Tap Into Your Community’s Desire to Support Grieving Families
March 20th, 2012
Every day, you deal with death. You’re experienced at knowing how to comfort, support and guide families, as they cope with the death of a loved one. For many of you, you can probably say that at this point in your career, it almost comes naturally to you.
But for the majority of your community, nothing about dealing with death is natural or comfortable. They struggle to know the right way to express their condolences for the bereaved.
So let’s forget for a minute that you’re a funeral professional, experienced at dealing with death, and pretend that you’re just a regular Joe in the community who just found out that your neighbor Bob just passed away.
Take a look at the following scenarios and see how your funeral home website has the potential to tap into the community’s desire to support friends and family suffering the loss of a loved one.
Put yourself in your community’s shoes, and see how these two solutions might help you!
Scenario 1: Help them express their support with sympathy gifts & flowers
You hear the news about Bob, and your first instinct is to send something to his wife Betty and their family to offer your condolences.
You’re not alone—statistics show that 93% of people send sympathy gifts and flowers to show their support for friends and family grieving the loss of a loved one.
But before you can send them anything, you go to the funeral home website to read Bob’s obituary and find out service times.
To your surprise, you see a link to The Sympathy Store. You click on it, and without leaving the funeral home website, you’re taken to a page filled with a large selection of flowers, memorial gifts, gift baskets and food. You take your time browsing the selection; you want to be sure to buy a gift that Betty and the family will really appreciate.
You select flowers to be sent to the funeral home and a gift basket to be sent to their home. Without ever leaving the funeral home website, you were able to read Bob’s obituary, find out service times and information, offer your condolences to Betty and the family, purchase sympathy gifts and flowers, and have them sent to the location of your choice.
The funeral home website just became a convenient one-stop-shop for you, saving you time and the hassle of navigating through various websites.
Scenario 2: Allow the community to share their memories
You’re scrolling through Facebook late one evening when you come across a link to an obituary for Bob, on his son Dave’s Facebook page.
You click on it and it takes you to a dedicated memorial page for Bob on the funeral home’s website. When you arrive there, you not only find Bob’s obituary and service times, but a whole tribute wall filled with memories and stories shared from visitors of his social memorial website.
As you read through them, you learn things about Bob you never knew. You click through images and videos, and even look their family tree. You get inspired to share some memories of your own, light a virtual candle in his memory, and offer Dave and the rest of the family your condolences.
You’ve been to funeral home websites before to read obituaries and sign online guestbooks, but you’ve never experienced anything like this before. The memorial website feels like you’re celebrating Bob’s life, instead of mourning him.
You decide to share Bob’s social memorial website with another neighbor Susan who has since moved out of state. That way, she too can participate in the celebration of Bob’s life, even though she can’t make it to the actual funeral service.
The funeral home website serves as an online gathering place, connecting all Bob’s friends and family in one central location.
It’s easy to forget how difficult it is to know the right way to support someone suffering the loss of a loved one, when you deal with it on a daily basis. Sometimes it helps to take a step back and put yourself in someone else’s shoes. Your community looks to you for guidance and support, just like your families do. Use your funeral home website to tap into the community’s desire to support your families.
What are some ways you use your funeral home website to tap into your community’s desire to support your families? Please share your comments below! 🙂
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