Community Outreach: Programs to Get Your Funeral Home Noticed Without Breaking Your Budget
Front page article in the newspaper, story on the evening news, calls coming into your funeral home months and years after an event. All of this is possible by planning the right event, getting media to cover it, and utilizing the power of SEO to keep it going. Best of all, all of this can be done for no to low cost.
Is your funeral home taking advantage of all the benefits community outreach programs can provide? Do you know how to select an event starting with the endpoint in mind? How do you build relationships with other organizations, create relationships with the media and build a database for future marketing? Is this even possible during a pandemic?
Our guest, Nancy Weil, has been running events like these for years and will share the three words that she lives by and that you will know how to get for your funeral home by the end of the program: Free, Positive, Publicity.
Nancy Weil is the Member Resources Director at the Order of the Golden Rule, an association for independent funeral homes. For the past ten years, her monthly column has been featured in Funeral Home and Cemetery News. She has certifications as a Grief Management Specialist, Grief Services Provider, Funeral Celebrant, and Laughter Leader. Nancy speaks across the country through her company, The Laugh Academy.
Michelle Iman Bakhsh
All right, well, it looks like we are right on the hour, so we’ll go ahead and get started with today’s webinar and welcome. Thank you, everyone, so much for joining us. We’re so excited to see everyone today. This is our July in Conversation With webinar. My name is Michelle and I’ll be your host today. And with me, I also have Jenny, and she’s going to be helping us monitor the chat, sharing questions and comments as they come in.
Michelle Iman Bakhsh
So thank you, Jenny. Before we get started, just a couple of quick housekeeping items. First, we really want this to be an interactive session, so please go ahead and give us your questions. Comments. This is meant to be a time of discussion. And we’re so honored to have Nancy with us to help facilitate that and share all her wisdom and insight. And secondly, the full version of our program, Community Outreach, Pre positive publicity, is available for no cost to all state funeral directors associations, courtesy of Order of the Golden Rule.
Michelle Iman Bakhsh
So please reach out to Nancy for the recording or to schedule your in-person event. You’re going to really enjoy it and I highly recommend her program. So please take advantage of this wonderful opportunity. Nancy’s contact information is going to be on a slide at the very end of our time together today. Or you can always reach out to me and I’m happy to provide that. So with that, I would like to welcome our guest, my dear friend Nancy Weil member resources director for Order of the Golden Rule.
Michelle Iman Bakhsh
Welcome, Nancy, and thank you so much for joining us again for a program. We’re so excited to have you.
Nancy Weil
Thank you for having me back again, Michelle. And I get to talk about one of my favorite topics. So that makes it even better. Even better.
Michelle Iman Bakhsh
Well, we’re just we’re honored that you want to help us get that free, positive publicity. So what really sparked your interest in helping funeral homes with publicity?
Nancy Weil
Well, first of all, there is a reason it’s called free positive publicity free because that’s generally our marketing budget. Positive because the press loves to come after us with negative stories. Right. And having publicity, getting our name out there. It started for me because I was working at a cemetery and creating events and finding my way through the world of media. How do we get the information out to the community? What are we going to do?
Nancy Weil
How is that helping our cemetery? And as I learn this over many years and talking to lots of different experts over the years and figuring this out, that’s what I’m bringing today, is I really want everybody listening to learn from all those years of experience because what I’m going to teach, they don’t talk about. They just don’t mortuary schools are not talking to you about how to get the name of your funeral home out in front of your community unless you’re writing a check.
Nancy Weil
So that’s really how it started, is just by creating these events and figuring it out. And it’s really an important thing to talk about. It really is.
Michelle Iman Bakhsh
It is. And you make a wonderful point. You know, when I was a mortuary school, we didn’t have any kind, of course, on publicity or better yet, for any positive publicity. That should really be a program that they start implementing because it’s key to the survival and success of the funeral home.
Nancy Weil
So absolutely, the days of placing that ad in the newspaper on the obit page are kind of gone. And so if you don’t want to have to keep writing those checks to get very little on return, this is the program to pay attention to.
Michelle Iman Bakhsh
Absolutely, and so you say free being one of the key components of publicity. Is it really possible to get free publicity? I mean, nothing in life is really free, right?
Nancy Weil
No, this is free. This absolutely won’t cost you a dime. This is a method to get whether it’s a print, whether it is radio, whether it is television, they are looking for stories, knowing how to provide them that story, knowing how to pitch that story, knowing how to follow through. It doesn’t cost you anything, it doesn’t even take that much time, to be honest, depending on what your program is and what you’re putting together.
Nancy Weil
So they want to do this for you. They are looking to fill space, air time, print time pages, websites. They’re looking for this. And so why shouldn’t we be providing it?
Michelle Iman Bakhsh
Well, yeah, I mean, it’s really free, it’s just it seems kind of kind of crazy to think that something free exists out there in funeral homes just aren’t taking advantage of it. So, I mean, that’s pretty cool. Do you think it’s more effective to have free publicity versus the paid publicity? I mean, you kind of just alluded to that like no more ads and the nickel ads or whatever that may be. But do you really think free’s more effective?
