12 End-of-Year Events to Help Your Funeral Home Get Involved in Your Community
The new year is almost here but there’s still time for your funeral home to make the most of the current one. The end of the year is jam-packed with several holidays that you can use as an opportunity to host events and get involved in your community. From remembrance dinners for honoring those who are no longer with us to collecting donations for local causes, there are tons of options. This article goes over just a few of them.
Plan a Fun Halloween Event for Your Funeral Home’s Community
When it comes to community involvement, Halloween is the perfect holiday for it. Everyone’s looking for something fun to do in their community, from taking their kids trick-or-treating to watching spooky movies. Although it may be a bit too late to plan a Halloween event for this year, it’s never too early to plan for next year. Here are a few ideas.
1. Invite your community to a spooky movie night at your facility or a local cemetery. After all, Halloween movies are the perfect way to get into the spirit of the season.
2. To get the kids involved, have a trick-or-treat night at your facility. Or you can pass out candy on Halloween during your community’s trick-or-treating time.
3. If you’re ready to tackle a larger project and have the space for it, create a haunted house in your facility’s event center. Since this event requires a larger workload, you should reach out to other businesses in your community or ask for volunteers from your local schools and colleges to make it a team effort.
Honor Your Community’s Living and Fallen Veterans This Veterans Day
To show your respect for the veterans who bravely served their country, there are many ways to get involved for Veterans Day. Not only is it about honoring your community’s living veterans, but also those who are no longer with us. Here are some ideas. (To learn more about the history of the holiday, we have an entire blog post about it.)
1. Hold a remembrance ceremony to honor the fallen veterans in your community. This could be at your funeral home or your local veterans cemetery.
2. Invite the veterans in your community to a free cookout at your funeral home. Or you could take them to the best brunch spot in town.
3. Collect donations for Wreaths Across America. On National Wreaths Across America Day, there are wreath-laying ceremonies at more than 2,500 cemeteries.
Bring Your Community Together This Thanksgiving
To have a community to be involved in, you need to play a part in creating one. A community is more than just people who live in the same town. It’s people who come together to celebrate the good times and the bad. Hosting events is one way for your funeral home to play your part and what better holiday is there than Thanksgiving for coming together and celebrating what we’re thankful for? Here are a few ideas.
1. Collect food donations for your local food pantries. You could even organize a group to volunteer at a food pantry to help with packaging the food, serving it, or whatever else they need help with.
2. Have dinner at your funeral home for community members who don’t have a place to go to. Or set up a dinner at your local nursing home or hospice center for those who don’t have family in the area.
3. Participate in a local walk/run. You could create a group for your funeral home’s employees and invite their family and friends to join too. The more the merrier!
Help Your Community Grieve and Honor Their Loved Ones During the Holidays
The holiday season is filled with event opportunities to bring everyone together to honor their loved ones. Grieving a loss is difficult any time of year, but especially during the holiday season. By hosting events, you can help people feel less alone this time of year. Here are some ideas.
1. Many funeral homes host events during the holidays to honor those who have passed that year. You could have a ceremony with readings and music followed by a meal.
2. Collect donations of toys and clothes for families in need in your community.
3. Going along with the previous idea, you could have an event for children to open the gifts and make holiday crafts. You also could see if Santa can fit the event into his busy schedule.
Quick Tips for Promoting Your Funeral Home’s Events
No one’s going to come to your event if they don’t know about it. That’s why along with planning your event, you need to promote it, too. Here are a few ideas.
- Post about your event on social media. (Learn about Facebook ads in our eBook.)
- Send invitations by mail, email, or create a Facebook Event.
- Write a blog post about it and link to it on social media.
- Tell your local new publications about your event to help spread the word.
- Don’t forget about non-digital promotion, like word of mouth and flyers you can post around town and hand out to community members.
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