Watch those cash-advance rules of thumb

I spent some time reviewing my company's financials this afternoon and it surprised me to see how much our newspaper cash advance line has jumped in the last year--almost 29% (or $43,000 for a company our size)!

We have seen several of our local papers switch over to paid obituaries in the last year or so and as a result families must pay substantially more to post funeral information.

Anyway, this got me thinking I should write a simple reminder to all of you to double check those cash advance rules of thumb. We all have them, quick mental guides on how much an obituary will cost based upon the amount of family information in the record. This allows us to provide a reasonable estimate on the "Statement of Goods and Services". Still those rules of thumb get out of date from time to time and all the more so these days with the cost of many goods and services on the rise.

So check those bills more closely and make sure your arranging directors have current costs in mind when they sit with their families. An unnoticed newspaper short-fall of $20 or $30 dollars can add up quickly if it happens too often and at least in states like Massachusetts, cash-advance items have literally no margin for error.

In a time of slimming margins, every dollar counts. Don't just write off those mistakes. Fix them! That will make funerals just a tiny bit less expensive for everyone else.

Have a fabulous day!

Comments

[Lauren Kwan]

BT:

To make every dollar count, I think the fundamental question each funeral director should ask themselves as well as the families they serve is whether paid obituaries is a good use of their money. A number of important factors all support online instead of print as the best solution for obituaries, including: growing Internet usage by people of all ages; dispersion of families and friends across the globe; cost-effectiveness; and permanency. When my grandmother passed away a decade ago, the few reasons my family gave me for wanting to publish an obituary in the local newspaper was:

1) mass notification: ability to easily notify friends and neighbors who you are not in regular contact with about the funeral and wake details

2) legacy: honor the life of my grandmother (this would be the only time my grandmother appeared in a newspaper)

3) social norm: it was expected

I think these reasons are still largely the ones that drive families to pay (sometimes outrageous amounts of money) for paid obituaries in the local newspaper. But, times have changed, and each of these reasons have tremendous weaknesses when considered in the context of our world today:

1) Friends and family are spread all over the world. Many of them are probably not reading the local newspaper. You can spread news to more people and at a faster speed via sms, email, chat, blog, or social networking site. For older relatives who are not online, you would still have to call them by phone.

2) It’s so easy to share information and honor the life stories of our loved ones now. Create a blog as an online memorial, upload photos about your loved one on flickr, or create private multimedia online memorials so that it lasts for generations. From cost as well as legacy standpoint, these online solutions last a lot longer, are much richer in terms of information they can capture about a loved one, and are all cheaper than the printed obituary.

3) Online media and presence is certainly becoming more of the norm now, but I think the most important thing is to constantly challenge whether what we’re doing actually achieves the goals.

No matter how I look at it, paid obituaries just seem like the biggest waste of money.

[BT]

Hi Lauren,

Thanks for the post.

I'd have to guess we're at least 10 years (and probably a lot more) away from dropping the local newspaper as a place to post obituaries. They still aggregate enough eyeballs to make it important to post funeral information there.

No doubt our online resources help enhance the process and no doubt we can suggest to families they limit their line counts in the print portion because of the website resources available through the funeral home.

But there's still plenty of 70 and 80 and 90 year olds out there who only read the paper, and those are the folks most likely to show up for the funeral.

I don't think we're ready to disenfrancise those folks yet.

BT

[Lauren]

Hi BT,

Point well taken - I definitely don't mean to disenfranchise the folks who only read the paper. However, I think we're in agreement here that there're now a lot of online resources (offered via the funeral home as well as other parties) that can help families honor their loved ones and spread the word about the memorial service that are perhaps more cost effective. As you suggest, a hybrid approach, with an eye towards limiting line counts, may be it.

Out of curiosity, what is the average length (word count) and cost of the obits that you help customers place? Our conversation is making me very curious about the national averages, and also how much of a newspaper's revenues is derived from paid obituaries. I think I will investigate further.

Lauren