Collaboration not competition.

According to Twitter, the website and an e-mail bulletin sent out yesterday, the Good Funeral Awards will be taking place this year in Bournemouth in September.

We think it worth noting that the Good Funeral Guide is no longer involved with these events and will not be attending.

We ended our involvement with the awards as joint organisers last year, having been very much part of the awards since they began in 2012.

The decision was taken for various reasons, but in essence, we feel that the time for competing against one other in funeralworld has come to an end and that progressive, intelligent people working together and collaborating in best practice is the way forward.

Across the UK, good people serving bereaved families face the relentless pressure of large corporates seeking ever larger ‘market share’, the growing issue of unregulated funeral planning, negative media coverage of the funeral industry, the race to the bottom in pricing, ‘ ‘disruptive’ online ‘experts’ adding their two penn’orth to information in the public domain – and the ongoing stress of working daily directly with death and the aftermath.

We feel that all who are trying to improve the way we do funerals in the UK are stronger together, supporting each other and sharing fellowship, rather than competing against each other, and allowing themselves to be set apart by judgements of who is the best in each field.

We also feel that the role of the GFG is done when it comes to awards within the funeral industry.

We want to concentrate on what we think essential. Reaching out from inside the funeral bubble of talking to each other about each other and actually talking to the people who matter most. The public.

The role of the Good Funeral Guide is, and always has been, to support, empower and represent the interests of dying and bereaved people, and we will continue to do our best to do so in the future, rather than getting sidetracked with event planning.

Other funeral ‘homes’ are also available…

Dying Matters, the former NCPC coalition, now under the wings of Hospice UK, sent out an e-mail bulletin this week with an update on this year’s Dying Matters Awareness Week, presumably to most of their 32,000 members.

Top feature in the bulletin was the large Co-op logo and blurb shown above.

The neat hook of offering those hoping to extend their Dying Matters activities throughout the year omits to mention that you can’t apply for a grant from the Co-op’s Local Community Fund if your organisation is run for private profit, nor to pay for general running costs or that successful applicants will receive a share of the funding starting in May 2019, which won’t be much help with your activities this year.

Pop in to see your local Co-op funeral arranger and find out more, and ask about their Start the Conversation campaign, the website for which helpfully leads you to information about Co-operative Funeralcare’s Funeral Plan.

Nice one Co-op marketing team. 

The GFG has long standing views on Co-operative Funeralcare – select it as a category in the search bar on the right and you’ll find 112 other posts, few of them flattering.

We aren’t keen at all on the carefully crafted illusion that your local Co-operative Funeralcare funeral home is part of a virtuous, publicly minded organisation providing working people with a good quality funeral at a fair price.

The TV and radio campaigns to convince Joe Public of this must be costing millions, so we’re mystified why they can’t chuck a few bob at their website and get all their prices online, nor why their much touted Simple Funeral costs £1,995 for their services alone and the day and time is arranged to suit them not you.

Hat tip to Holly Clarke, member of the Good Funeral Guild who brought this to our attention. We missed our copy of the e-mail bulletin, but found it in the spam folder.

 

 

 

Something for the weekend? Some good reading – and another book.

 

At GFG Towers we do like a good book, and recently we have indulged our book buying habit rather a lot – a pile of our recent acquisitions is shown above, all thoroughly well worth a read for anyone with an interest in dying and death. 

Last week, our attention was drawn to another recently published book, written by a celebrant, entitled ‘HOW TO HAVE THE FUNERAL SERVICE YOU WANT..? ‘And How A Celebrant Can Help’. Sounds interesting, we thought. And according to a couple of fulsome 5 star reviews on Amazon, it’s just the ticket.

But it’s not great. It’s not even good. How can we put this without sounding rude? It’s dreadful.

One of the first duties of a celebrant charged with the responsibility of writing a funeral ceremony for a bereaved family has to be accuracy – of content, spelling, grammar and syntax. So it is surely not unreasonable to expect that a book written by a celebrant about celebrancy should be a shining example of the beautiful use of language.

This one isn’t.

We’d love to show some examples of Ms Mewton’s work, of ‘grief’ and ‘funeral’ being spelled wrongly, for instance (pages 5 and 50) or of the frequency of unnecessary capital letters throughout sentences, the direct excerpts taken from the Death Cafe website and the frequent references to the opportunity to purchase her helpful Funeral Ceremony Wishes Planner, (also variously referred to as ‘Funeral Ceremony Wishes plan’, ‘Funeral Ceremony Wishes Plan’, ‘Funeral Ceremony Life Plan’ and ‘my visiting Funeral Ceremony Wishes planning service’) – but there is a stern warning at the front of the book prohibiting reproduction of any part of the publication. And we’re not keen on being sued.

