2025 Innovation Award Participants

Thank you to our Innovation Award Participants:

• Eternity’s Touch
• Final Embrace
• Forensic Pathology Services (FPS)
• Forever LT Fingerprint Keepsakes
• Hearses by Perches
• Just Enduring Inc.
• LifeArt by Terrybear
• Loop Biotech
• Memorygram
• National Cemetery Administration
• Passages International
• R&S Design Gallery
• Recap Books
• Return Home
• Spencer Italia srl
• Terrybear Urns & Memorials
• The American Chair Company/Church Chairs of America
• The Dodge Company
• The Memory Box
• The Natural Funeral Inc.
• Tribute Technology
• Tukios

Thank you to our 2025 Judges

Thank you to our distinguished panel of judges:

• Matt Bailey – Bailey Family Funeral Homes, Wallingford, Connecticut
• Chris Costello – Mothe Funeral Homes, New Orleans Louisiana
• David Hernandez – Jersey Memorial Group, Old Bridge, New Jersey
• Leili McMurrough – President, Worsham College, Libertyville, Illinois
• Mike Burns – Pittsburgh Institute of Mortuary Science, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
• Timothy McLoon – William R. May Funeral Home Inc., New Hope, Pennsylvania
• Welton Hong – Ring Ring Marketing, Las Vegas, Nevada

Afterword – Grace, The First AI Assistant for Funeral Homes

Grace is the first AI assistant purpose-built for funeral professionals, designed to ease the administrative burden and allow directors to focus on caring for families. Integrated within Afterword’s software platform, Grace automates routine tasks such as building case files, sending reminders and managing family communications. From converting a photo of a handwritten worksheet into a complete digital case file, to generating personalized follow-up emails, task lists and memorial date reminders, Grace works behind the scenes to ensure a seamless experience for both staff and families. What sets Grace apart is her ability to adapt to each funeral home’s unique processes, having been trained directly from the workflows of real directors. She’s not a generic chatbot; she’s a customized, intuitive assistant who brings compassion, consistency, and efficiency to every case.

Healing Path Cemetery, a Grief-Focused Engagement System for Cemeteries

Healing Path Cemetery is an innovative, multi-dimensional solution helping cemeteries remain relevant in a changing cultural landscape. With permanent memorialization on the decline, Healing Path reconnects local families to cemeteries by blending grief support, interactive rituals and lead generation. The system includes on-site healing stations designed around nine evidence-based grief rituals; a cemetery-branded mobile app offering videos, virtual rituals like “Letters to Heaven” and “digital candle lighting”; and a library of coordinated social media content that promotes healing and education. With features like narrated blessings from Peabody Award-winner Bill Kurtis and seamless integration of grief psychology with cemetery marketing, Healing Path is a pioneering platform that transforms cemeteries into places of ongoing remembrance, relevance and emotional connection.

Passare – AI Scanner

Passare’s AI Scanner revolutionizes the way funeral professionals handle handwritten documents by eliminating the need for manual data entry. This powerful, mobile-first tool uses advanced handwriting recognition technology to scan handwritten vitals forms and automatically populate the corresponding digital fields in Passare’s case management system. Designed to accommodate directors who prefer pen and paper during family meetings, the feature reduces the risk of transcription errors and saves valuable time. Built and trained using hundreds of handwriting samples, the scanner delivers high accuracy and requires no training — just scan, sync and send. As the first of its kind in funeral service, the AI Scanner sets a new standard for efficiency and innovation, enabling funeral professionals to spend less time on paperwork and more time supporting families.

1Director

1Director is the first-of-its-kind software that includes case management, personalized websites, real-time family collaboration, stationery design, memorial video creation, calendar coordination, online arrangements, custom documents, payments and accounting, and so much more, all in one seamless platform.Case management with 1Director streamlines the planning process by allowing funeral directors to collect case details, execute online arrangements, e-sign documents, and process payments in one simple experience. Owners and staff stay organized by tracking and assigning tasks, making case notes, and creating events in a cloud-based, always up-to-date calendar.

Bluewater Voyage

Bluewater Voyage offers something completely new for cremated remains. The Bluewater Voyage Buoy has given the public an alternative means of scattering ashes at sea. Once the ashes are packed inside the vessel,  Bluewater Voyage will deploy this into the gulf-stream for a one year long adventure. Sensors aboard the Voyager Buoy connect with our online Portal. Family and friends are able to track their loved one across every swell and wave.  Monitoring details like temperature, current, and bearing will be recorded for the family to see at the current point and time of the buoys location. Once the buoy is deployed, one of three things will happen during the adventure.

1. At the 365.5 day mark the buoy will be scuttled to become a permanent grave marker on the ocean floor.
2. At any given point during the trip the family can scuttle,(sink) the buoy to become a permanent grave marker in the ocean.
3. If the buoy gets within less than 100ft of water, it will be scuttled to keep from having it wash up on shore.

Everything After!

