Welcome to the eighty-first edition of Morticians’ Monday Morning Mashup, 4M #81, where we’ll serve up bite-sized, easily-digestible nuggets of the deathcare news you need to crush conversations in the week ahead. Bon appetit!
What say you?
The Ohio Supreme Court is considering a case that poses an interesting question: To whom do preneed clients “belong” — the funeral home that holds their contract or the funeral director/salesperson who sold it to them? The answer may seem obvious to you, but as the same situation has made it to the highest court in the state, apparently it’s not that simple. In the Ohio case, a funeral home employee who moved to another funeral home after his was bought out mailed 99 letters to the folks he had purchased preneeds from him to let them know he’d moved. According to one report, some of the letters mentioned that the clients could transfer their contracts to the new place, as well. Fifty-six of the recipients did just that, so his former employer sued, alleging that the employee stole the contracts, which contained trade secrets.
Speaking of preneeds …
Well, this sounds questionable:
What the heck is going on in Arizona?
An Arizona senator has introduced a bill that would transfer most of the oversight of the state’s deathcare personnel and establishments to the health department and eliminate licensing requirements for assistant embalmers and directors. The bill comes on the heels of a March 31 law that eliminated the state’s 78-year-old funeral board and gave it six months to “wind down business.” None of these decisions seem to be popular with the folks who will be directly impacted, who believe deathcare will get lost among the health department’s workload and licensed practitioners will become liable for the mistakes of the unlicensed assistants they’ll be required to supervise. However, the lawmaker believes it’s a positive move for all involved, eliminating a board that “failed multiple auditor general inspections” and was “not responsive to consumer complaints” and breaking down barriers to employment for potential embalmers and directors.
Party like it’s 1730
Check out this piece from The Pennsylvania Gazette about the 1730 funeral of a Quaker physician. Not only did 900 people show up for his funeral; 200 of them were gifted with a little book on mortality written by none other than the deceased — which the paper notes is much better than the previously “frequent and fashionable” drinking of “spiritous liquors” at such events.
The secret’s out
It’s more than likely there is no course on search engine optimization (SEO) in mortuary school. But that’s ok, because the cool kids at MemoryShare know all about it — and they know how to improve yours … while at the same time making streaming services super simple for your staff. Get ready for a little mortuary math here (also probably not a class):
SEO + superior streaming services + super simplicity + safety and security =
The MemoryShare not-so-secret sauce for success
MemoryShare’s exclusive app makes streaming super easy; you can record your full service with the touch of a button. By sharing these streams with your community, you showcase your excellent service and create name recognition with the viewers. Aaaannnd that’s not all, folks. Because MemoryShare videos are embedded on your own website (and not on the site of a separate streaming provider) your site gets more views, which results in street cred with the search engines.
Two things funeral homes need in 2023 are visibility and increased call volume. MemoryShare provides both of these things as well as a team of REAL people you can talk to if you ever run into trouble. So what are you waiting for? Learn more about MemoryShare today!
