Blogging for Funeral Homes

How can funeral homes use blogs as a value-added service to their families?

There are some general strategies that would apply to all funeral homes and then others techniques can be applied whether your funeral home is in a large city or a smaller town.

General Blogging Strategies for All Funeral Homes

• Press Releases
• Upcoming Funeral Home Events
  
• Special Memorial Events and Guest Register Signing
• Helpful Information About Funerals
• Frequently Asked Questions
  

Press Releases:
Let your community (and the world) know if you have had any promotions or new hires. If your funeral home has received any awards, recognitions, or designations. Plus create a Press Release your your firm or staff have achieved any anniversaries, such as 50 years of supporting your local service club, or a staff member has been employed for 20, 25, 30 or more years. These may seem minor or insignificant, but it helps humanize your company and after a while, you will be surprised how many people mention those items to you. As a bonus, you may get your story picked up by your local media!

Upcoming Funeral Home Events:
Do you have Grief Support Group meetings, Open Houses, Funeral Home Tours, Cremation or Pre-Planning Seminars, and Christmas Memorial Services? Use your blog to promote them. Yes, put these events in Calendar module of your website, but using your blog, will get in front of your community's eye easier and with more detail.

Special Memorial Events and Guest Register Signing:
Even though most funeral homes that might be experimenting with a blog will probably already have some form of Online Guest Book, you should create a blog posting letting your community know that they can come by the funeral home to sign the Register. For instance, for President Gerald Ford, Princess Diana, or the slain RCMP Officers, many funeral homes made guest books available to be signed, so the next time this happens you can create a blog giving people the details.
This also applies for Special Local Memorial Services for these types of people. Sure it is going to be covered in newspaper, TV, and more popular websites, but since you are the local authority on death and funerals, you can make a positive comment or promotion of an event.

Helpful Information About Funerals:
Your current website may have a "Helpful Info" area but that should not stop you from adding to your content. During slow periods have different members of your staff write short explanations about:

• Why do People View Their Loved Ones?
• What is Involved in Embalming?
• Suggestions for Personalizing Services (this can be continually updated)
• Social Security Benefits

Once you are ready to update the content of your funeral home website, all of your homework is already done.

Frequently Asked Questions:
Similar to helpful information, as you have to answer questions for the families that you are serving or for inquiries over the telephone, write them down - or better yet, enter them into your blog and select "Save As Draft" until you are ready to post each question. Once you have a dozen or so, have your web developers upload the new questions to your existing FAQs page.

For Funeral Homes in Smaller Towns:
Blogs are a great way to communicate with the residents (and former residents) of your town. Your funeral home website or blog could become the portal so that members of your community can keep abreast of the towns activities. Whether it is plays, art shows, parades, church bazaars, your web presence will "virtually" bring the town together. Even people who no longer reside there, probably check your website for recent deaths. This also applies to snowbirds who like to keep in touch - many funeral homes that are located where winters are cold have members of their community travel South, and constantly receive condolences via their website saying, "Joan, we are really sorry to hear that your Mom died. When we get back from Florida in April we will have you over for tea."

For Funeral Homes in Larger Cities:
Most likely you are in a competitive situation so the best thing to do is start a blog. Get your blog established. Yes, if possible, have it part of or associated to your website, but don't let your web developer impede your progress with high costs and design issues - blogs were designed so that the non-techies could could communicate on the Internet with ease and little expense.

Once you get started you can have your web developers insert a small column window on your website listing all of your recent postings. Throughout your blog postings, link back to your website: "For More Information About the Benefits of Viewing - Click Here"
After a while, you will have compiled a lot great material so that you can update your website or have enough in-house content for a Newsletter or eNewsletter.

I am sure that there are a lot more great ideas out there from fellow funeral professionals, please feel free to add your comments.

Photoshop for Funeral Directors: Memorial Folders - The Basics

Photoshop for Funeral Directors: Memorial Folders - The Basics

As funeral professionals continue to try to improve their personalization offerings, this series will help equip them with the basic skills and techniques to stay ahead of the do-it-yourselfers. This means that we have to break away from Oval Vignettes and Times New Roman fonts! In this segment, we will go through the architecture of the 2-Up, 8.5 X 11 memorial folder using Adobe’s Photoshop. I favour the 8.5 X 5.5 (2 up) folders for a variety of reasons:

• It reduces your printing costs by 50% over the full 8.5 X 11 landscape folders
• The smaller ones easily fit in suit pockets and purses and hence more likely to be taken from the service
• Larger folders invite more service details which in turn invites more headaches for you as you know these details can change right up to service time
• Also from my experience attendees would prefer an additional photo or a personal letter or poem from a family member over a list of hymns and scripture readings
• I now encourage that the order of service be on a separate piece of paper that can be photocopied
• The bigger the canvas the more things the family may want to be included, so your production time will be reduced with the smaller folders – if they insist on the larger ones, then double your production fee and double your printing fee.

In creating the memorial folders with Photoshop, we will now need to make some basic assumptions:

• This is not your first time using Photoshop (if it is, there are many tutorials on the Internet and it may be worth while to purchase an instructional book or video)
• You are aware of how Layers work in Photoshop
• That your printer has margins of ¼ inch for the top, bottom, left and right, giving you a Canvas Size of 8 X 10.5 (if your printer only gives you a print area of 7.5 X 10 with ½ inch margins you will need to make some additional adjustments as we work through this demonstration)
• Note: For Photoshop commands, I will display the Menu Path after the bullet and then show the keyboard shortcut in brackets.

