An article I read in SouthernMinn.com piqued my interest about the potential for public relations.  The article featured the small community of Blooming Prairie, Minnesota, and some of the events that were going on there in conjunction with the community’s 150th anniversary celebration.  One of the events that caught my eye was that of a “Cemetery Walking Tour”.

Turns out that over 50 people came to walk thru the Blooming Prairie Cemetery and the St. Columbanus Cemetery and hear stories of those who were buried there.

At each of the stops, narrators shared about the families’ ancestry, their arrival in Blooming Prairie, and their occupations.  The article points out that each stop and story spurred other stories about the deceased by people on the tour who may have known them.

Funeral Director Daily take:  Our county historical society offers a county cemetery tour each summer.  It is a very well attended excursion that takes a few hours as the participants board school buses and are driven from cemetery to cemetery – maybe covering three or four on each outing.  Narrators tell of the stories of those people who are buried there. . . . .sometimes at small church cemeteries pastors or long-time members join in telling some tales.

Nancy Reagan, when she served this country as its First Lady ran a program about drug intervention called, “Say no to Drugs”.  What I remember about that program was, that according to statistics, the younger you could reach kids with that message, the more effective in curbing drug abuse it was.

I’ve always remembered that and have tried to bring that philosophy to winning client families in a competitive funeral service environment.  I’ve often thought – the earlier we can get acquainted with a family, the better chance we have of serving them in the future than one of our competitors.  I’ve never shied away at getting in front of folks who are no where near being our customers for some time.  We’ve done it with pre-arrangement seminars, police/firefighter thank you nights, sponsoring Little League Nights at the ballpark, and so on.  The net effect of these efforts is that we meet people in our community and start building a relationship with them.

Funeral directors are really some of the experts – because you write many of the obituaries – on the deaths in your community.  How about sponsoring, and taking charge of, a night where you take a cemetery walk and talk of the history of some of the community’s famous (or infamous) characters?  I’m guessing some in your community would enjoy it and you would get some positive public relations from the effort.[wpforms id=”436″ title=”true” description=”true”]