Nancy Weil
Well, the reason it is, is if I place an ad right, I have total control over what it’s going to look like. I’ve written a check. I know when it’s running. I have control over that. OK, but it’s me tooting my own horn. And everybody looking at that ad knows exactly that. When media covers your funeral home or if you also have a cemetery, when they are covering that, it is giving you sort of implied credibility because it’s newsworthy.
Nancy Weil
It’s a story that allows somebody who’s watching or reading that to say, hey, something going on there, and they know that it’s because they wanted to cover it, you see, so it gives you more credibility with the general public. So absolutely. You want other people tooting your horn. You don’t want to be tooting your own.
Michelle Iman Bakhsh
But that definitely makes sense. So if you were to kind of advise a funeral home, it’s like I don’t even know where to start. How do I get this free publicity? What kind of advice would you give them to help them create events that are going to get them noticed that are worth their time? Because no one wants to do an event where one person shows up and it’s someone’s mom. It’s not like, you know, I mean, we’ve all had those events.
Nancy Weil
But the bottoms on seats component is always the stress. But why have we had some events? It doesn’t even depend on people showing up. So you’re OK. We’re going to talk about one of those. But really, the thing is, you have to keep in mind is when you are starting to plan an event, if you want coverage, think of that and plan backward. Will this get media attention? And we’re going to talk about what kind of events do that.
Nancy Weil
But you have to have some sort of public service component so that the press is going to cover it because it’s a need to know in the community. Right. So there is something that your community there, they’re providing a community service by sharing your event or story because that makes sense? It has to be about the public. It has to be about their listeners, their viewers, their readers can’t be about you because you try to pitch it as it’s about you.
Nancy Weil
They’re going to go ahead in the Newsroom. It’s going to send you over to the advertising department. Has to be about the community.
Michelle Iman Bakhsh
Now, do I just hear you say butts in seats component?
Nancy Weil
So any time you have an event where you’ve invited people in, the stress is butts in seats. Right? Are there going to be people there or am I looking out? And it’s like you said, your mom and some staff members, family members, a couple of families who love you and come. Right. That has extra stress. So if you’re trying to reach out to the media to fill the room, so to speak, that’s a different kind of pitch than other kinds of events.
Nancy Weil
And frankly, you’re going to have events like that. We had a funeral home and I’ll give a shout-out. Lakeside Memorial Funeral Home in Hamburg, New York. Phenomenal funeral director Charles Costelio. And he’s very innovative. And we actually held a holistic, open house, holistic health open house at his funeral home where we had different vendors, acupuncture, massage therapists, reflexology, different vendors who were teaching you about what they do and how that can help you.
Nancy Weil
We had over six hundred people walk through his funeral home that day, most of whom had never been in his funeral home. They were meeting his staff. They were seeing his facilities. They were seeing him as a resource provider. And needless to say, we got a lot of press because a funeral home focusing on holistic health, that’s going to get some press notice. Like, what’s that about? And it was phenomenal. And to get anybody hearing any of these story ideas get hold of me, I can tell you how to run these events.
Nancy Weil
But that’s the idea. So how do you get six hundred people in your door with an event? Well, you got to do something a little different and you have to do something that’s of interest to your community.
Michelle Iman Bakhsh
So talking about events, you know, there are events that are kind of traditional, like your service of remembrance around Christmas or Easter Sunrise service, some of them are better attended than others. So how could a funeral home be innovative and creative and maybe take one of those events that really don’t have the turnout they would like to see and turn it into something that’s going to help generate publicity? What can they do?
Michelle Iman Bakhsh
Change the date?
Nancy Weil
Change the date? We found that kind of accidentally.
Nancy Weil
I worked at a cemetery in Buffalo, New York, and every year they had a Christmas remembrance service, just like every hospice, every church, and every other funeral home in town and cemetery was holding. And two years in a row, we had blizzards. And by the third year, I was like, no, we are not planning this anymore because I can’t deal with having to cancel again from another blizzard. And so we changed it to Valentine’s Day.
Nancy Weil
Now I call Valentine’s Day the missing holiday of grief. You know, we talk about Thanksgiving. We talk about Christmas. We talk about New Year’s. We forget Valentine’s Day, which comes shortly after, is very difficult for people who are grieving. It’s very hard and it doesn’t mean it just has to be their spouse. It could be a child. It could be a parent. It could be just a friend that that holiday of love hearts everywhere is so difficult.
Nancy Weil
So we moved our remembrance service and we made it into we called it always, as in, I will be loving you always. And so we turned that into the remembrance service on Valentine’s Day. We were able to get a lot of publicity because now we weren’t competing in a crowded field of remembrance services at the holidays. Now I do get publicity going back into October prior to the holiday season because I start pitching our great support programs and how we’re there to support people through the holiday season so you can get publicity around the holidays.
Nancy Weil
You’ve got to start early and you have to have a program in order to get that kind of coverage. But what we did is we took and so we turned Christmas into being Valentine’s Day. I work in Florida. I worked for Veteran’s Funeral Care here in Clearwater, Florida. So needless to say, Memorial Day is kind of a big deal for us, but it’s also a big deal for everyone pitching to the stations. So what did we do?
