CANA PR Toolkit

Educate Consumers and Grow Your Business

The Cremation Association of North America is pleased to offer this Public Relations Toolkit as a benefit for CANA members. We hope that you will find it helpful as you work to build and enhance relationships and awareness of your business within your local market.

As you know, the death care industry is experiencing dramatic changes. People’s attitudes toward death, funerals, and traditional practices are different today than they were just 10 years ago. CANA’s latest statistics show that more people are choosing cremation than ever before. In the United States, 48.6% of people chose cremation in 2015, and in Canada the rate was 68.8%. CANA predicts that by 2033, cremation will be the preferred form of disposition in every state, surpassing 50%.

And yet, the lack of understanding among members of the public about cremation and its relationship to funerals and memorialization is astonishing. What does this mean for you, your business, and the families you serve? Right now, there are tremendous opportunities for you to educate consumers, fulfill your professional mission to help people with death and funerals, and grow your business.

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The CANA PR Toolkit Enhances Your Current Efforts

Most likely you have a strong marketing and sales program for your cremation and funeral business. You and your business may be well known in your community and you may hold positions of leadership with local business, civic, and philanthropic organizations. Those are all extremely important factors in your success.

In addition, there are ways to use public relations and targeted community outreach to amplify those successes and build greater goodwill. A public relations strategy is different than a marketing and sales plan, and is designed to work in conjunction with marketing. The field of public relations is often described as a collection of activities that build awareness, enhance a public reputation and heighten visibility. Where marketing and sales efforts are aimed directly at prospective customers with the intent of making a sale, public relations tactics are more general and educational, and often rely upon third-party validation (such as non-advertising media coverage or word-of-mouth endorsements).

Public relations activities help you build a positive reputation and educate important audiences in your community long before members of those audiences need your company’s services, and long before you need their support, such as for plans to build a crematory in your community or expand your operations.

Log in now to access complete PR Toolkit contents.

Public Relations covers a lot of territory. We map it out for you with CANA’s PR 101 Reference Guide.

The Tools in the CANA PR Toolkit include a variety of resources, “how-to” instructions, and templates that you can use.

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