We did, however, notice a fairly corruscating 1 star review of the book on Amazon which ends: ‘If I were a celebrant (or a Celebrant, as the author bestows the word a capital ‘C’ throughout the book, perhaps to emphasise how Very Important the role is) I would urgently be seeking a new job description. And if I were someone seeking guidance and advice ‘to help me have the funeral service I want’, I’d feel cheated.’

We found this review helpful. And told Amazon so.

 

 

 

Breaking the silence – a guest post

Guest post

Ed’s note – the writer of this blog post is known to us, however their identity is being withheld for reasons that are obvious.

‘The subject of bullying is in the media a lot these days, especially bullying within the work place. Most fair and just people think that any kind of bullying is abhorrent, although it’s a phenomenon that has been around since the beginning of time.

Work place bullying, whether obvious or more subtle, is something that many of us have had to suffer and deal with. A lot of managers, company owners and bosses etc. are approachable and empathetic to the victims, and these situations can be dealt with: but what if the bullying and intimidation is not within a structure or institution like this?

What if it is happening to a person who is working for themselves and trying to develop and build a business, and the bullying and intimidation is from competitors within the same business?  The victim has then to deal with situation themselves, which, along with the stress of developing the business, building a new client base, forging relationships within the community, can cause a great deal of upset stress and anxiety.

I have been living this scenario for a few years since starting my business. It’s taken a lot of hard work, perseverance and determination. I am now becoming fairly well known locally, and feel I’m making a difference to the families I work with. It’s been a hard but very rewarding time for me, I love my job with a passion but any problems I have had to deal with along the way have been exacerbated by bigger, more established funeral directors, interfering with and trying to close my business.

Some of my competitors have a very unhealthy obsession with my business, my personal life and the people I work with/employ. I have had to deal with phone calls from different people, some of which have been vicious and threatening. I have been asked questions regarding almost every facet of my business; these calls are by supposed customers enquiring about using my services. I have been reported to various authorities, and they have been informed of many totally unfounded and fictitious wrong doings within my work practices. I have been followed to find out about my vehicle, and I have been ignored at places we all as funeral directors use, ie the local crematorium, the hospital mortuary, not by the staff of these establishments, but by fellow funeral directors and their employees.

I’ve been dismissed both verbally and by people turning their backs to me when I try and pass the time of day, being professional and courteous (we all have to work within the same places). I have had letters sent to these places and a barrage of phone calls with people giving false names and using throw away mobiles, questioning why I am afforded the same facilities and utilities as the other funeral directors. These are only a small selection of the bully boy tactics and intimidation I have had to endure by the bigger, more established funeral directors, sometimes on a daily basis. I have been in touch with the police, who investigated to the point where I was informed that an arrest would be made. Then the case was suddenly and mysteriously dropped and I was advised that there was no further action.

Obviously this decision by the police was another very stressful and upsetting blow, to a point where I almost decided not to continue with my business, as who was going to help and protect me in this situation if the police are not? I am a strong person and I am very much able to fend for myself, but the relentless – and it is relentless – barrage of calls and underhand tactics from these, and I can only call them ‘mafia’, almost broke me.

Fortunately as I said, I am strong, and after a lot of soul searching and deep thought I decided that the only way to deal with these people is to carry on regardless of everything.  So, for want of a better phrase, I put on my ‘brave face’, suppressed my fear and anxiety and continued with my business.

After having the independent inspection from The Good Funeral Guide, with the results of this I felt vindicated and was hopeful that the campaign would end. Although it went quiet for a while, there are still episodes of bullying and letter writing. Recently a funeral director forcefully questioned and intimidated a celebrant who was working with me on that particular day, querying what the actual connection is with my business, in other words are they affiliated to me in some way, with an underlying veiled threat – appalling and unacceptable behaviour.

It seems that some of the other funeral directors feel threatened by a small independent like me, and certain ones will stop at nothing to try and put me out of business. Whether it is misunderstanding, a need for patriarchy, or just plain greed that drives this ongoing campaign, I don’t know, but amongst it all I am lucky to have a great team around me, and  I won’t bow down to the pressure. I will continue to be there for my families and offer the alternative, cost effective service as I always have.

I decided to break my silence on this as it occurred to me that maybe someone else is currently, or has in the past experienced something similar?  I hope mine is a one-off case and that no-one else has had to put up with the bullying I have, as it’s a very lonely place to be, but I doubt it. Unfortunately, where there is money involved, there will be unscrupulous greedy people who think they are entitled and no-one will get in their way.

I’m interested if anyone else has experienced anything similar to mine? If so how did you deal with it?’

The Good Funeral Guide
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