Nancy Weil
I pitched for two weeks later for Flag Day and they don’t know what to cover on Flag Day. And we have a wonderful program called Retire Your Flag with Honor and it’s community service. And we pitched it and it got picked up because they don’t know what story to run for Flag Day. So start thinking about when are other organizations not pitching the stations to do the same kinds of stories?
Michelle Iman Bakhsh
Wow, so it’s really just as simple as changing the date, like you said?
Nancy Weil
I mean, it’s also getting more butts and seats, right, because people aren’t coming because they’re already going to their church’s remembrance service they’re already at has invited them. Right. Do something in February for Valentine’s Day. And those family members that you’ve served will come because they’re not busy. Right. And don’t have you right on that date, obviously, but around that week before so and so.
Nancy Weil
Absolutely. This works. Change the date.
Michelle Iman Bakhsh
Wow. Well, in talking about kind of being innovative and creative, right, one thing you said, Nancy, that I want to go out and share with everyone because I just think this is so cool. It is a great way to draw some attention is a before I die board. So maybe you can talk about this. I know you talk about it in your free positive publicity guide, but what is this? Where did it come from?
Nancy Weil
One of my favorite projects I’ve ever done? I had read something about Candy Chang, the artist who originally started this project. This was in response to a friend of hers who died and candy the artist lived in New Orleans and there was an abandoned house near her or a little building near her neighborhood. And she asked the owner of the property if she could use an outside wall for a project. And they gave her permission and she painted the side of the building and chalkboard paint created the stencil like you see, before I die, I want to put some chalk there and waited to see how the neighborhood residents would respond.
Nancy Weil
And it was phenomenal. And from there, it started getting picked up all over the world. My son lives in Eindhoven in the Netherlands. They have a Before I Die born, Niagara Falls, New York before I die board. Where they never had had before I die board was in a cemetery. Now we asked for permission to have one and she said, absolutely, we took this and we did not put it right by our chapel.
Nancy Weil
You don’t want people driving in for a funeral thinking, well, too late, right? We put it at some entrances away from the general area where people would be coming in, but still visible from the road. And it’s literally some plywood, some chalkboard paint. You can buy the stencil right from her website and some chalk. This is not expensive. If you can’t put it on your property, think about some little community parks near you, some little pocket parks or Niagara Falls has it right in a park there.
Nancy Weil
And a little sign at the bottom saying sponsored by with your funeral home’s name so you can do this outside of your actual property. What’s wonderful about this is, as you can see, we were constantly taking photos of the board and then posting those on social media to show people what was being posted. Yes, we monitored it. Sometimes people would come after hours and write some naughty things on there and we would have to wipe them off afterward.
Nancy Weil
But it was so spectacular. We had that up all summer from May all the way to October, and people were continuing to write on it as the rain would wash it away. We would clean the board from time to time and start fresh again. But it was incredible, the response and people stopping just to read it and people writing on it. And over the course of that summer, we had two television news stations come to the cemetery to cover the project.
Nancy Weil
And at the end of the summer, the Buffalo News actually ran a front-page story, a front-page story on our cemetery. Was that where some plywood and some chalkboard paint, was that worth it? For the social media coverage? We were able to post and see those things being shared. It was incredible. We are also on that website. If you go look up Buffalo, New York, on the Before I Die website, you will find our board listed and we’ll talk about why that matters and a little bit.
Nancy Weil
But it was incredible. And again, I think outside of the box, as you can see already, some of the things I’m getting publicity for are not your standard remembrance services. I love remembrance services. I used to do at least three of them a year. I get it. They’re important for our families. But when you’re trying to get the media, it’s important to do some other things as well.
Jenny Eagles
That’s amazing. I’m really impressed me. I have no idea that something so simple could generate such interest and I think that’s the key, like being simple and also being that unique and thinking outside the box. So one of the questions we’ve got, which I think you’re covering as you go, but what else you can do to be noticed? So exploring that idea of what’s fresh and as I say, I think you’re kind of doing it organically as you’re talking. So I just keep going with all the good stuff.
Nancy Weil
I mean, it’s a great question, though. What can I do to get noticed? Right. And that really needs to as you look at me before I die, I didn’t create that project. I just read an article about it when I would work at our cemetery. And so sometimes you just want to pay attention to some things that maybe you’ve seen done or like the holistic health event that we did, the open house that came because I founded
14 years ago, a group called Holistic Alliance of Western New York, where we could educate each other about different holistic modalities.
Nancy Weil
And this funeral director had heard about it and invited me to develop this with him. So start thinking about what’s going on in your community. Who do you know? My grief support group. We used to run a drum circle for the community, not just those grieving, but anybody could come. But a lot of people who are grieving would come in multiple generations could drum together and play those emotions out. And that came, frankly, because I had a friend who was a certified drum facilitator and I said, would you do this for us?
Nancy Weil
And she said, sure. And we got publicity. I am a certified laughter leader. We used to run laughter clubs at the cemetery. If you want to get publicity, run a laughter club at a cemetery and the news is going to come to cover it. So start thinking about those juxtapositions of what people think about your business and what can you do to turn that a little bit and educate at the same time?
Michelle Iman Bakhsh
Definitely. Now, do you find in your experience, Nancy, that one type of publicity is more effective like is print more effective than radio and television? What’s I guess, what’s most effective?
