Setting Up Your Business -- Adding Funeral Programs to an Existing Business

Are you already running a successful business or organization, but want to expand your product line? Adding funeral programs to an existing business can make sense, if funeral publications are a natural extension of your services. Here are just a few of the possibilities.

Adding Funeral Programs for Your Funeral Home Clients

In some areas of the country, funeral homes are still dependent on the quick turnaround (and design limitations) of a local print shop in order to provide funeral publications to their clients. If you are in that situation, have you considered designing and printing the programs, funeral cards, and other mementos yourself?

Here’s why that can make good financial sense, as well as providing an important service to your clients. First, funeral program templates make it simple to design attractive, customized memorial keepsakes through Microsoft Word or Publisher, or even Pages for Mac. Second, providing this service yourself keeps the additional income in-house and provides a more streamlined collection of services for your customers.

By making the initial investment for a set of customizable templates, you can serve every client who comes to your funeral home in need of full-service funeral planning assistance. With a good quality color printer, an assortment of paper stock and a computer with recent word-processing software, you will be able to help those clients choose personalized elements and formats most appropriate for their loved ones’ memorial keepsakes.

One note: if you choose not to print the programs on-site, you’re still able to provide better service by designing them with your clients and then sending the digital file to a local copy shop.

Adding Funeral Programs to Your Hospice Services

The main purpose of providing hospice services is to bring comfort at the end of life, both to the patient and their family. Helping family members design and print personalized funeral programs is just one more way to offer comfort and assistance.

You’ll be able to help walk the family through an important detail of planning a funeral or memorial, and with the templates now available, a staff member or volunteer with standard word processing skills can design programs, prayer cards and other mementos easily.

Adding Funeral Programs for Your Congregation

Many churches now offer services such as designing and printing funeral programs as part of the funeral planning process. No matter whether a formal religious service or informal memorial service will be held at your church, appropriate funeral program templates are available to help make the design process simple.

The ease with which Scripture verses, songs, poems, collages and photos can be added to funeral or memorial templates ensures each funeral program designed is unique. This information can be collected during the family meeting with the pastor as well as afterward by email. It’s truly a comfort to the family of the deceased to know that the church where the final service will be held can help them create loving tributes in the form of funeral programs, prayer cards, bookmarks and other memorial keepsakes to distribute at the service.

Adding Funeral Programs to a Virtual Assistant Business

With the explosion of Virtual Assistants in this country, those men and women who support small businesses via phone, email and website, adding on this much-needed service is a natural. “VAs” are skilled in communicating with their clients online, making them the perfect people to design and edit customized funeral programs for their clients anywhere in the country.

If you’re already working as a Virtual Assistant, you’ve learned most of the skills you need to know to add funeral publications to your list of services. Before you begin marketing that additional service, download some funeral program templates to which photos, frames and borders, clipart and other custom elements can be added.

Practice designing individualized funeral programs to see how simple it will be to save and send draft copies to your customers for approval. We’ll talk more about marketing later, but consider the businesses and individuals for whom this unique service could be valuable.

You probably already own the computer, software and printer you need to run your memorial program business, so the only cost will be for templates and supplies. Tip: decide whether you’ll offer start-to-finish service including design, edits, final template creation, printing and shipping of funeral programs, or if you’ll simply be sending your customers a digital file of the document to send to their own local copy shop.

These are just a few ideas for adding funeral program design and printing services to an existing business. If your own business doesn’t fall into these categories, think about whether or not funeral bulletins could be an appropriate, value-added service for your customer base.