The person who searches for a funeral director is doing so under conditions that are unlike any other search they will make this year. They are not comparing options in a settled state of mind. They are not reading reviews with the unhurried attention they might bring to choosing a restaurant. They are searching because someone they love has died, sometimes in the last few hours, and they need to know what to do next, and they have no clear sense of how to choose between the results that appear, or what the differences between them mean, or whether the price they are being shown is normal or exploitative, or whether the person behind the listing is someone who will be present with them throughout or someone whose company has a call centre and a rota of staff and a set of efficiencies that, however well-intentioned, will mean that the family never quite speaks to the same person twice. They are, in the language of user experience, highly motivated and highly vulnerable and working with almost no prior knowledge — a combination that makes the quality and honesty of what they find online matter enormously.
The independent funeral director who is a member of the National Association of Funeral Directors — whose membership requires compliance with the NAFD Code of Practice, whose pricing must be published transparently and in a format that allows genuine comparison, who is subject to an independent complaints process in the event of a dispute — or who is a member of the Society of Allied and Independent Funeral Directors, which operates an equivalent code, is offering something substantively different from what the large chains offer, and the person who is making this choice at the worst moment of their life deserves the opportunity to understand that difference. The independent funeral director cannot compete on marketing budget with the chains. They can, and they should, compete on the one quality that no chain can manufacture: the knowledge that the person who answers the telephone is also the person who will conduct the service, who has arranged funerals for other families in this town, whose name the family will remember because it is the name of a person who was actually there.
On What a Funeral Director Actually Does and Why the Distinction Matters
There is a widespread vagueness about what the role of a funeral director entails, a vagueness that is perhaps understandable given that most people have very limited direct experience of bereavement and almost none of the practical arrangements that follow it. The funeral director is not, primarily, the person who conducts the service — that role belongs to a celebrant or clergy member, though some funeral directors are themselves trained celebrants. The funeral director is the person who coordinates everything that must happen between the moment of death and the moment of committal: the collection of the person who has died, the care of the body, the registration and certification requirements, the arrangement of the service including venue and music and transport and floral tributes and the publication of notices, the management of the many legal and logistical elements that a bereaved family is expected to navigate while simultaneously doing the internal, wordless, barely-begun work of grief. The funeral director who does this well does something that is genuinely difficult and genuinely valuable, and does it for families who are in no position to evaluate what excellent care looks like because they have no prior frame of reference for comparison.
This is part of what makes transparency so important, and what makes a clear website so much more than a marketing tool for a funeral director. The family who is choosing a funeral director without prior experience or personal recommendation has no way of knowing, from a listing or a brief entry in a directory, whether the care being offered is attentive or perfunctory, whether the person they speak to on the telephone will still be the person they deal with on the day, whether the price they are quoted includes everything or whether further costs will appear later, or whether the funeral home they are considering is independently owned and has a stake in the community it serves or is a branch of a business that acquired it as part of a consolidation strategy and whose priorities are elsewhere. These are not small distinctions. They are the distinctions that determine whether a family, already carrying what they are carrying, is supported through the process or navigated through it.
On Why Independent Funeral Directors Are Invisible at the Moment They Are Needed
The funeral director faces a particular version of the invisibility problem that this journal returns to again and again: the invisibility of the professional who is excellent at their work and who relies, as excellent professionals often do, on the word of mouth that their work generates. The person whose mother was cared for with extraordinary attentiveness by the independent funeral director at the end of the high street tells their friends. Their friends tell their own friends. The business grows slowly and steadily on the strength of that reputation, and the funeral director who has been in the same premises for thirty years knows that this is how it has always worked, and trusts that it will continue to work.
What that model does not account for is the person who has moved to the area in the last three years and who does not yet have the network of neighbours and family connections through which recommendations travel. It does not account for the person who is new to a town because they moved there to care for an elderly parent and who is now, very soon after arriving, searching alone. It does not account for the growing proportion of searches that begin on a device rather than in a conversation. And it does not account for the fact that the large chains, who can afford to spend substantially on digital advertising and directory listings and search engine optimisation, have in many areas come to dominate the first page of results in a way that presents a misleading picture of what is actually available to the person searching. The independent funeral director who has served their community for decades may not appear at all in a search conducted by someone who moved into the area this year and who does not know to search for them specifically.
The funeral director who has spent years learning to hold a family’s grief with steadiness and care deserves to be findable by the family searching at the worst moment of their lives.
The solution is not a complicated one, but it requires the funeral director to take it seriously. A clear website — one that states NAFD or SAIF membership and explains what that membership means in terms of code of practice and complaints procedures; one that publishes a simple and honest price list that allows genuine comparison, as the NAFD code requires; one that describes the care that the funeral home provides in terms that are specific rather than generic, and that conveys through its tone the values that distinguish an independent business from a chain; one that includes the name and, ideally, the face of the person who will answer the telephone; one that explains what happens next after first contact, because the family who has never arranged a funeral before does not know what the next few days will involve; one that addresses the most common questions honestly, including the question of direct cremation, which is a legitimate choice and one that an honest funeral director will explain rather than discourage — does several things at once. It makes the funeral home findable. It gives the searching family the information they need to make a confident choice. And it makes visible the qualities that distinguish an independent funeral director from the large and efficiently impersonal alternatives that the search results currently tend to favour.
At GitFoundry, we build websites for independent funeral directors that make your NAFD or SAIF membership immediately visible and verifiable, publish your pricing honestly in the format that the code requires, describe the care you provide in terms that are specific and genuine, name the person who will be present throughout the arrangement and the service, explain the process clearly for families who have never done this before, and address the questions that families most commonly ask — including the question of direct cremation and unattended services — with the honesty that a family at their most vulnerable deserves. One payment, no monthly fee, yours outright.