Nancy Weil
Whatever you can get.
Nancy Weil
Whatever you can get, what you get it if they won’t cover it. I have gotten more responses from the little free PennySaver that you see in the front of little grocery stores and things. I’ve been on some community calendar where they just picked up my grief support group and every month without me asking, they just kept putting it out there.
Nancy Weil
And years later I was still getting responses from that. And so I don’t think it has to be grand. You have to be on nighttime news drive time radio don’t. I have done radio, thankfully prerecorded pretend it’s live. That’s a whole other topic about how to actually handle it once you’re there. But it was, it like six-thirty on a Sunday morning. Who’s listening to the radio at six-thirty on a Sunday morning. A lot of people there getting up there, getting ready for church.
Nancy Weil
They throw on the radio. I can’t tell you the response, though, I would get when I was on that show that early in the morning. So think about your church bulletins. If you’re a funeral home, you know what churches you’re in all the time have an event that you can ask them to put into their bulletin. And so don’t think about the logistics of how large an audience you need to reach, because sometimes your most influential are ones that find you in some of these smaller places as well.
Nancy Weil
So especially if you’re in a smaller town, it may be just in some small Penny Saver kind of thing. It’s still OK. It’s still great. It’s still your name out there and you didn’t pay for it. And frankly, and I know this is taboo, I shouldn’t even say this, OK, I’m going to drive your competitors crazy because when they keep seeing your funeral home name all over the place again and again and again because you’re doing all these things, it’ll drive them mad because they’re not being seen anywhere.
Nancy Weil
Right. Unless they’re writing a check and paying for it. So I’m not saying that’s the reason to do it, but that’s kind of an added benefit.
Jenny Eagles
And I’m really learning a lot, Nancy, because I think in the U.K. and I don’t know so much about the US market, but definitely in the U.K., death care seems there’s a real stigma and it is seen seems there’s almost tacky to promote death care services, which is ironic because we’re all going to need them at some point in our lives arranging funerals of loved ones. But it seems tacky and, you know, sales and just not something you want to associate with death care nd yet if you combine it with a service for the community and providing an event which is bringing people together and then as a byproduct of that, you get noticed as well, that kind of that seems the dream to me and the right way to do it. And as you said, you know, promoting yourself again with death care, it sounds a bit too much like, I don’t know, we’re a bit sensitive in the U.K. I don’t know if it is the same in America. I’m interested, but I could be very careful with promotion and death care.
Nancy Weil
And more than that. And I used to sell preneed plans. So I’m very tuned in to that. And this is not about marketing because people are going to come and you’re going to get their information. We’ll talk about that in a minute. You probably will, but you’re going to do it a little differently. But it’s more about bringing people in to see your facilities, to meet your staff, to do what?
Nancy Weil
Build relationships with your community. And so some of that benefit is just your meeting people that normally you wouldn’t have that opportunity to meet. And that is really helpful for building your brand, for letting people know your story, what you provide and how caring and compassionate you are. And maybe some of the things you do differently in your approach are a little bit different than some of the other places in your community.
Nancy Weil
So it really has that amazing benefit because people are very uncomfortable because if they’re coming to a funeral home, it’s generally because someone has died and they’re coming either they’re the family or they’re the friends to pay respect. It’s not a good time. Right. And they’re not going to be asking a lot of those questions necessarily. And it’s uncomfortable. But when you’re holding an event in your funeral home and inviting them in, it’s giving you that opportunity to sort of meet them in a more comfortable, relaxed way. And that’s what we have found again and again. And it’s just incredible. It’s just incredible to do that.
Nancy Weil
All right, I just have to mention one more I’m going to keep throwing out ideas, guys, sorry.
Jenny Eagles
So I think that’s what people want.
Nancy Weil
So I was working, as I said, you at a cemetery in Buffalo, New York. And at that time in New York State, pets were not permitted to be buried in a human cemetery with their people. As people used to say to me, our pets buried here, I’d say that’s two questions are pets legally buried here? The answer is no. Did cremated pets get tucked into the bottom of a casket before the casket arrived on our property?
Nancy Weil
Yeah, probably right. But they weren’t able to honor their pets at that time. But I ran grief support programs and grief support is about if your heart is hurting, come to me. So one of the kind of unsupported loss is the loss of your pet. And yet for those of us who are well, I know Michelle, your pet crazy like I am right our fur babies. And sometimes you’re closer to them than your family because they’re the ones that are there with you, right?
Nancy Weil
They’re the ones that are part of your day and your routine. And yet it’s an unsupportive kind of loss. It’s not really recognized so much. So what did we do? Well, we had our human remembrance services for the community, but then once a year, we ran a pet remembrance service. And when we did this, we partnered with area rescue groups, different organizations, the veterinary association, and let them set up informational tables again, educational components about these groups.
Nancy Weil
We allowed people to not bring their life pets. Please don’t bring your dead pets, but please bring a photo of your pet. And we had a display of the photos at the front and we had iguanas us and we had dogs and cats and horses and all these wonders of turtles, these photos that we made a beautiful focal point with some roses. And then so then what we did is we had an actual remembrance service and we did, in fact, every year do a reading of the names where people would stand as they heard their loved one’s name.
