Prout Funeral Home, based in New Jersey, is dedicated to delivering the highest quality of service to families. In addition to being award-winning leaders in death care, the team at Prout Funeral Home recently switched to Gather’s case management software. Learn about their story, and how Gather is helping expand their legacy.

Case Study Overview

• Customer Name: Prout Funeral Home
• Location: Verona, New Jersey
• Using Gather Since: 2023
• Uses Gather For: Case Management, Integrated Website Design, KeepTrack™

The Story of Julia Prout and Prout Funeral Home

Julia Prout is a fourth-generation funeral director who, after pursuing various other career paths, found her calling in the funeral service industry. She initially helped improve her family’s funeral home website and online presence before deciding to become a licensed funeral director herself. She describes her work as incredibly rewarding and challenging in a positive way.

Prout Funeral Service has been in operation for nearly 100 years and several generations of Prouts have made significant changes to adapt to evolving consumer needs. They even have a support dog, Morris, to help grieving families. Julia’s great-grandfather pioneered the concept of funeral homes in Verona, moving away from home-based funerals. Her grandfather expanded and modernized the building to provide more comfort to grieving families, and her father embraced and still speaks on innovative practices such as solar power and green funerals.

Julia’s impact on the family business involves embracing change and educating consumers about the evolving funeral industry. She strives to be a source of support and comfort for families during their most challenging times, drawing from her personal experiences of loss.

Overall, Julia Prout is committed to continuing her family’s legacy by adapting to the changing needs of consumers while providing compassion and understanding during difficult times.

The Challenges Before Gather

Plenty of different challenges exist in the world of death care. Julia Prout noted a few specific challenges that funeral home and crematory businesses consistently face:

• Different Ways to Make Arrangements: Many times, the next of kin lives far away and is not easily able to come in and physically make arrangements. As a result, there are many efficiency gaps to try and fill when it comes to coordinating with families 100% remotely.
• Changing Consumer Preferences: More people are looking to plan services and coordinate with funeral directors digitally because it’s more convenient. Additionally, consumers are exploring greener options for funeral services, which completely changes the game for death care businesses.
• Monotonous Data Entry: With every other aspect of planning services that a funeral director is required to manage, it’s incredibly difficult and time-consuming to double-enter data into an antiquated case management platform.
• Website Design: More consumers are visiting websites from their mobile devices, so it’s crucial to have a funeral home or crematory website that is mobile-friendly.

How Gather Helped Prout Funeral Home

Since switching to Gather, Julia pointed out that the business experienced an immediate lift in several areas:

• Improving Efficiency With WorkFlows: “Making the switch to Gather has really improved our efficiency. Thinking about families for what we’re doing for Visiting Service Cremation, maybe Visiting Service Burial, we have at least a dozen WorkFlows.”
  

• Collecting Payments From Families: “Collecting payments has gotten so much easier. Gather has helped us better serve our families by allowing us to offer more ways to pay. There’s always the traditional cash/check method but with Gather we can split payments among different methods, family members, allow for trusted crowd-funding, and more.”

• Capturing and Storing Form Signatures: “I have so many documents in our library. [With Gather], we uploaded so many forms. They did everything. It’s so easy now to just autofill all the documents, print it out, have it ready for the family to sign, send it off to them, email the gentle reminders, again just taking so much off the plate. And getting notified when things get done is so helpful.”
  

• Obtaining Case Info at a Quick Glance: “Anybody, even if someone who is working here part-time comes in and works on a file, they can just look at Gather and see what needs to be done. We have tasks, like ‘Order The Vault’ and I have the phone number for the vault company listed so you don’t even have to search for it.”

• Increasing Community Engagement With Remember Pages: “Something else that has blown me away is the Remember Page. We have gotten such positive feedback that it is easy to use, that it is attractive, that people feel like they’re part of a community remembering their loved one. People are more likely to upload photos, we find now. We’ve actually had ministers use what people have shared [from the Remember Page prompts] for their sermon and it just makes it so special. Everyone starts to feel included in the service too. They’re not just passive participants, they’re active participants. Their relationship is being valued. It’s been really powerful to be honest.”

• Exporting Case Info to Messenger’s Make It Personal: “The way that you can export all of the data that you and the families entered into Messenger’s Make It Personal. We’ve now upgraded our register books thanks to Gather. We’ll take the photos that people upload to the Remember Page and upload to the register book.”

• Relieving Stress With Organized Data: “[Gather] just improved efficiency and honestly reduced my stress because I can look at it on my phone or in the office and know what needs to be done. The documentation is so important. It’s all automated in Gather.”
• Integrating a Beautiful Website Design: “We are quite proud of our site – it has turned many inquiries into actual calls. We’re so grateful the website team could carry out our vision and enhance it with unique Gather features like the Remember Pages.” By integrating a website design and case management with Gather, they also unlock the time-saving ability to publish obits to their website in one click.

• Having Access to Reliable Customer Support: “It definitely is a lot easier when you have a support team like Gather. A lot of other colleagues have asked me how the switch has been to Gather, I said just above everything else is the customer service. It’s stressful enough running a business and planning a funeral, Gather lightens our load a lot. There’s so many ways to get in touch with somebody.”

Stand Out From Your Competition With Gather

In a competitive and evolving funeral industry, funeral homes and crematories can better market themselves with a modern case management platform like Gather – as we’ve learned from Julia and the team at Prout Funeral Home. You instantly unlock the ability to provide a more personalized and efficient experience for grieving families.

Book a demo with our team and learn how you can leverage Gather to streamline funeral arrangements, give your team better tools, create a better family experience, and take your funeral home to the next level.