Does your company currently run or plan to run events that require managing registrations, such as seminars, training courses, non-profit fund raisers, social conferences, or even a large-scale event like a trade show, 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 time-consuming process. You may have to manage calendar schedules, event dates, participant numbers, data collection and admin, payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders and notifications, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to attendees.
There are a number of advantages to setting up an online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce costs, help you easily copy settings for previously-run events, give you more control, improve client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that this can be costly.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-based digital presence, you can set up an inexpensive and professional web-based event booking system.
Presenting …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress enables you to easily set up your event and begin accepting registrations in just minutes.
(Set up multiple events and take online event registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can use several event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your participants, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing updates.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Important: Currently, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is fundamentally different than the older EE 3, as the platform has been rebuilt using a different structure to enable future expansion. The Event Espresso 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 read more about this plugin.
Learn more here:
Benefits
Here are just some 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 existing web site into an automated and fully featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically doing away with the chore of processing registrations manually.
Basically, you are facilitating attendees to perform the registration by themselves.
Letting your attendees to do the data themselves frees up your time and lets you focus more attention on organizing a memorable event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover in a moment, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management and registration process that you want your users to experience.
Some additional plugin benefits include:
- Less Costs: The Event Espresso plugin provides you with a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own system or using a third party service. The cost is kept low through a model where users start with the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then purchase add-ons only when you need added features.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept new event registrations any time of day or night. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features and add ons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event invite friends who may also be interested.
- Paperless Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, the event registration process remains entirely online, reducing typical paper waste from tasks related to enrollment.
- All Data Belongs To You. You own all the information you acquire from event attendees.
Features
The Event Espresso plugin delivers functionality to its users via standard features (these are included with the software) and additional features that you can buy for an added cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of great built-in to WordPress users. Here are just a few:
- Quick and easy to install and implement. Ready to start using in minutes.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In EE 4, events can have multiple dates and times (called datetimes), and these can be managed from a single event.
- Customized Notification Email Message. Set up automatic booking and payment confirmation emails to communicate with your attendees.
- Ticket Selector. Present multiple ticket options to prospective registrants and let them choose the ticket(s) that will best fit their needs.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration enables you to customize the display settings of Google Maps on the event listing and event details sections.
- Default Prices. Create events quickly by pre-configuring default pricing.
- Promotional Codes. Set up promotional and multiple discount codes to incentivize people to make a decision immediately, or make your offers more attractive for others. Also useful if you want to increase sales of events close to timelines.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of attendees and confirm everyone who attends.
- Waiting Lists. Latecomers can join a waiting list if your event has reached capacity. You can also specify that wait-list registrants pay for their spots if you plan to expand capacity for the event.
- Public Commenting. Add social engagement to your events pages by encouraging potential prospects to interact with you online via commenting and past participants to post comments that can help others choose whether or not to sign up. Moderation settings for commenting are configured via the WP commenting settings.
- Keyword-Rich URLs. Keyword-rich URLs leverage your WordPress Permalinks configuration settings. “Pretty” web links with topic-relevant keywords enhance the context of your pages and improves your search rankings, helping you bring a more targeted audience to your events.
- Country-specific Settings. You can configure the country and currency settings that will be used throughout Event Espresso, such as currency, currency signs, decimal characters and places, country codes, states or provinces, and so on.
- Default Tickets. If you find yourself creating identical tickets for many of your events, you can automatically set one of those tickets as your default ticket for any new events simply by ticking a checkbox.
- Register Multiple Event Participants. Event Espresso 4 allows one person or an organization to order multiple tickets and different ticket types at the same time. You can control how many people are allowed to enrol in a single session by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Event Espresso Community. Event Espresso lets you network with a community of experienced event managers, software programmers, web designers, internet marketers and business owners who also use the plugin. You can interact with other members of the Event Espresso community via their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Staff Manager. Save time and keep your information organized by reusing staff profiles for multiple events or displaying their profile using a shortcode in an event description.
