes. Set up promotional and multiple discount codes to encourage prospects to register immediately, or simply make your offers more attractive for others. Also useful for helping to increase sales of events close to deadlines.
• Contact Profiles And Contact List. Event Espresso 4 provides you with the tools to know who your clients are and how you’ve done business with your customers. Your Contact Profile page stores updated records like the name, biography, contact details, event registration information, private comments, etc. about each attendee.
• Waiting Lists. Prospective participants can subscribe to a waiting list if your event has reached the maximum number of registrants. Additionally, you can make it a requirement waiting list registrants pay for their spots if you plan to expand capacity for the event.
• XML RSS Event Feeds. Automatically update customers, bring in more visitors and expand your content distribution with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
• Optimized For The Most Recent WordPress Version. The Event Espresso 4 user interface follows all WordPress guidelines to help you build beautifully-designed event pages that are easier to use and mobile-friendly.
• Your Organization Settings. Configure your profile to be used throughout Event Espresso and your WP themes. Your organization data include: company name, street address, city, state, country, zip code, email, telephone number, tax number, your logo, Facebook URL, Twitter URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest profile URL, Google+ URL, Instagram profile URL.
• Bulk Upload Events. Event Espresso 4 provides an advanced importing feature that enables you to upload bulk event data all at one time. You can export, edit and upload data for events, datetimes, ticketing details, pricing, registration questions, venue info, terms, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
• Venue Manager. The venue manager in EE 4 lets information about a venue to appear throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front-end of your website to inform site visitors 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 lets you add information such as venue seating capacity, venue website, phone number, physical and/or virtual location, maps, etc. You can also list all of your venues in specific areas of your theme and on a venue listing page on your website where you can set up and display venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have booked for a given venue.
• Automatic Upgrading. Event Espresso offers easy one-click software installation updating to ensure that you have the latest features and to keep your software installation up-to-date with new versions of WordPress.
• Social Sharing. Event attendees and site visitors can help create a wider exposure for your events using social sharing buttons.
• Categorize Events. If you have a number of types of events like free and paid, workshops and breakout sessions, different kinds of programs and program modules, etc. you can categorize them to help event registrants to locate what they’re looking for. You can list all the events in a category on an event category page, make all events searchable by category, and colour-code your events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make them easier to find, in addition to suggesting new events in the categories that interest your visitors.

Extra features include:

• Define Extra Meta Information. This allows developers to have more control and options over the content of your event pages and how your information displays to readers.
• Maintenance Mode. You can pause registrations for normal site traffic whenever you need to make changes on your site. You can still work on the back-end of your site during maintenance mode.
• Autonomy, Flexibility And Value: According to the mission statement on their web site, Event Espresso’s goal is to “empower business and organization leaders with the event registration, ticketing and management tools that maximize the success of events.” To achieve their objectives, 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 version of Event Espresso also comes with over 40 added features, including:

• Duplicating events – reduces the work of re-entering event data when creating new events.
• Default surcharge (the same as applying a service tax to all tickets).
• Default payment status.

Event Espresso Add-Ons

As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow plugin users to significantly expand the capabilities of managing your event.

Some of these addons 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 the event does not have a featured image, a default image will be used.
• Recurring Events Manager Addon: The Recurring Events manager add on lets you put events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months ahead. You can schedule as many events in advance as you need. Event Espresso will automatically open and close registrations for all of your recurring events.
• Events Category Accordion Template Add on: The Category Accordion template displays event categories in a simple list. Clicking a category name displays all events related to that category and closes any previously open categories.
• Social Coupons Integration Add on: If your website uses Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can also specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
• Custom Template Add-on: The Custom Template add-on lets you display your events in a range of visually exciting ways.
• Seating Chart Add-on: The seating chart addon is suitable for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is perfect 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 from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart addon lets you manage the experience for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach single prices to every seat.
• Multiple Event Registration Addon: The Multi-Event registration addon gives your 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 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.
• Events Calendar Add on: This WordPress events calendar displays events and categories of events using an attractive graphical calendar.
• EE4 Infusionsoft Integration Add on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and marketing plugin add-on, you can completely automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture event attendee data, track enrollments, and accept payments from your website.

Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software, including new add ons.

For more details about the latest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:

• Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management

User Testimonials

Here are some of the many great testimonials that plugin users have posted 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

”I’m so excited to fire Eventbrite! Event Espresso has an amazing WP plugin for event management. We’re testing it now & are very impressed! In a nutshell Event Espresso saves us money & does everything Eventbrite did before. :)” Dustin Nay

Event Espresso Tips

Whether you are a motivational speaker, trainer, concert planner, or event management professional, there are simply endless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.

After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, search the support forum for inspiration and practical ways to streamline your event management and registration process and enhance the experience of your event customers.

Product Support

Event Espresso is compatible with all WordPress plugins and themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you find that you need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent support, as so many of its satisfied plugin customers attest:

”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

The plugin provides exceptional support including access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, premium 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 developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can depend on to run your events.

Software Pricing

Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software functionality, however, you may want to consider purchasing one of the paid plugin versions below:

• Personal License Edition – This allows you to run 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 License – This lets you set up Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
• Developer License – This license allows you to install Event Espresso on five sites. It includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.

Pricing for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. When we last checked, the software is being retailed for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current price: Event Espresso – Event Espresso

Please Note: The pricing above was current at the time this article was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the site.

Additional Plugin Info

Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.

Look up the software’s documentation tools for answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to a specific situation, or to report issues and give feedback.

For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product information pages.

The Bottom Line

Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event booking and ticketing management plugin, used and trusted by thousands of event promoters.

If you are a WordPress site owner and you currently run any event that requires managing dates and venues (offline and online), enrolling participants, or selling seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable WP plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.

For more details, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso

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