Michelle Gerhardt
Director of Preplanning & Aftercare Advisor
Browning Funeral Home
Evansville, IN
Average call volume: 425 calls/year

As a busy funeral professional, you need the time and freedom to do your best work. And when a family in need turns to you for care, the last thing you want is to be focused on other parts of your business.

Michelle Gerhardt of Browning Funeral Home struggled to find enough time to serve families and navigate other day-to-day responsibilities. That’s when Browning Funeral Home partnered with Funeral Directors Life (FDL), which freed up staff time and increased preneed sales by 95%.

“With FDL, everything runs smoothly, and we’re able to focus on serving families,” Michelle said. “We’ve had a great experience.”

Find out how FDL has helped Browning Funeral Home’s social media, preneed, aftercare, and more!

What did your funeral home’s social media look like before partnering with FDL?

Back then, we weren’t posting regularly, and what was posted came directly from the funeral home staff. We would post our obituaries and any events we hosted, but nothing more than that. Our posts weren’t the most professional-looking. Still, we kept posting because we understood that we needed an online presence. The problem was that none of us had time to make sure our social media looked great and stayed active.

How did that struggle affect you and Browning Funeral Home?

Trying to figure out what to post, when to post, and how often to post was extra stress that no one in our funeral home needed. It truly felt like another fire we had to put out. Marketing and advertising are not in my wheelhouse, and I think most funeral professionals would feel the same way. I’m not saying funeral professionals aren’t creative, but we’re focused on helping families. None of us wanted to worry about getting on social media after a long day.

What is your favorite part of using FDL’s social media management service?

Oh, the fact that FDL takes care of all of our social media for us! We’re not the ones who have to keep our Facebook active. Now, we have FDL for that, and we have a whole team of experts who are helping our funeral home get in front of families on social media. Before FDL, we would have had to hire someone for our staff to do that.

Plus, getting started with FDL was really easy. All we had to do was give FDL access to our Facebook page, and the next thing I knew, our funeral home started posting great content. It was very simple.

Besides saving time, what other benefits have you seen since using FDL’s social media management service?

I’m confident that our improved social media has helped increase our preneed appointments. I think as families scroll through social media and see our posts about preplanning, it triggers them to think, “I really need to do that. I haven’t done that, and I need to get on that.” Our social media serves as another constant reminder.

FDL also helps free up my time to meet with more families and grow our preneed program. So, knowing FDL can handle our social media is a win-win for us.

How else has FDL helped your funeral home stay active online?

We’ve done a better job of growing our online presence through FDL’s Google Ads. I think it’s important for our funeral home to rank high on Google because that helps us get business. We want to be near the top of the search results when families look for funeral homes in our area, and FDL has helped us do that better.

FDL has also created several personalized videos that we’ve used on our Facebook page. Those videos always look professional and do a great job of showing the personal side of our funeral home, which definitely helps us connect with families. Our community can see our faces and better associate us with the funeral home. Plus, there are so many intimate parts of funerals and grief that you have to be careful in how you talk about those subjects. Our videos allow us to talk about those subjects in a respectful way.

Is your aftercare program also through FDL?

Yes, and we’ve seen excellent results. We’ve heard great things from families in our community who have signed up for Circle of Friends+. They love it! There are so many great articles and resources available to families who need that little bit of extra help from time to time. And since Circle of Friends+ comes through email or text messages, families are free to share those links with others who may need them. I think it’s so important for our funeral home to have a strong aftercare program because it’s a way we can continue to comfort families and let them know that we care. We don’t want our families to feel like we’re cutting them loose after the funeral. We’re still here for them, and we do care.

You also use FDL’s preneed sales software, DIGicon. How has your experience been with that platform?

I use DIGicon a lot, and I really like it. It’s so easy to work with and nearly impossible to make mistakes. I appreciate how DIGicon populates a lot of my information for me so I don’t have to type it in. DIGicon also checks all of my information to make sure I’ve got everything correct before I finalize a contract. To make things even simpler, I can send a family their contract through email. To me, using DIGicon is a no-brainer.

What makes FDL different than other funeral home partners?

FDL is top-notch, professional, and a wonderful company to work with. Everything FDL does for us is done well, and I haven’t had any issues with any of the services we use. If I have a question, I know I’ll speak to someone who has great customer service and can take care of it. That’s a big plus for us.

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