Transcript:

Hi, I’m Sam Giedris the Social Media & Video Specialist here at Frazer. And like many of you, I was at the NFDA convention in Salt Lake City last week.

The convention had a ton of great sessions, exciting booths, and informative campfire chats. And throughout almost all of the sessions that I attended, I noticed one big theme. Your funeral home needs to think about more than just helping families who are at need. You need to find ways to engage with them preneed and post need. And increasing your community involvement is a great way to do that.

Engaging with your community in person and on social media is an important part of making sure you’re reaching families at all stages instead of only reaching them when they just experienced a loss. Finding ways to get involved with your community also builds familiarity which is an increasingly important factor for why families choose funeral homes.

Planning events at your funeral home can be a great way to start increasing your community engagement. And with the holidays right around the corner, hosting a holiday remembrance program can be a great way to bring people in your community together. You could also host a pizza and preplan session in honor of Have the Talk of a Lifetime month in November. Or, if your funeral home has a grief therapy dog, you could partner with the local school and bring your dog in for an hour or so to comfort students and help make the idea of funerals and funeral homes less scary to them.

By hosting events and engaging with your community now, you’ll be familiar to families in their times of need. To get more people at your events, be sure to use social media. You should post your obituaries there, but you should also create posts promoting events, asking your followers questions, answering questions you frequently get, and sharing tips for dealing with loss. By maintaining an active social media presence, where you engage with and educate people in your community, you’ll be seen as an expert in your area.

We know there was a lot of information to process at the convention and we want to make sure you have all the key takeaways.

Check out the NFDA recaps on our blog by clicking here.