Create a New Document

• File > New (Ctrl + N)

Copy the settings in the following screenshot. Make sure that you choose a Resolution of at least 150 pixels/inch. Most printers will not give you a higher quality output if you use a higher resolution and by using 150 it keeps the document at a reasonable size - anything lower than 150 will result in a poorer final output. If you wish to save this New Document as a Preset, in the Name field type Memorial Folder Template - 2 Up (or something similar), then click on the Save Preset button and following the prompts in the new window. Then click on the OK button to accept the new document.

Setting Up Your Work Space

When creating documents such as memorial folders, it is helpful to use Guides and see the Rulers so that you can centre photos and text.

• View > Rulers (Ctrl + R)

To make the four quadrants of the folder use the Guides feature which is a visible line on the screen but does not print.

• View > New Guide: Vertical, 4.0 in
• View > New Guide: Horizontal, 5.25 in

You can also create guides by placing your mouse in the Ruler area (white), left click and hold, then drag the Guide into place. Now to take into account the printer margins, add two more Guides on each axis ¼ inch away from the centre Guides: Vertical, 3.75 & 4.25 and Horizontal, 5.0 & 5.5 Your work space should look similar to this, (but without the text):

Adding Text Layers
For each quadrant create a Text Layer by clicking on the Horizontal Type Tool in the Tool Palette or (Shift + T). Left-click in the top-left of each quadrant and then drag the mouse to the bottom-right. For now type in the labels that I have as place holders; eventually you will replace them with the appropriate text for the deceased. Depending on how you like your folders formatted, you can add text to the various quadrants. Please note that the following is just a standard layout that has been used for many years. The following is not a mandatory layout, but at least a starting point. Please feel free to change the location of the text and pictures. I would encourage you to slowly push away from the old and be more creative with your memorial folders. Just like services themselves, the more personalized the folders are, the more meaningful they are for the attendees.

Standard Layout for Text and Images

Outside Back: Obituary Notice or Poem with funeral home logo at bottom

• Alternative: add a photo at the side of the text or have a faded image under the text, or if you have used the obituary on the inside maybe create a collage of 3 or 4 photos

Outside Front: “In Loving Memory” or “Honouring the Life of” followed by a photo of the person, and then add their name and dates

• Alternative: use the “Polaroid” look of the deceased for the front cover instead of the feathered, oval vignette or the stock image that matches the memorial register.

Inside Left: Statistical Information (Name, place and date of birth, place and date of death, service location, date, and time, clergy, disposition and location, reception information).

• Alternative: include another photo of the decease or an image depicting their hobbies / activities.

Inside Right: Order of Service, list of pallbearers, etc.

• Alternative: have the order of service on a separate piece of paper, insert an additional photo, scripture, poem, family letter or obituary notice
• Leave in the pallbearers names as this makes the folder more personal, or move them to the other side if there is room

Text Effects

Once you have laid out all of the necessary textual information, you can now add various effects to the text. In Photoshop these are called Blending Options and are applied to the individual layers. Once highlighting the desired layer in the Layers Pallet:

• Layer > Layer Style > Blending Options (Right-click over the layer in the pallet and click on Blending Options)

I will list my default selections here but feel free to play with the various settings.

In Loving Memory, Name, and Years select (check box) Drop Shadow and Bevel and Emboss – the default settings are fine or adjust them to your liking.

Text over top of photo select either Stroke or Outer Glow. Stroke will give you a crisp outline of the text – best when over top of image consisting of predominately one colour. Outer Glow give a faded or cloudy haze over the image – best used when there are multiple colours or a lot of contrast such as a black and white collage. For either Layer Style choose the colour that looks the best

We will cover more advance text options in upcoming tutorials.

Ready to Print

Once all of the text and images have been added and you have applied the desired effects you will want to print the folders. As the document looks right now, it is not going to help you so we can do a couple of things here, but I will walk you through the easiest way and then in later tutorials we will look at other methods.

1. Save the document: File > Save (Ctrl + S) eg. Heppell-folder.psd
2. Save it again: File > Save As (Shift + Ctrl + S) eg. Heppell-folder-flat.psd

· This gives you a backup in case you need to make any changes because you will not be able to edit the new document

3. Hide all of the inside layers by clicking on the “Eye” so that it does not appear – do this to the Background Layer too
4. Merge all visible layers: Layer > Merge Visible (Shift + Ctrl + E)
5. Select > All (Ctrl + A)
6. Edit > Copy (Ctrl + C)
7. Edit > Paste (Ctrl + V)
8. Select the Move Tool (Shift + V) and move the copy down to the bottom half of the template
9. Once in place you can print the outside of the folders: File > Print (Ctrl + P)
10. Hide the two Outside layers by clicking on the “Eye” so that it does not appear
11. Unhide all of the Inside layers then repeat steps 4–9

Download Templates

Since there are so many functions to Photoshop, it may be beneficial to download the .psd document so that you can examine the various layers. If the Guides are not visible, press (Ctrl + H).

The document can be downloaded at: www.heppellfuneralsolutions.com > Resources > Tutorials

Then select “Memorial-Folder-Template–2-Up.psd”

Next Tutorial: The Polaroid Effect