What your cemetery could do
Your website is a brochure. It could be a front desk that never closes.
Once the grounds are captured and your records are searchable, you are no longer just answering questions online. You are open. A daughter in another state can send flowers to her father’s grave at midnight. A man who got a diagnosis on Tuesday can hold the plot he wants on Tuesday, instead of waiting for an appointment on Monday.
Four things families already want
They are asking for these on the phone. This is the same thing, without the phone.
Recurring revenue
Flowers, placed and photographed
The most common call a distant family makes is some version of “can somebody put flowers on my mother’s grave?” Today that is a phone call, a card payment read out loud, and a promise. Online it is an order against a specific grave on a specific date — and a photograph back afterwards proving they were placed.
Standing orders are where this compounds: a birthday, an anniversary, Memorial Day, Christmas. Set once, recurring for years, and your grounds crew is already walking past the grave.
The big one
Preplanning that starts before the appointment
Preneed is where cemeteries actually make money, and the first step today is the hardest one: get a stranger to book a meeting about their own death. Almost nobody wants that meeting.
If they can walk your sections in 360° from the sofa, see what is available, and understand what things cost, the meeting stops being step one. It becomes the step they ask for, once they already know what they want.
As far as you want it to go
From “I like this garden” to holding the ground
At the quiet end, a family standing in your Rose Garden in 360° taps once: I like this garden, I’d like to talk to someone. A short form, straight to your team. No prices, no availability, nothing public you did not choose to make public.
At the other end, if you want availability visible, they can hold specific ground at eleven at night from another time zone. Same system, different setting.
End to end
The whole arrangement, at their pace
Section, plot, marker type, inscription, service preferences — worked through over a fortnight in their own time rather than compressed into ninety minutes across a desk.
People buy more, and regret less, when they were not rushed. And everything they have chosen is waiting on your screen before they ever walk in.
The legal shape of it
A hold is not a sale, and that distinction is the whole design.
Preneed is regulated, and properly so. In many states anyone who offers, sells, or signs a preneed contract has to be licensed, and the money is subject to trust requirements. Rules differ by state, and family-owned, church, non-profit and municipal cemeteries are often exempt from parts of it.
So we do not try to execute a regulated contract through a web form. Online captures intent and holds the ground. Your licensed staff complete the contract, the same way they do now. You lose nothing you are required to do — you just stop losing the people who were never going to book the appointment.
Also on the table
Smaller, and they add up.
Grave and marker cleaning
Families who cannot visit will pay to have a stone cleaned properly — by someone who knows not to take a wire brush to marble.
Seasonal wreaths and blankets
A single well-timed email in November, against a list of families who already have a grave here.
Your unsold ground, visible
Most cemeteries cannot say precisely what is unsold and where. Once the grounds are mapped against your records, you can — and you can sell it.
Anniversary photographs
A photograph of the grave on a date that matters, sent to a family two thousand miles away. Small money, and they remember it for years.
Your decision, not ours
How far down this goes is a setting.
Cemeteries differ enormously on what they will put in public. Some will not publish availability or price under any circumstances. Others want a family to be able to reserve ground at midnight. Both are right, for them — so it is built to where you draw the line, and the line can move later.
Just tell my team
A family taps the section they like and fills in a short form. It reaches whoever you nominate, with the section they were looking at attached. Nothing about price or availability is public. This is the setting most cemeteries start on.
Walk them through it first
A guided sequence — section, plot type, marker, inscription, service preferences — worked through at their pace over days or weeks. Whoever handles arrangements — a family service counselor at a large park, the sexton at a small one — receives a complete brief, and the first meeting starts from what they have already chosen instead of a blank page.
Let them hold the ground
For cemeteries that do want availability visible: a family reserves specific ground online and your licensed staff complete the contract. The hold removes the appointment that used to come first — it does not replace the contract that has to come after.
Where it stands today
Running now at Mountain View, in Mesa.
Capture, search by name, walking directions to the marker, family photo uploads and a guest book — both held behind cemetery approval — and a corrections queue that lands on the office desk. Roughly 23,800 records, going back to 1951. You can use it yourself right now.
The flower orders, the guided preplanning and the holds are configured per cemetery, because no two cemeteries want the same depth or the same wording. That is a conversation about your rules and your sections, not a feature request.
Where would you draw the line?
Tell us what your families actually ask for, and how much you are willing to show. We build to that.
Sources
- Virginia Department of Professional and Occupational Regulation, Consumer Guide: Cemeteries and Pre-Need Burial Contracts — on trust requirements and which cemeteries are exempt from licensure.
https://www.dpor.virginia.gov/Consumers/Guide_Cemetery - Florida Department of Financial Services, Division of Funeral, Cemetery and Consumer Services — Licensing. In Florida anyone who offers, sells, or signs a preneed contract for burial rights must be licensed under chapter 497.
https://www.myfloridacfo.com/division/funeralcemetery/licensing - Preneed rules differ by state and several categories of cemetery are exempt. Nothing here is legal advice — confirm with your own counsel and your state regulator before selling anything online.