Nancy Weil
And at first, we thought, well, this could be kind of like almost hard to get through because some of the names were so funny and we thought, we want to take this in in the way it needs to be presented. And yet when you’re there and you feel that grief, it is its sacred is the human remembrance service. People are more appreciative because this is not being offered. Right. This is not being offered. And so that they had a place to go and look around and realize all these people also.
Nancy Weil
Were grieving the loss of a pet, and we limited it to three names because you all know how many pets if we’re pet people, we’ve lost. But it was and I have a template of the service I put together because I did so many that I templated it into one service. If it’s the only thing you’re going to do, reach out to me. I’ve already done all the work. I will send you that template that you can work from.
Nancy Weil
You do not have to write this pet remembrance service, but we had a musician singing and playing the keyboard. We did poems and pieces. We had the reading of names. We had the educational booths. We had a reception afterward. Now let me tell you, unintended borrowed benefits. We did this event every year for I think seven years. And we’re going to talk in a minute about building your database and your list. At that point, New York State changed the law and said, all right, in certain areas of your cemetery, you can have both a cremated pet with a cremated person buried guess which cemetery already had a database with hundreds and hundreds of names of people that we knew for a fact would be interested in being buried with their pets.
Nancy Weil
We were ready? That wasn’t our intent of why we did it, but it sure was helpful when that law got changed.
Jenny Eagles
Oh, yeah. Yeah, it’s incredible.
Michelle Iman Bakhsh
That’s so innovative, though I’ve never heard of a funeral home doing a service of remembrance to honor their pets, because you’re right, at least here in the United States, maybe not so much in other countries, but they are they’re almost like our children to some of us and around. And you’re right. They’re my children.
Nancy Weil
And it’s usually the pet funeral homes that are run this. But if you haven’t used that pet funeral home, you may not know about it. You may not be invited. So I was able to get quite a bit of publicity because like our drive time radio host, he loved his animals. And when he heard about this, he jumped all over it, had us as a guest on his radio program. Let us have three segments. I know you all don’t understand what that means, but generally, if you’re going to be a guest, you get one segment cut commercial.
Nancy Weil
They’ve moved on to another topic. He just kept us and kept us and kept us because he was fascinated and wanted to talk about his pets. Who doesn’t? Oh, yeah, it works.
Michelle Iman Bakhsh
So this might sound like a silly question, but can you ever have too much publicity? I mean, is there publicity overkill, if you know what I mean?
Nancy Weil
Yes, you can. So this comes into this is completely my opinion that I formulated. You may have other media experts telling you differently. I believe that the stations want the scoop. They want the story. They don’t want to see it on every single station running. So my internal rule has been pitch everywhere. But the first time it’s picked up, I stop pitching. Now, that’s not to say of a second station goes ahead and follows up and wants me.
Nancy Weil
I’m going to go there. Yeah. If I’m invited to I’m going to go too. But once I know I booked a station or booked a paper or booked a radio show, I stop pitching to that media so I could be on the radio, I can be on television, but I don’t want to constantly be trying because they want to know they’re the only ones with the story on the air. And so you don’t want to go ahead and cross over as many mediums as you can to get it out there.
Nancy Weil
But I really think that if you want to be back on with those reporters, make sure they get the story themselves. That’s just what’s worked for me.
Michelle Iman Bakhsh
That makes sense. You want it. You want it to be unique. Again, like you said, they want the scoop. If everyone has it, why do they want it? So how do you go about effectively pitching to them? What makes them want to pick up your story?
Nancy Weil
Yeah, you have to beg. No, you don’t have to beg. Have ready for the elevator speech. So here’s what I do. I call send call. Every station will have a contact us; here is the newsroom phone number or do you have a story idea? So you go to the website, find what that phone number is. Sometimes you can find the person that’s in charge of that area and you’re going to call there and the news newsroom, not just the general operator and you’re going to say, I’m holding an event, and here’s what it is.
Nancy Weil
I’ll give you an example of a pitch. Here’s why we would like you to cover it. Why it would be a great story. Can I send you more information about it? Sure. What email should I send it to? And then they give you an email. Now, you know, they’re looking for it. You’re not in a pile of five hundred emails that came in that day. They’re looking for your email to come. And then you wait for whatever, depending on the timeline, and you call them back again and go, hey, I’m just following up with you, I did send it.
Nancy Weil
Just wondering if it’s something you want to run or you read the email. I find call send call. So we did something here. I work with a group called Opus Peace, and they are a group of retired hospice nurses who, under their work and hospice at the VA hospital, identified something called soul injury. And you can look up their website Opus Peace and a Soul Injury. They notice that combat veterans were dying differently than other veterans.
Nancy Weil
And it was because of this unmourned loss, this regret, these aspects of self, of trauma that they sort of had pushed away and not integrated into them their soul. And when they were dying, they couldn’t be so stoic anymore. And all of this would start to come out and they would help them to heal. And so we were having an event about it and there was a little show and we would have a panel discussion. And so I would call the station and I would tell them and I did this in different cities, we are holding an event and such and such funeral home about soul injury.