- Categorize Events. If you have multiple event types like free and paid, workshops and breakout sessions, different kinds of exercise classes, etc. you can categorize them to make it easier for event registrants to find what they’re searching for. You can display all events in a category on an event category page, make the events searchable by category, and colour-code events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make these easier to find, as well as suggesting other events in the categories that interest your existing customers.
Extra features include:
- Hooks, Actions & Filters. These features allow web-based software developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso application that are compatible with WordPress.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. EE 4 allows you to create a log file with debugging data that can be useful for web developers when potential software errors.
- Autonomy, Flexibility And Value For Money: Event Espresso states on their website that their mission 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 company operates on a modular and highly efficient model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium version of Event Espresso also comes with 40+ additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – reduces the need to re-enter event information when creating new events.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse the same group of questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page during registration.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow customers to further expand the capabilities of the event management system.
Some of these add-ons include:
- EE4 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, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Management Addon: The Recurring Events manager addon lets you put events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months ahead. You can schedule as many events in advance as you want. Event Espresso will automatically open and close bookings for all recurring events.
- Events Calendar Table Template Add on: The Calendar Table template is a list template with a bold date and customizable “register now” button. The template can be customized to show an event thumbnail image instead of the date.
- Social Coupons Integration Add-on: If your web site 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 Files Add on: The Custom Files addon lets you bypass certain aspects of the plugin.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Addon Versions: This add on lets you include other staff in the event management process and give new users the capacity to create events or regional managers the capacity to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WP users roles and assign them different permissions with different capabilities, allowing staff to help you manage your events or events that others create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain parts of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain sections 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.
- Multi-Event Registration Add-on: The Multiple Event registration add-on gives 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 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 Table Template Add on: The Events Table Template add-on provides event managers with an easy-to-use system that allows you to modify 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 developers design custom templates using one of the templates provided as a source template.
- Infusionsoft Integration Add-on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft integration all-in-one sales and business marketing software add-on, you can completely automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture registrant data, track registrations, and accept payments from your Event Espresso powered website.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin, including new addons.
For more information about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, visit the plugin website:
Plugin Users – Feedback
Below are a few of the many testimonials that customers have posted about Event Espresso:
”Event Espresso is one of the nicest Event Managers (WP Plugin) I have come across.” Joe Distefano, Citizen Joe
”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
”Hello. I wanted to say that I’ve purchased Event Espresso twice now for two different organizations and have had great success with the purchases. Outside of photography, I also build small websites with WordPress as the CMS. I built two websites for two different martial arts organizations who host yearly seminars and tournaments. The plug in has provided a way for attendees to sign up online from both Canada and the United States with ease, and also allowed the organizations to easily manage payments, attendee lists, and many other aspects of the events. Thanks to Seth for creating such a great plug in, and for your constant support!” James Zedd, James Zedd Photography
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, presenter, concert promoter, or event professional, there are just countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed user, search the support forum for useful ideas and practical suggestions to improve your event management and registration process or enhance the experience of your customers.
Event Espresso Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with most WP plugins and WP themes that follow WP coding standards. If you find that you need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive support, as so many of its 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 Event Espresso software provides incredible support including access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base 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 an established team of experienced WordPress web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely software you can rely on to organize and manage your events.
Product Price
Event Espresso is available in different plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software options, however, you need to consider downloading one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal Edition – This edition enables you to set up Event Espresso on one site only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This enables you to install Event Espresso on 1 site only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This edition allows you to set up Event Espresso on 5 domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one 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 specials being offered. When we last checked, the software is selling for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticketing Registration System For WordPress
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 developer when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding 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 plugin’s documentation pages for answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to a particular use-case, or to notify developers about problems and leave feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the leading WP event booking and ticketing manager software, used by thousands of WP users.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you currently run events that involve managing dates and venues, enrolling participants, and/or booking tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso
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