Steven Gilbert is vice president of PassingNotice.com, a new Web site that curates obituaries and death notices from communities in Rhode Island. Gilbert talked with Providence Business News recently about the thinking behind the site, which launched April 1, and its business model.
PBN: What is Passing Notice? Where did you get the idea for it?
GILBERT: Passing Notice is an online database of all of the death notices and obituaries for the state of Rhode Island. Originally the idea came from one of the partners in the company, whose grandmother had passed away, and he couldn’t find the obituary in The Providence Journal. When he spoke with his mom and asked why there was no obituary, she said that the cost was so high she just couldn’t do it. She ended up posting it in The Kent County Times, which was great for the folks who lived in the Coventry-Warwick area, but his grandmother had lived and worked in Woonsocket, so none of the people who had grown up in that area were aware that his grandmother had passed away. And he just started investigating it and thought there had to be a better way.
He came to me, because my company does a lot of Web programming, with the raw idea of how this would work, and we sat down, went through it more, and the more I looked at it the more I thought, what a great idea.
You know, it’s a twofold business: part of it is to provide the information quickly and easily to folks in large print that is easy to read, and the other part is a business.
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PBN: How does it work, both as a business and as a service?
GILBERT: We have two revenue streams. One is advertising on the site itself. We look for different types of businesses that are related to the funeral industry – florists, limousines, et cetera. We have limited the amount of advertising that we’re willing to put on the site, because we’re not willing to make it a commercial Web site that’s really burdened with advertising. To us, the real value is the content.
The content – the obituaries and the death notices themselves – we work directly with the funeral homes. We work with the funeral directors, and we gather that information up. We also get information from public records, such as other newspapers and whatnot, to try and get as many as possible. Right now, most people don’t realize it but if you read The Providence Journal every day, the obituaries that are in there are strictly the obituaries that were posted by the families to The Providence Journal. If a family does not put an obituary in The Providence Journal, then there’s no death notice, there’s no record. There’s roughly 30 local newspapers in the state that do obituaries. They comprise about 15 different Web sites.
In addition, out of the 100 or so funeral homes in the state, there’s about an additional 50 Web sites that you have to check. It would be a full-time job every day for one person to do it. Fortunately, we have several people who do this on a daily basis.
PBN: How much does it cost?
GILBERT: The cost is very reasonable. If you compare it to Legacy.com, they charge either a monthly fee or an annual fee, and each year or each month if you don’t continue to pay, [the obituary] comes down. On our site, it’s a one-time fee of $70, and that’s paid directly to the funeral home, and they work with us and we bill them. Now, that price is a one-time fee – so a year from now, you don’t get a bill; five years from now, you don’t get a bill.
There’s approximately 10,000 deaths a year in Rhode Island … and we feel that there’s a strong enough revenue stream there of people who will want to put it up there and be willing to pay a nominal one-time fee to keep it up there, and so we don’t see the need to go back and charge every year.
We’re also looking at adding a new Memorial feature to it that’s still in development – it’s basically kind of a blog type of feature that allows you to upload photos and not only write condolence messages but also write about the person’s life and things like that, and be able to have that as a permanent record that you can then go back to and tell grandchildren about – their grandparents, how they grew up, where they came from – and it creates kind of a permanent family record.
PBN: You mentioned Legacy.com. Why did you create a local site when there are national ones? What was the thinking there?
GILBERT: Several ideas. One, we have looked at what it would take to do this on a national basis or even on a multi-state basis, and the reason that the business model works here in Rhode Island is because Rhode Island is a small town. It’s a relatively small geographic area with a relatively close-knit population, and the business model works great right here in Rhode Island. Geographically, we can meet with funeral directors in all different parts of the state without it being a long, arduous trip, two, three hours of driving each way or whatever it may be. When you look at doing that in Connecticut or Massachusetts – just in Rhode Island alone, there are about 100 funeral homes, give or take, and in Massachusetts, Connecticut, you’re looking at probably five to six times that number of funeral homes. Just the sheer logistics of it would be very prohibitive. And also, with the number of people that live in the states, that makes it prohibitive.
One of the things with, like, Legacy, if there’s something that is posted incorrectly or if you wanted any kind of change or something to it, it’s harder to change those sites than it is to change if you have an obituary that has missing information or an error in The Journal, where they have to print a correction. With us – and this is a good example – I had a funeral director send me an obituary on a Sunday, and I was checking e-mail kind of routinely and saw this had come in so I posted it up – and we also have a condolence e-mail we send to the family with a direct link to the posting to make it easy for them to get the word around quicker – and so I sent that back and when the funeral director was reviewing the posting, he noticed that he had forgotten to put some of the information in, and he e-mailed me back and said, look, I hope this isn’t a big deal but I forgot to put some of this information in. And I had it corrected in 10 minutes for him. And that is the biggest advantage, I think, to local versus [national].
You know, Legacy works with newspapers; we work with funeral directors. We think we’re much closer to the people of Rhode Island the families.
PBN: How are you getting people to use it? What has been the response so far?
GILBERT: This has been the interesting part – we are promoting the Web site to the general public, to make them aware of it, through several different methods. We’ve done bus stop signs throughout the state, we’ve got some television advertising that’s going to be coming up on the ABC 6 morning news, we are looking at doing some radio advertising – we’re trying to stretch out our advertising budget on a monthly basis to kind of hit different areas of the population each month. We’re also doing some additional outdoor advertising, passing business cards around, networking events.
The response has been really good. Each month we’ve doubled the number of hits. We only started in April, and each month we’ve doubled the number of hits. Right now, we’re seeing about 25,000 to 40,000 hits a month. And the really nice part about it is that we’re finding that roughly for every three or four people that visit the site, about three-quarters of them are bookmarking the site and coming back. That’s very encouraging, because when we look at our unique [visitor] traffic versus our repeat traffic, we’re finding that most people are coming back at least a couple of times, and that’s really what it’s all about.
We’re very optimistic. The feedback we’ve received from people has been great. Across the board, they’re like, I didn’t know that, this is great – especially people who’ve been the site, they say, that’s a lot easier than any of the other sites I’ve ever been to, and you’re not getting just one particular newspaper or Web site or funeral home.