Nancy Weil
And I would tell them that little bit of background. And then I would say there are viewers that are suffering and they don’t even know that help is available. This program is helping people to heal. It is helping people to become whole again, to understand where to get help, and sometimes even to recognize that they need that help. They need to hear this because nobody talks about soul injuries. Would you help us get the word out to the community so people can come to this event and learn more?
Nancy Weil
Now, do you notice it has an emotional component? It has an urgency. It has a need in the community now that is asking the community. Right. Pitching it to say the community has this need. Your listeners, your readers that be like grief supported the holidays. Right. There are people suffering. Help us get the word out. We have help. The other thing is, is when you’re doing a collection now, you’re asking for the help of the community.
Nancy Weil
So there’s a funeral home that every year what they do, I’ll give another shout out. Barnetts Draw funeral home in Madisonville, Kentucky, and they participate in a community event where they collect new shoes for children before the start of the school year because they see that many children don’t have shoes that fit them appropriately. They have hand-me-down shoes because of poverty, maybe from older siblings or they have shoes that really don’t fit them anymore. They’ve outgrown. But the family can’t afford a new pair of shoes.
Nancy Weil
And so they reach out to the community both for my regionally going to say sneakers, I come sneakers, gym shoes, athletic wear and maybe a pair of dress shoes that they could wear as well. And they asked the community for their help because then what they do is there’s an organization that does a big event at the schools where these children can come in and shop for shoes. And it’s a huge deal in their community every year. So their pitch is asking the media, please get the word out.
Nancy Weil
We need the community’s help. We need the community’s help. So think about any charitable drive you might be doing, whether it’s toys for needy families at Christmas, whether it’s a food drive, shoe drive. And so, of course, the more different it is, the better to get coverage and asking. Now, we need the community to help us with this event. You see the difference. Both of them are effective, but you want to have the emotion behind the pitch.
Nancy Weil
You want to have the call the send the call. So calling to a quick little synopsis, can I send you more information, have the information available to send to them, and then follow up and then get booked? And then get ready. Have a good hair day, because radio is great because you don’t have to do your makeup. So I’m just saying.
Michelle Iman Bakhsh
Oh my goodness, funny. So if you had a choice, do you want to try to get covered like the day before the day? Are there better days of the week? I mean, you talked about six-thirty Sunday morning, which I’m still not convinced.
Nancy Weil
I wasn’t either.
Michelle Iman Bakhsh
But are there better days? Better times? What what would you recommend they try to do if they have the choice?
Nancy Weil
Sure. Just you know, I wasn’t even up listening to myself at six-thirty in the morning. So there are two ways to think about this. Do you want coverage prior in order to produce butts and seats in order to get people there, or do you want the station there the day of your event to have coverage of whatever is happening there? They both have value. They both are great because any publicity is better. Right, because at least they’re there covering and interviewing the staff and people coming.
Nancy Weil
I prefer beforehand, I’d rather let people know, hey, this is happening. Why don’t you join us? Because I don’t know about you, Michelle, but I get super frustrated when I’m seeing a story about something that happened in the community. I’m like, why do I know about that? I would have gone so personally as the viewer. I’d rather know ahead of time as the person promoting the event for my funeral home, I’d want the community to know.
Nancy Weil
So I get more people in my door. Right. Or more response to whatever that is that that shoe drive, for instance, I’d rather have more shoes coming in ahead of time than them showing the distribution and how we help the community. But if you can’t get anything but coverage day off, then have at it. Let them in better than none better.
Michelle Iman Bakhsh
So that makes sense. And so I’m assuming it’s probably better to get coverage at the location of the event or your funeral home. Is that correct? And how flexible are most media outlets and coming to you like what’s traditional?
Nancy Weil
OK, so it brings up a great point and I don’t want to forget it. I’ll go back to your question. But when you said how flexible are media, media is not flexible, OK, we need to be flexible. So if you pitch a story and I have had this happen, hey, we have an opening. We’re sending a reporter over in an hour. Is that OK? No. The answer is, oh, my gosh, yes, that’s great.
Nancy Weil
And then you furiously start making sure that the funeral home is clean and everybody’s got their clean clothes on and you’re ready for them when they walk in the door so many times they’ll say, we can have you on air Thursday. Can you come to the station at 3:00 in the afternoon? Your answer has to be yes, they will move on. If you say that’s not a good day for me, can I do Friday? The answer is no, I can’t do Friday.
Nancy Weil
This is when I have an opening. So you can take it. You cannot take it. Always take it, make it work, even when it’s impossible. I have taken these calls when I’ve been out on a speaking training event across the country and furiously had to call. I am not kidding. The owner of the funeral home I was working with say this news is going to be there in an hour. He’s like, Are you kidding me?
Nancy Weil
I got to run home. I got to put on a better suit I have to make. Yeah, I know. And not only that, but they’re also going to interview Curtis and I’m reaching out to him and he’s turning around his day so he can come in and join you because he’s part of our committee and they wanted to interview somebody on the committee. As I was about to walk into a room of one hundred hospital staff, it was a good time, but we did it and it worked and we were on the air.
Nancy Weil
So now back to your question. I always want them in my funeral home. I want the community to see my beautiful place. Right. I want them coming in my door for my events. I want to show off my building as much as I can. Sure. And there’s special training I give you when those things are happening. And when I do the full program, I talk to you about how to set that up and everything. But for today, we’re not going to go into all the details of media training.
