Houston — Service Corporation International’s acquisition of 70 percent of the Neptune Society last week is being viewed by funeral service watchers as a very savvy move, giving the largest funeral home company strategic strength across the funeral service spectrum.
“SCI can work its mainstream funeral locations and enhance its cremation society network into more areas,” commented David Nixon, Nixon Consulting. “The move to dominate the other side of the spectrum by capturing low-end, discount operators [is quite] a power play. It’s a pretty sweet deal for them, it seems.”
Funeral Service Insider invites all funeral directors in the United States to take its annual casket survey by visiting http://tinyurl.com/3ln26k3.
The survey mines data from funeral home owners throughout the country. It yields key data and analysis, including:
“Welcome to Jardines De Humaya” in Culiac’an, Sinaloa, a cemetery that illustrates the grim contrast between dying a drug lord, and dying anybody else, in Mexico.
This Mexican cemetery has mausoleums that are several stories high; there’s a mausoleum with a telephone line, and another one with stereo system. Ivory statues, Persian rugs, furniture. The tomb of a drug pilot, is actually adorned with crystal planes!
The monks of St. Joseph’s Abbey will have to wait a few weeks to hear the decision of their three-hour trial in U. S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana Monday. U. S. District Judge Stanwood Duval heard arguments from both sides but has postponed his decision until sometime in July.
“A trial is a search for the truth and the truth here is that there is no legitimate reason to deprive the monks of their constitutional right to earn an honest living,” said Institute for Justice senior attorney Jeff Rowes. “A casket is just a box and you don’t even need a casket for burialÖThe bureaucrats and special interests are so out of control in this country that not even monks are safe.”
The monks began building caskets to provide an income. They receive no support from the Catholic Church. In the past, they have farmed and harvested timber on their land but in the 1990s were advised by financial advisors to find a new way to support themselves.
The monks of St. Joseph’s Abbey will have to wait a few weeks to hear the decision of their three-hour trial in U. S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana Monday. U. S. District Judge Stanwood Duval heard arguments from both sides but has postponed his decision until sometime in July.
“A trial is a search for the truth and the truth here is that there is no legitimate reason to deprive the monks of their constitutional right to earn an honest living,” said Institute for Justice senior attorney Jeff Rowes. “A casket is just a box and you don’t even need a casket for burialÖThe bureaucrats and special interests are so out of control in this country that not even monks are safe.”
The monks began building caskets to provide an income. They receive no support from the Catholic Church. In the past, they have farmed and harvested timber on their land but in the 1990s were advised by financial advisors to find a new way to support themselves.
INNOVATION DISTRICT, BOSTON, MA — Tributes, Inc., the online resource for local and national obituary news, and FirstGiving, a proven leader in providing online peer-to-peer fundraising tools dedicated to expanding the world of giving, announced today that they have formed a strategic partnership. Tributes.com has integrated FirstGiving’s Global Charity API Platform throughout the popular obituary classified destination site to help facilitate memorial giving to major charities in line with the final wishes of those that have passed away and are permanently memorialized in the Tributes.com database.
By leveraging FirstGiving’s API and donation processing services, Tributes can provide funeral homes and families with a very simple point-and-click interface to integrate direct links to over 100 of the most popular national and international charities so that extended family and friends can easily make donations in the name of a loved one directly from within their online obituary. FirstGiving seamlessly handles all payment processing and will even facilitate annual giving commitments through their powerful donation engine.
“Tributes.com is quickly becoming the brand that people turn to in times of loss to connect and remember,” said Karsten Robbins, CEO, FirstGiving. “Donating to a designated charity can be an important part of honoring someone’s memory and we are thrilled to play a critical role in facilitating that transaction – making it easier for the donor and in doing so ultimately increasing the volume of donations received by charities working to fund important research and solve critical problems.”
“By partnering with FirstGiving and taking advantage of their robust technology and service platform, we have dramatically reduced the amount of business development and technology resources that would have been required to develop the relationships and infrastructure that they bring to the table,” said Elaine Haney, President of Tributes, Inc. “We couldn’t be happier to be partnering with a neighbor in Boston’s Innovation District that delivers such tremendous value to our Company, our funeral home channel and the families we collectively serve while helping us increase the amount of memorial giving generated by our platform and across our growing network of 100+ broadcast media partners.”
About Tributes.com:
Tributes.com is the online resource for current local and national obituary news, lasting personal tributes and online community providing support during times of loss and grieving. Through one centralized national web destination, with over 90 million current and historical death records dating back to the 1930s, Tributes has made obituary and online memorial service information easily accessible so people can come together online and offline to remember and share the treasured stories of the important people in their lives who have passed away. Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor officially launched Tributes.com in the fall of 2008 and in 2 1/2 short years the site has experienced rapid growth, and is now relied on by thousands of funeral homes and more than 1.8M unique consumers each month to publish and locate obituary news. For more information about Tributes.com, please visit our website at www.tributes.com or contact us at media@tributes.com.
About FirstGiving
FirstGiving empowers passionate individuals to raise money online for thousands of causes and helps 501c3 nonprofit organizations plan, execute, and measure successful online fundraising campaigns. FirstGiving is a proven provider of powerful, yet easy-to-use tools for charity fundraising events and grassroots fundraising campaigns and securely processes online donations. Fundraising ideas and fundraising tips abound on FirstGiving, and our personal fundraising pages are easier to use than any other fundraising software product. In addition, in support of our commitment to expanding the world of giving, we offer a suite of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) enabling charities and outside parties to tap into our donation processing and fundraising expertise. For more information, visit www.firstgiving.com or contact us at press@firstgiving.com.
As you leave middle age behind, buying insurance to finance your funeral may seem like a no-brainer – death is inevitable, after all, and somebody will have to pay.
“In life insurance planning, that topic of conversation often comes up,” says Scott Zuckerman, president and CEO of Wexford Financial Strategies in New York. “Clients say, ‘I don’t want to place any burden on my family.’”
Today, the average funeral costs $6,590, according to the National Funeral Directors Association. That’s just for basics and doesn’t include costs for the cemetery, grave marker and flowers.
Austin funeral service icon Charles Walden lent his name to a misleading open letter that appeared, apparently as a paid advertisement, in the Austin American-Statesman, page A6, on May 26. The purpose of the letter seems to be to convince Austin area readers that the five Cook-Walden funeral service locations in the Austin area are the same now as they have been for the last 100 years. Of course, this is not the case. Cook-Walden originally had just one funeral home 40 years ago. It is now owned by Service Corporation International (SCI)-the largest funeral and cemetery chain in the world.
TOPEKA, Kan. — Kansas funeral industry regulators are set to setting rules for using a new form of cremation, by dissolving bodies in lye, that will become legal in the state July 1. But few expect the practice to become widely used anytime soon.
Kansas legislators in 2010 passed a law that broadens the definition of cremation and makes the state just the seventh in the nation to allow the practice formally called alkaline hydrolysis, said Mack Smith, executive secretary of the Kansas State Board of Mortuary Arts
HAMILTON – A woman who may have been engaged in sexual activity in a township cemetery Tuesday evening was injured when a tombstone fell on her leg, police said.
The 39-year-old woman was not badly hurt, and the administration of Ahavath Israel Cemetery declined to press charges, according to police.
The woman was with a male friend in the graveyard off Cedar Lane just before 7 p.m. visiting the grave of a relative. When the two engaged in some “extracurricular activities,” one of the grave markers rolled onto the woman’s leg, Capt. James Stevens said.
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