While going digital has changed the world and cemetery management along with it, the team at Chronicle have taken another big step in helping communities engage with their legacies. With our latest mobile-friendly update, our team is changing the way that things have been done in the industry. Here’s how we’ve optimised our platform for mobile use.
Live Walking Tours for the Public
For those who wish to visit deceased family members at the community cemetery or for people who seek to know more about individuals who made an impact in the locale, this new update is what they’d call a “game changer”. Even for taphophiles (those fascinated with headstones and cemeteries in general), Chronicle mobile-friendly cemetery software allows for a cemetery experience that hasn’t been done before.
Cemeteries can be overwhelming, especially for the bereaved. Finding the plot that one wishes to pay their respects or just visit is not always an easy task. And, at a place of peace and reflection, difficulty in finding a gravesite is an unwanted obstacle. With a digitised cemetery and mobile responsive cemetery software to go with it, the Chronicle team has made this simpler.
Visitors can now perform a quick deceased search on their phones and be guided to a plot – with GPS guidance – in real time. This is especially helpful since cemetery management teams don’t always have personnel on hand to help at any given moment.
Picture a simple change in the cemetery experience: A scannable QR code at the entrance to the cemetery, allowing visitors to easily access your live cemetery map with unobtrusive, highlighted grid overlay, that offers them a live walking tour directly to the plot they wish to visit.
Offering a self-guided historic tour with all relevant information at their fingertips (literally), you’re now able to cut down inquiries coming directly to your office while also offering a richer experience. Now, there’s an added sense of realism, allowing the public to connect with history at the very site they’re visiting. Stories about the deceased are accessible – not from a laptop before or after visiting, but directly at the site. With the ability to highlight a “Featured” story, those who visit are directed to prominent people or those with fascinating life stories who have been laid to rest there.
How Chronicle Mobile-Friendly Cemetery Software Helps Cemetery Managers
While the update offers the public the opportunity to relate more closely to those who built their community – to stand where they rest and experience those emotions – it offers even more for those who manage the cemetery.
This cemetery software feature allows for real-time audits of your cemetery without all the steps in-between. What does this mean, practically?
Think of it this way: On the Chronicle platform, your digital cemetery is built on the relationship between 3 different sources of information; the real world, your cemetery records (which were previously on Excel or written on paper ledgers), and the cemetery map. It’s now one, single point of reference for your cemetery.
Now, this latest feature gives you access to add, edit, and update data to cemetery plots while you’re walking among the headstones. There’s no need to awkwardly make scribbled annotations on PDF printouts before taking them back to your workstation to update them digitally. Fix mistakes as you go. Improve the accuracy of your records over time. It’s far less overwhelming and far simpler to rectify mistakes when you’re able to check data in “real life”, or add to it. Update the information on the digital plots, too, by adding headstone photos quickly and directly, on your phone.
Cemetery managers can also engage with visitors from the community, offering them an immersive experience while also making their visits more meaningful. While the walk-to-plot feature provides visitors with a self-guided tour, managers can create a GPS-guided, historic walking tour or virtual historic tour of their community. This way, experiences are created, highlighting histories and uncovering hidden gems.
Convey Accurate Information and Simplify Sales
Providing mobile-friendly capabilities to smaller cemeteries is as valuable as it is for big cemeteries. Many of these institutions are dealing with records that are lost or have been destroyed – finding a starting point in digitising their records can be disheartening. With this new feature, the Chronicle team can now build their digital cemetery plot map as a template – or skeleton, if you will. Then, on a number of walks through the cemetery, small cemetery managers can easily populate all the “vacant” plots accurately, while standing right at the plot site.
For cemeteries of any size, however, sales become far simpler. As a cemetery manager, you can send a link of the available plot to a potential buyer and they’re now able to find and view the plot themselves, at their leisure. It becomes much simpler and clearer to convey relevant, accurate information when engaging with contractors and the onsite worker (grave diggers, plaque installers, funeral directors).
If you want to learn more about managing cemeteries with a single management tool that can be accessed easily from a mobile device, click here to discuss the steps tailored to your unique cemetery situations with our digital cemetery consultants.