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Many people don’t know this about me, but I’m a fourth-generation funeral director and own a funeral home with my twin brother. This experience leaves me uniquely positioned for a career at Legacy where I oversee Newspaper and Funeral Home development.

At the heart of it, funeral homes are a fixture in the community. We pride ourselves on supporting families during the hardest moments in life. But, we’re small-business owners too, and while we focus on our families, we also have to worry about expenses, marketing, our websites, generating new business, and more.

When Legacy purchased Tributes, I was excited for the opportunities and investment that the acquisition would bring. But, one of the most popular programs is one that has been available for years – Funeral Home Local Spotlight.

Funeral Home Local Spotlight (FHLS) offers funeral homes a lot of added features to their online newspaper obituaries that promote their businesses and often incentivize placing an obituary with a newspaper. The newspaper obituary is the best way for funeral homes to reach their communities, and Funeral Home Local Spotlight is a premium online obituary to complement the print product. In markets that have launched the program, we’ve seen overwhelmingly positive response from funeral homes:

Mark Busch, Vice President and Funeral Director at Busch Funeral and Crematory Services, has said, “We’re really happy to be a part of the Funeral Home Local Spotlight program because it’s bringing us more traffic to our website and additional revenue through flowers sales. Our families appreciate the spotlight for their loved one, and we are glad to be featured prominently in the online newspaper section.”

As I visit with different newspapers and funeral homes across the country to talk about this program, it’s clear why this program is ideal for funeral homes to participate in, but what’s in it for you – our newspaper partners? Well, besides the added benefit of building stronger funeral home relationships, FHLS is built to help you generate more revenue, with no development or sales effort on your end. Amy Houser, Director of Sales Operations at Tronc, agrees: “It was surprisingly easy to tap into the new revenue this program brings. Our local newspapers have been very pleased!”

In fact, here’s how FHLS could affect your bottom line if you received just five FHLS notices per day:
fhls-equation-web

We strive to help build bridges between our newspaper and funeral home partners and come up with products and solutions that mutually benefit everyone with whom we work. Funeral Home Local Spotlight program is an excellent example of this mission: It generates more revenue for newspapers, provides funeral homes with a premier product that promotes their homes, and gives your readers the best user experience. 

John Heald

John Heald

Vice President of Channel Development

John Heald is a fourth generation funeral director and has been licensed in Massachusetts for 18 years. Currently, John is the Vice President of Channel Development for Legacy.com. He started his career at Eaton Funeral home, one of the oldest independent funeral homes in the country. Since then, he has worked as a casket sales consultant, pre-need insurance broker, and was one of the original members of the team that started Tributes.com. In 2010, John built a new funeral home located in Shrewsbury, MA with his twin brother, Jim, and business partner, David Chiampa.