Respectance.com

Funeral Homes: a dying industry?

pay phone users

Funeral home directors are using the internet to buy supplies, you read about it every day, you have national conferences that tell you how your clients are wired. So why don’t you get it? Why do we have to keep banging our heads against a wall just to get you to see, hear and feel? Customers are asking for it, we’re telling you people want it. Listen up!

The internet has become an indispensable tool for work. People (your customers) are also using the internet as a primary means of communicating news to friends and family. Whether it’s via email or social networking sites like Respectance or Facebook, this is where we are sharing our news. The good and the bad.

When we came home from the NFDA in October we were filled with confidence from all of the positive feedback we’d gotten about Respectance. At the same time it was very obvious that most funeral homes were busy with prehistoric websites. Ever realized that most artists get more visitors online via their social network profiles, than via their own, personal websites? Did you know that family members and friends are sending each other more messages via social networks than via email nowadays? We think you ought to realize.

As Timothy Totten said in his October comment to us, “Unfortunately, this industry (sic funeral business) lags behind most others in terms of technology. While I think you’re in for some pretty serious resistance from most funeral directors, I’d encourage you to pursue the more progressive firms and work toward making your service an “inevitability” for the industry.”

It’s time for the funeral homes to put their client’s needs first. It is not only about greenbacks. We at Respectance are listening. We are offering our site and expertise to you FREE to pass it on as a value added service to your clients.
Come on guys, let’s not start taking the sailing boat for a trip to Paris. You take the airplane. Or do you really have so much time that you keep on sailing the ocean, because you always have done it that way?

p.s. the photo was taken in 2003 when there was a total blackout and inhabitants of Queens were forced to use the payphone. Cell phones did not work at that time.
The photo was shot by mark [at] sorabji.com, more of his work can be found at www.payphone-project.com/stories/blackout/. Thanks for capturing this unique moment in modern times.

p.s.2 we changed one story line after long and sensible comments from our readers. Thank you guys for being so upfront. We like that.

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Posted by Richard Derks

31 Mar

4 Responses

  1. Comment by Laneesha at 12:15 pm, March 31st, 2008

    Hope you have lots of patience.

  2. Comment by Timothy Totten at 1:11 am, April 1st, 2008

    Richard:

    You’re facing a pretty rough road, trying to convert funeral directors to use the Internet. But the folks you’re reaching on your blog are not the old-breed, “what is a computer?” funeral directors. The ones who might stumble upon this post are the people who actually use the Internet and might actually consider using your service.
    Maybe “yelling” at them or scolding them is not the best approach, if you want to convert some users.
    Also, my friend, most business people gauge the success of their business by how much money it makes. Money not coming in? Business is bad. Money pouring in? The business is working right. To suggest that funeral directors, the people who work all hours of the day and night, often ignoring their own family are “greedy and focussed (sic) on money” demeans them unnecessarily.
    Once again, you’re facing a tough, uphill battle here. But turning people to your cause (and to spend money with your business) is easier if you respect them and not insult their life’s work. You may not have intended your frustration to have that effect, the article written here seems very much like a reprimand.
    Few people want to spend money with someone who makes them feel evil or “greedy.”

  3. Comment by sorabji at 3:57 am, April 1st, 2008

    i fail to see what my photo from the 2003 blackout, which you lifted from my web site without permission and without citation, has to do with the businesses of funerals or online memorials.

    in any case, you enter a crowded field. findagrave, ancestry.com, even social networking sites like myspace host thousands upon thousands of memorial sites for the dead. i contributed mightily to findagrave for a period, and found it satisfying to send photos of grave sites and such to far-away relatives, helping to put together the pieces of a random family tree or lineage. you just can not imagine how happy it makes people when pieces of a seemingly infinite puzzle start to come together.

    the funeral business moves at a famously glacial pace. some homes have begun webcasting the funeral services for the benefit of relatives and friends too far away to attend the services. others are following the resurgence of interest in large-scale mausoleums. still others have begun embedding video screens into tomb stones, screens which play a video in honor of the dead buried there. the video screen development would seem to elaborate on the traditional sepulchral portrait, a genre that interested me enough to where I have taken hundreds of photos of such portraits.

    it is hard to find a center to the business, a place at which all funeral homes can do business, but good luck in your attempt to create that center. unlike you, i have never reached any broad conclusion that the business is greedy or self-absorbed. i do vaguely agree with you, though, that obituaries and traditional forms of remembering people’s lives can and should be supplemented by the Borgesian infinite copy space of the web.

    as for the unauthorized use of my photo, i am guessing it is just some random form of keyword brinksmanship. that photo is one of my favorites of mine that i’ve ever taken. it has been leeched far and wide, but usually with the courtesy of a citation.

    thanks,
    -mt

  4. Comment by Richard Derks at 8:24 am, April 1st, 2008

    Thank you Timothy and Mark for your honest comments. We are happy that we have readers that are as bold and upfront as we hope to be ourselves.
    I have changed one line, as it was too harsh. And I have of course added the photo credentials for Mark. I was simply looking for a photo that would show the ways of the good old days in the modern world, and the pay phone use by present day people made a lot of sense. Still love this picture, it tells so much.
    And Timothy, we are trying to be the brand that is totally open and is owned by our users. This means that we try to communicate as open as we can about what we experience. There are little secrets, we have a very pure ambition. To create a new tradition allowing people to share memories online with the most modern techniques.

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