Nancy Weil
But I’d rather have them there. Many times they’re going to say, can you come down to the station? The answer is yes, I can. And again, that’s a different way to prepare. And I can anybody gets any of these options, call me. I can train you on it. Or like I’m offering to come out to your state funeral director associations and teach all of this to you. But there are differences depending.
Nancy Weil
But a lot of times, radio, once you into the station or radio will have. Can we call you? And the answer is yes. Don’t take it on a cell phone. They want a landline because its better receptivity is not as likely to drop the call. So the answer is yes. I don’t have a landline in my house. I’ve been known to have to drive to the funeral home at 8:00 at night because that’s when they want to interview me for radio and that’s where I have a landline. OK, so the flexibility is you need to be flexible to them. They are going to tell you what they’re willing to cover. And your answer is, that’s fantastic. Thank you so much. That is what you do.
Michelle Iman Bakhsh
Makes sense and you have your best-laid plans, you know, you probably have this idea in your head of how things are going to work, it never works that way. But what could a funeral home do to try to like the best plan their marketing to reach the widest audience and best-laid plans don’t always happen, but what can they do to try to do that?
Nancy Weil
First of all, and again, this is in my deeper training that I give, I hate to keep falling back on that, but this is a pretty deep topic. So to give you the simplest answer, write it all down and provide things to them. Hand them your business card so they have your name. They have your address, they have your phone number. They have your website so that they’re not writing it down incorrectly. Right. If you have a flier about your event, present that to them ahead of time that they have that resource.
Nancy Weil
Because what happens is oftentimes is they go to put those little banners you’ll see right when you’re hearing a story or something and they get I’ve had more things wrong. I’ve had my phone numbers wrong. I’ve had my job title wrong. They’ve spelled my name wrong. I mean, and I give them the information and they still get it wrong. So make sure you do as much as you can to support that reporter and getting the story right because you’re not their only story.
Nancy Weil
They are running on tight deadlines. So make it easy for them to cover your story and give them the information they need to have so that they can get it as accurate as possible.
Michelle Iman Bakhsh
Makes sense and I mean, it’s so simple, but you don’t necessarily think about it, I mean, I know most funeral directors. I don’t know, the ones I talked to don’t really care about their business cards, so that’s something really good to think about. You should always have some business cards on you because you never know when an opportunity like this would arise.
Nancy Weil
You know, got to you know, you might need somebody who works for a station. I mean, you don’t know. But I always have things ready that when I am pitching that story, it’s part of what I send. But then it’s also what I bring with me or have available when they come in the door. So I have a whole media presentation about our event. I have questions written out for them. I have the flier, I have my card. I have every bit of information they could possibly need to present that story.
Nancy Weil
And I have it for them both ahead of time. Once it’s booked, I send it. I also have it again. So in case, they don’t bring it with them or they don’t have it available, not a problem here. You know, here’s all the information you need, you want. And again, this is a little bit deeper media training, but you want to be able to tell the story you want to tell. So have in mind the key points you want to make.
Nancy Weil
And when the reporter, you know, or journalist, they ask you questions, answer and yes. And answer their questions. And here’s another point I wanted you to hear and you’re not asking me about. Right. Tell your story that you want to tell. Don’t let them just completely take over. What now? We don’t have any control over what makes the final edit. OK, but at least know the point you want to make about this event or this story.
Nancy Weil
And that way you can sort of you inserted in if you’re hearing that they’re not going there with the interview, don’t be awkward. You know, you have to be a smooth transition. But usually, there’s a way to sort of. Yes. And it when they’re talking to you.
Michelle Iman Bakhsh
I see. You have your event, once the event is done do you do any kind of like post events aftercare if that makes sense.
Nancy Weil
It’s almost forgotten and the most important part of all of this, this is where you get the traction. This is key. It’s exciting. You were on the news. You had your event. People came on great. No, now, when you have to do some of the work and I’ve seen this again and again, this mistake being made.
Nancy Weil
So what do you need to do? Number one, you need to be able to track who went in your door. So if it’s reservations for an event, that’s easy, they’re going to call the funeral home, give you their name, their email, their address, their phone number, whatever you’re trying to get, they’re going to give that to you to come in. Well, in the event of our holistic open house, we didn’t know who was coming.
Nancy Weil
So what did we do? We created a raffle and all of those vendors donated a prize. We had like 20 prizes for the raffle. And you had to fill this out and go to we did a little passport where you went to every table and they stamp it. Even if you didn’t talk to them, you said, here, stamp this. So they visited the tables and people were leaving and hadn’t turned that back in. We’d say, oh, don’t worry, you didn’t get everywhere.
Nancy Weil
Just it’s all right. We’ll put you in the raffle. We didn’t care. We wanted their address. We wanted their name. So we got that information and now we created the database. And what do we do with that? Well, number one, for future events, we know who we’re inviting, even if it’s a different kind of event. We know who we’re inviting because we know who has attended our event before. The number two thing we do is if you have an active pre-need, don’t call and ask for them to make an appointment and plan their funerals.
