Funerals going high-tech because of boomers

BY LINDSAY MACHAK, Media General News Service
Published: July 22, 2008

When Roberta Winston attended her mother’s viewing, a video slideshow tribute documented her mother’s life with pictures.

Winston said she wept at the sight of her mother’s smile at a recent birthday celebration.

“That tribute brought me tears; it brought joy and it brought happiness,” Winston said. “I could let her go easily because after looking at those pictures, it reminded me of the happy times with those memories.”

Video tributes are one way baby boomers — those ages 43 to 62 — are memorializing parents and loved ones in nontraditional ways.

Technology is changing the face of the funeral industry and boomers are at the root of it, said John Reed, president of the National Funeral Directors Association based in Brookfield, Wis.

Each of the 20,000 funeral homes in the group is capable of offering technological services, the most popular of which are photo slideshows, Reed said.

The overall cost for a funeral is about $6,000 in the U.S., he said. Most of the technological services, such as a DVD of a photo slideshow or webcasting, are free or have a small fee, Reed said.

Winston, 58, of Petersburg said using technology at funerals and planning is making memory-sharing more accessible.

“Technology — I think it’s amazing,” she said. “It opened our doors for everyone that was willing to explore those pictures to do so no matter where in the world they were.”

Her mother’s video tribute, like that of many of the clients at Petersburg’s J.M. Wilkerson Funeral Establishment Inc., was posted online with a guestbook.

Funeral director Shelton Smith said posting the online tributes and guestbooks are new features that have been added to the Web site in the past month. Nearly a dozen tributes have been posted, Smith said.

“We do this so people can see more about a person’s life rather than just reading an obituary,” Smith said.

Another means of using technology in the funeral industry is webcasting.

Chiles Funeral Home in Richmond conducted its first funeral webcast about six months ago for a soldier in Iraq who could not come home.

O.P. Chiles Jr., the owner and funeral director, said operators

face some challenges, including making the webcast secure and making it work in sync with the actual service. Security features are built into the software funeral directors are using to ensure the services are broadcast to a select location through e-mail.

“You don’t want somebody’s funeral ending up on YouTube or something like that,” he said. “We try to keep the funeral as dignified as possible.”

About 10 percent of the National Funeral Directors Association’s members have used webcasting during a service.

“It’s so new we don’t know what the market is for it yet,” Reed said. “I think we will create the market and within five years, they will be coming asking for it.”

The funeral-home industry serviced about 2.5 million funerals in 2007, Reed said.

By 2010, the National Center for Health Statistics estimates 2.64 million deaths should occur in the U.S. By 2030, the number of Americans dying should be 3.47 million.

Matt Thornhill, co-author of “Boomer Consumer” and a baby boomer specialist, said the generation is known for being nontraditional.

“They’re also doing things different by having ice-cream socials or a keg party and turning into something different than a traditional funeral,” he said.

Boomers want to make take the negativity out of funerals and celebrate life instead, Thornhill said.

“It’s like anything else in their lives,” he said. “Boomers want to do it differently than the way their parents did.”

Blair Nelsen, president of Nelsen Funeral Home & Crematory, which operates four locations in Virginia, said he often deals with boomers via e-mail when planning services because that generation loves using the Internet.

“Boomers tend to be very educated in what their options are,” he said. “They will use the Internet to compare services and costs and in many cases they will have all the information ready when they walk in the door.”

Nelsen began an online funeral planning component to its Web site last fall. Five people have submitted plans online since March, he said, while about 35 people have pre-planned in person since March. That compares with 30 people who planned in person last year from March to June.

While individual funeral homes may not be seeing a fast reception to online funeral planning, a new Web site, http://www.mywonderfullife.com, has seen a rapid response.

The funeral planning site went live in May and already has more than 1,200 members nationwide.

After joining the site, members choose six people who will have access to their account should something happen to the member. After the six have accepted the duty of carrying out a member’s wishes after death, the member creates an online book. This book includes all the funeral arrangements from music to finance instructions.

The site was created with boomers in mind, said the co-creator, Sue Kruskopf, 51, of Minneapolis. In an online poll to their members last month, 69 percent of the 360 responding members indicated they were baby boomers.

“We want to have as much control over our deaths as we do our lives,” she said.

The site has had more than 20,000 hits in the two months, and 7 percent of those hits sign up for the free service.

Whether online or in person, pre-planning a funeral has benefits for loved ones, said Winston, the Petersburg woman who had a video slideshow at her mother’s funeral.

She wasn’t able to see the presentation until the service because she was so busy making the rest of the arrangements. Pre-planning would have made the grieving process easier, Winston said.

“I had thought about making a plan before her passing,” she said. “But I didn’t know it was going to happen so soon.”

Winston said she is considering making her own arrangements online to help her family if an emergency arises.

“It would be good to have that because then they won’t have to go through all this,” she said.

Contact Lindsay Machak at (804) 649-6243 or .