This isn’t your mother’s funeral home

August 12, 2021/Business/

Tonight (August 12), according to this article from MarketWatch, if you happen to be in Manhattan you can stop by the historic Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home, take a seat inside, and enjoy a night of comedy. The article states that four comedians are ready to “play the room” where services for diplomats, socialites, and entertainers have been held for years.

According to a quote from the President of Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home, William Villanova, “It’s all part of a much larger commitment to the community”. The article continues to state that the funeral home began hosting entertainment events in 2018 when they hosted a Christmas concert. The shows are all free and open to the public and Villanova adds, “(it) positions the funeral home as a place of comfort and security for local residents in the long run”.

The article goes on to say that event functions, whether free to the public or paid events, are an outcrop of growth from the fact that funeral homes starting opening up hospitality rooms several years ago so that client families could have services, visitations, and receptions all in one place. Many funeral homes, according to the article, realized that they had hospitality rooms that now could be used for much more than funeral related events.

In some funeral homes, the non-funeral event business may have became a profit center all on its own. The article mentions that Flanner-Buchanan Funeral Homes of Indianapolis who, according to the article, hosts about 500 non-funeral events annually.

Funeral Director Daily take: There is no doubt that funeral homes have evolved in how they serve their communities. And, opening up their venues for events like this shows the opportunities that are out there. Even a free admission event can be helpful to business by exposing potential clientele to your facility.

Our funeral home opened a multi-purpose room when we built a new facility in 2005. We were able to raise revenue with it as we rented it out to families for post-service luncheons. As more and more families used the funeral facility for services, as compared to church funerals, it became more popular and we eventually had to add a larger multi-purpose room.

As always, funeral home operators need to keep their eyes open for possibilities that they see that could bring more business and/or more revenue to the facility.

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