Nancy Weil
But do you have your preneed salesperson? Call those people and say, hey, I know you were at our event last week. Just wondering, what did you think of it? You know, everything good. Just just checking in, start a conversation. Do they know why you’re calling? They know what you’re calling. Don’t tell them why you’re calling just call and start a relationship. Because sometimes in those calls will say, you know what?
Nancy Weil
You really got me thinking why? I’ve got you on the phone and all of a sudden you’re making a preneed appointment. But don’t make that the reason, because people will stop coming to your events if they think the only reason you held it was to generate leads, they won’t come again and they won’t send their friends again. So don’t do that. But if you’re calling just to have a conversation and follow up, you know, things might be said and that’s OK.
Nancy Weil
One of the other things that I find is. You’ll post on your social media link to the news station that ran your story or you’ll post it on your website, those links go down the station is only going to carry those for so long and then you’ve lost your story. So there is a company called TV video clips clips.com, TV, video clips, dot com. If you’re on the radio, if you’re on television, what you can do is there’s a forum and you tell them what station about what day and time.
Nancy Weil
And it’s like, I don’t know, 80, 90 bucks. They actually get that segment and deliver it to you in a file that now you can post on your website forever. It’s yours. It’s your segment. There are no links to go down. So absolutely every single time that we were on the air, we went and bought our segment. And you want to have that up on your website. Out into your social media pages, right?
Nancy Weil
You want to be doing some of those things. This is key for the follow-up. I am telling you, Michelle, I would put things in about our grief support group. I am not kidding. I have lived in Florida now for close to five years. Two months ago, I got an outreach from someone who was doing a Google search for great support in the Buffalo area and found something that had been written about me. And they reached out five years later.
Nancy Weil
That’s the traction that’s called borrowed SEO, borrowed search engine optimization. My funeral home doesn’t have a whole lot of SEO. But the Buffalo News does, right, our major news stations do so when those stories are still they are in their archives and somebody does a Google search, it pops up. That’s the borrowed SEO. That’s incredible. And people will still reach out and find you. Years after the event, because if they have a need and they search for it, oftentimes that story will come up. So it’s just what happens afterward is as important as what happens before, if you do it right.
Michelle Iman Bakhsh
WE don’t even necessarily think about that. It’s almost common sense, but it isn’t that common.
Nancy Weil
They don’t think about it. They just think, oh, good, OK, that project done, we all have that feeling like, yay, OK, let’s give it back to other things we need to do. And I mean, I had something where I had an event and we were going to do it again the following year.
Nancy Weil
And I went to that staff. It wasn’t my staff. I was doing an event for an outside organization. And I said, where’s the database from the campaign last year? And they’re like, oh, we didn’t keep that. What do you mean you didn’t keep that everybody called with reservations? Yeah, we had something going on with our computer and we thought we had it, but now we can’t find a file and now we’re starting from scratch.
Nancy Weil
Right. Our pet remembrance service grew every year because every year we had more people to add to that database until suddenly it’s three hundred invitations going out. It’s four hundred because it’s not the same people year after year. And you just keep building the database. You just keep right. The data is king. So. So you want to keep that afterward and know where to find it so that a year later you can still have it. And yeah, I mean you do you have to do a little legwork after your event.
Nancy Weil
You just do. But it’s worth it when you go to hold an event again and it doesn’t have to be the same event. People who have come for one event might be interested in something you have going on, might be a speaker series, you know, that you have going on. I used to do something called Make Your Planned and live your life so that people who had preplanned had different life experience opportunities. And we had a whole speaker series on cooking and all kinds of different hobbies and things. And we’d invite people over to hear these experts speak about life enrichment events, it worked.
Michelle Iman Bakhsh
That’s awesome. Well, sadly, it looks like we are a little over our time, but, Nancy, I want to go ahead and I’m going to share your information. And while I’m doing that, do you have any final tips and tricks that we can share with our audience today, how they can do media? Right. And the best way to do that is to get in touch with you and do your program. But anything else?
Nancy Weil
I actually took up this not exactly this program, but on free publicity and made it into a video, a 30-minute video for the state FDA so that they can send and use as a meeting or have me come in and do it live.
Nancy Weil
But what you have to remember is that as you’re doing this publicity, it’s not necessarily the turnout that matters. You don’t know who in your community sees your name again and again. You don’t know how you become top of mind. You won’t always know that until later when suddenly someone dies and they come to your funeral home because they see you all the time in different spaces. And, oh, my gosh, you’re such a community partner. And I just thought about you.
Nancy Weil
So just know that there’s sometimes you don’t know, always the benefit until further down the road. But there is always, always a benefit to having this ability to get free, positive publicity. And it works. It works.
Michelle Iman Bakhsh
Absolutely. Well, Nancy, we thank you so much for your time, for your knowledge, and just investing in your community, investing in the funeral profession. We’re so appreciative that you gave us your time. And once again, please, everyone, reach out to Nancy. If you would be you would not be disappointed to have her come and either share her video or come in person and give you her full extended version of free positive publicity. So with that again, Nancy, thank you.
Michelle Iman Bakhsh
And thank you, everyone, for joining us. And we look forward to seeing you at our next event.
Nancy Weil
Thank you so much for having me. Thank you, thank you.
Michelle Iman Bakhsh
Thank you. Take care, guys.
