Frequently asked questions.

We begin with a forty-five-minute intake session. You tell us how your firm talks — the specific phrases your director uses with families, what you would never say, the community references and rhythms that signal to a family that they are in the right place. From that session, we build a voice-style guide.

The guide governs every draft we write. Before any deliverable reaches you, it has been measured against it. Every edit you return teaches the guide something new. By the third or fourth month, most directors describe the drafts as arriving in a voice they recognize as their own.

Every deliverable is reviewed by a writer on our team before it leaves. Then it reaches you — the director — before it reaches any family. The sequence is: our writer drafts, our team reviews, you approve, then it goes. Families never see our work before you do.

You make them, or you send them back to us and we make them. During the first ninety days, there is no limit on revision requests. After that, most clients find that one or two minor adjustments per month, if that.

If a family contacts you directly about an obituary detail, you can relay the correction and we will turn a revised draft within one business day. Nothing is final until you send it.

No. Every communication that reaches a family goes through you — for your review, in your hands, under your name. We write; you send, or you hand it back to us to send on your behalf through your own channels. We have no direct relationship with families, ever.

Yes. The intake captures the cultural and religious traditions that are present in your service area — including specific observances, naming conventions, phrases that are respectful within a tradition, and phrases that would be wrong. If you serve a community we have not worked in before, we research it before we write. If we are uncertain, we flag it in the draft and ask.

Writers do. People who have spent their careers working with sentences — in journalism, editorial work, and long-form writing. They use the tools any serious writing team uses: research databases, editorial references, grammar tools, and the voice-style guide built from your intake. Every draft is reviewed by our team before it reaches you, and reviewed by you before it reaches any family.

The piece that lands in a family's hands is human-checked at every stage. That is not a claim most automated tools can make.

A starting point and a finished piece are different things. An automated draft gives you a blank page with names filled in — something a staff member still has to develop into a voice-matched, family-ready obituary, with your edits, your judgment, and your time. What Parlor Press delivers is the finished piece: already in your voice, already through a review, already ready to send to the family.

The review replies, the aftercare notes, and the newsletter are typically not covered at all by case management tools. Those are the deliverables most often going unsent.

It is a fair concern, and it is the first thing we address in the intake. We do not arrive with a template and fill in the names. We spend forty-five minutes learning your community — the neighborhoods, the congregations, the local idioms, the things that signal care to a family in your service area and the things that would ring wrong. The voice-style guide we build is a map of your firm's voice in your town.

Every edit you return teaches the guide something new. By the third or fourth month, most directors tell us the drafts sound like them. That is the work.

For most directors who ask this, the honest answer is: some of the writing is getting done, and some is not. The obituaries probably are. The review replies, the aftercare notes, the newsletter — the directors we hear from most often would rather send them than not, but they don't make it out of the week.

If your current arrangement is working — if the newsletter is going out, the reviews are answered, and the aftercare is reaching families — then it is working, and we would say so on a discovery call. If there are gaps, we fill them. The question worth asking is not what is written; it is what is not written, and what the cost of that silence is.

Engagements run month-to-month. There is a brief service agreement — two or three pages — that confirms the deliverables, the payment schedule, what you own, and what happens if either of us wants to stop. It is written in plain language. You can cancel with 30 days' notice, for any reason.

Yes, at any monthly renewal. Moving up or down takes effect at the start of the following billing month. Your voice-style guide carries over in full — no new intake session is required. Moving from Starter to Growth, for example, adds the anniversary outreach and pre-need cadence to your regular deliverables starting month two.

If, at the end of the first sixty days, the drafts are not reflecting your voice and the process is not working, we will refund the second month in full. We have not had to honor this guarantee, but we believe the commitment to it is part of the arrangement.

You give us 30 days' notice. We complete any in-progress deliverables. The voice-style guide we built together belongs to you — we will send you the document. Nothing outstanding remains. If you want to return, the roster permitting, there is no reinstatement fee.

Commission work — biographical memoir books, memorial video scripts, website rebuilds, annual memorial event writing, grief program curricula, local SEO content — is quoted individually. You can commission a project whether or not you are on a monthly retainer. Each commission includes its own timeline, revision rounds, and delivery terms.

The directors who ask this question most often do not, at first, account for the time they are already spending. At the NFDA's average of 1.5 to 2 hours per obituary — plus family rewrites — a 100-case year absorbs roughly $13,000 to $17,000 in director time before a single review goes unanswered or a newsletter goes unsent. Starter recaptures that time and adds the review replies, the aftercare, and the newsletter for under $24,000 annually. Growth adds the retention and pre-need work that protects next year's case volume.

The frame that makes the math clear: one referred family, one positive Google review that tips a decision, one pre-need contract that converts because the outreach actually went out. Any of these individually covers a month of service.

The setup is one forty-five-minute conversation. We do the rest. From that session, we build your voice-style guide and return it for your approval — one round of edits, then we are ready to write. Week two, the first deliverables arrive. Week three, the rhythm is live.

After that, your time commitment is what it will always be: reading a draft and approving it before it goes. Most directors describe the onboarding as the easiest part of the engagement.

No. Your PIMS — Passare, Gather, 1Director, SRS, or whichever system you use — stays exactly as it is. We do not integrate with it, access it, or replace any part of what it does. You provide us with the intake information for each case, typically a short voice memo or the family's written notes, and we work from that.

Yes. Every piece of writing we deliver to you is yours. You own it outright the moment you receive it. We retain no rights to it. You can publish it, archive it, adapt it, or delete it without asking us. The only thing we do not do is republish your clients' obituaries or family correspondence without your permission — which we would not do regardless.

We do not touch it. We do not post to it, we do not have credentials for it, and we do not recommend changes to it unless you commission a rebuild. If you use FrontRunner, Tribute, CFS, or any other funeral-CMS hosting, those relationships remain entirely yours. If you would like to commission a full website rebuild through Parlor Press, that is a separate project, separately quoted.

We receive the minimum information needed to write: the decedent's name, age, survivors, relevant life details, and any notes from the family or director. We do not receive cause of death unless it is relevant to the obituary and you choose to share it. We do not store case data beyond what is needed for the engagement. We use Resend for email delivery and Cal.com for scheduling. We do not sell or share your firm's data with any third party.

Full details are in the Privacy page.