Everything After was built to completely shift how families and funeral homes experience aftercare. Research shows that families universally face three needs after a loss: planning a funeral, navigating acute grief, and juggling the logistics of settling an estate.  Funeral homes are experts at meeting the first of these needs, but families are being vastly underserved when it comes to the other two—and that’s what Everything After was built to change, by creating an estate platform and a grief platform, the two working in tandem to serve families.

Passare

Passare® users wanted a way to streamline the death certificate process for every case, so the Passare team worked to develop and release the first-ever integration with a state’s electronic death registration system.

Carved In Memory

We take the love note from a late husband, a birthday card from a sibling or grandma’s famous pie recipe and cut them out of wood and turn them into an exact replica piece of art. Each piece is carved into a 3-D wood sign that families can cherish forever. 

ASD – Answering Service for Directors

Web Form Watchdog

In today’s busy world, it is easy to miss a call and even easier to overlook an email. This is just human nature. ASD’s Web Form Watchdog is the only tool that gives funeral homes the ability to protect this open line of communication. With this feature, inquiries submitted through the firm’s Contact Us form automatically generate an alert within ASD’s notification system. This safety net ensures funeral home web queries are answered in a timely manner and are always sent to the designated on-call funeral director.

ASD – Answering Service for Directors

Suicide – Telephone Operator Patch (STOP System)

When someone is feeling hopeless or alone, there is no telling who they might reach out to and in some cases they contact a funeral home. ASD created the Suicide – Telephone Operator Patch (STOP) System to give its staff a way to seamlessly connect with suicide hotline operators 24/7. By linking staff to suicide prevention operators, ASD can ensure these callers receive immediate counseling, guidance and support.

Tukios

Custom Tribute Video Themes

Our Custom Theme functionality is original and unique in the fact that Tukios is the only memorial video software that offers it. This provides funeral directors that are using Tukios the ability to not only set themselves apart from their competition, but also allows them to provide a level of personalization unique to each family.

ASD – Answering Service for Directors

MobileFH™

MobileFH™ is the first telecommunication solution that allows users to control their outgoing Caller ID without the need for an Internet connection. MobileFH™ uses a cellular connection rather than Wi-Fi to ensure calls are clear and free of audio issues. This critical difference is quite meaningful for funeral directors who must often discuss highly-sensitive subjects on their cell phones. The new technology introduced by MobileFH™ also allows funeral directors to record these calls for future reference, an added benefit that is not available using alternative methods.

Frontrunner

Total Business Solution

The Total Business Solution is unlike anything seen on the market today in funeral service. As a licensed funeral director for over 30 years, CEO & founder of FrontRunner Professional knew all too well how often he had to enter the same deceased and family information and how much time and money that cost him as a funeral director. With the recent acquisition of the industry’s only web-based management solution, FrontRunner now offers the only completely web-based Total Business Solution where all of a firms website, management, marketing and memorialization needs are in one powerful single-data-entry solution

funeralOne

f1Connect Mobile Websites

The reason f1Connect mobile websites are so unique in the profession is that we’re the only truly mobile optimized website out there. Unlike most website providers, we didn’t just take the easy route by simply making our website templates viewable on a mobile phone. Why? Because what mobile users are looking for and how they interact with funeral home websites is completely different than desktop users.  That’s why we started from scratch and built our mobile websites from the ground-up.

ASD – Answering Service for Directors

ASD Mobile

Can a mobile application transform how funeral professionals conduct business? When it functions as a two-way channel capable of transmitting and receiving information, it absolutely can. With break through push notification technology, ASD Mobile represents the next generation of mobile applications designed exclusively for funeral homes. First Calls and new messages are delivered through the app at extraordinary speed, surpassing text-messaging as the fastest communication method available. Unlike other funeral home apps, ASD Mobile allows for the bidirectional exchange of data. Using any Apple product, directors have one-touch access to send service or on-call information and can monitor all incoming telephone activity without being tethered to a physical location.

Greene Valley Media Co.

FuneralScreen Digital Signage Solution

Greene Valley Media Companys “FuneralScreen” is the first digital signage solution available to funeral homes which utilizes cloud based computing technology. Cloud computing allows funeral home staff to update content on digital signs from any computer or mobile device with internet access. Users have the ability to assign and schedule content to individual screens. Digital announcements, memorial tributes, weather, websites are just a few of the type of content that can be displayed simutaneously.

Argent International

ThanoSeal

ThanoSeal is a pre-cut clear polyethylene tape to be used as a wound closure and sealer for needle sticks, carotid arteries, anywhere body fluids may leak. ThanoSeal tape will minimize time to prepare a body for showing or reduce embalming time, and avoids sewing with possible needle injuries to the embalmer, especially if our Sutureless Protocol is used. Most importantly, ThanoSeal will halt any leakage post embalming and this can provide tremendous “piece of mind” and obviously reduce further time and cost issues. The cost is 70% below other products and has far greater adhesion qualities.