28 May 2010 – The Good Funeral Guide

Who are they, what do they want?

28 May 2010

Charles

2 Comments

Categories: Uncategorised

My website has been, I don’t know, hosted, is it? by WordPress for the last month. Instead of Google Analytics to tell me who comes and what they come for, I now have WordPress stats. In some ways they aren’t so good. I can no longer see where in the world my visitors come from. My wife enjoyed that. “Ooh, look, you’ve got two people in Patagonia!”

But in all sorts of other ways my new stats are a huge improvement. They tell me so much more. Including stuff I want to hear. Visitor numbers are rising all the time. That a niche publication which bangs on and on remorselessly and humourlessly about death should attract just shy of 9,000 visitors a month looks good to me. Now that the Guide is out, that ought to climb away nicely.

My new stats also tell me what people look for. Coffins top the list by a long way. What do you make of that? They are followed by best funeral directors, then What To Do With Ashes, then Create The Ceremony, then hearses, then Funeralcare bloopers. Green funerals, intriguingly, come way down. Perhaps people who want a green funeral are more inclined to go straight to the excellent Natural Death Centre website?

A good many folk trawl through the blog archive. Some posts are unaccountably and enduringly popular. Every day several people find Who cares? and Desert flowers.

I can also see who clicks through to other websites from mine. Coffins again take the lead. Top of the list there is Greenfield Creations, the coffin makers who supply to the public at remarkably fair prices. Next, to my delight, comes Bellacouche, the shroud maker. I do hope Yuli’s sold one or two on the strength. Phoenix Diamonds, the people who make ashes into diamonds, get a lot of interest. So does William Warren, the man who designed a coffin that can be used as bookshelves until you need it (pictured above). Send him your measurements and he’ll send you the spec. Free. Lovely man.

(Actually, it now occurs to me, I have amassed market information that would be of enormous value to lots of people in the Dismal Trade, whom I now expect to beat a path to my door waggling their wads. Go away! )

I also get a useful list of search terms people have used. I can test them and see what page of Google the GFG comes up on. And here I can report that, if you’re skint like what I am and doing it all on a frayed shoestring, you can, by dint of sheer hard blogging, get yourself right up there. It’s the most gratifying thing my stats have told me. Floreat meritocracy and stubborn self-belief!

Who’s working for who?

28 May 2010

Charles

3 Comments

Categories: celebrants

Secular funeral celebrants cling to the fiction that they work for their clients. They don’t. Their clients get to choose the coffin they want (they might go for something really expensive) but they don’t get to choose their celebrant, they get lumped with their celebrant. Celebrants work for funeral directors, who hold them in dependency.

That’s how the funeral directors see it. According to a report in the Funeral Service Journal (June 2010), Stephen Benson, civil celebrant, recently attended a meeting of the British Institute of Funeral Directors (BIFD). “A straw poll revealed that he had actually conducted a ceremony for over half the members present in the room.” This sentence tickles me. It makes it sound as if half of the undertakers present were dead. Perhaps they were.

Occasionally a celebrant will be contacted directly by a client, usually one who has seen the celebrant in action or received a recommendation from a friend. When this happened to me recently I was surprised when the funeral director came up to me after the funeral and said, “Thank you so much for doing this for us.” I won’t tell you what words I leashed in tightly behind my indulgent smile.

Unlike coffins, celebrants are available on the open market and can be inspected, rejected and selected at funeralcelebrants.org.uk. Recommended.

Would you credit it?

28 May 2010

Charles

No comments

Categories: Dignity

Here’s an interesting insight from the US into the robustness of the business model of Services Corporation International, the clumping, predatory and often bungling funeral chain which begat our very own Dignity Caring Funeral Services. Dignity is not a notably bungling organisation, but the challenges they both face are related:

Because of the lack of industry growth, Service Corporation and its peers have increasingly focused on preneed sales to drive revenue. While paying for a funeral at the time of death is unavoidable, paying in advance is highly discretionary. As a result, the company’s revenue has declined through the recession. More important, proceeds from preneed sales are placed in trusts until the actual funeral services are delivered. Service Corporation carried an investment portfolio of about $3 billion at the end of 2009, with about 40% of that portfolio invested in equities. If this portfolio suffers serious impairments or generates insufficient income, the company could be materially affected.

Dignity is profitable, but it is also leveraged. And, as Andrew Plume pointed out a while back, its figures in many branches are very low. The business pages of UK newspapers customarily talk up Dignity and advise investors that it’s a safe haven for their money. I don’t know that that is how it is seen by any who know the industry. Have any of you funeral directors out there got any money in Dignity?

The single most influential factor is this: the public does not like using a chain funeral director.

Read the whole story here.