Custom CRM for a historic New England cemetery
A ground-up digital platform to centralize operations, digitize decades of physical records, and unify a complex set of workflows for a Boston-area death care provider.
Challenge
Our client — a Boston funereal institution established in the late 19th century — was running on a patchwork of disconnected systems and physical records, some of them historical. They needed a unified digital platform, but the death care industry carries real complexity that off-the-shelf tools can't handle:
- Multidimensional plot specifications — tracking available space, resting configurations, and capacity across the entire grounds
- Carefully managed cemetery subdivisions serving different demographics and religious traditions, each with their own requirements
- The logistics of coordinating internment requests end-to-end: scheduling gravestone production, memorial services, and burials across multiple vendors and timelines
- All of it needing to maintain an elegant, compassionate experience for families during the worst time of their lives
Solution
We digitized the client's documentation and site maps, then designed and built a custom CRM from scratch to handle both internal operations and client-facing processes.
Internal workflows:
- End-to-end processing and tracking for the full lifecycle of each internment request and fulfillment
- Onboarding new internment requests and initiating the correct workflow automatically
- Scheduling and tracking headstone creation, funeral ceremonies, and burials
- Integrations with their marketing website, ArcGIS interactive cemetery maps for plot and grave searching, QuickBooks, and other internal business systems
- Tablet-optimized interfaces for cemetery counselors to initiate or retrieve internment details on-site at any time
- Integration with mailing list services for follow-up communication and marketing of additional services
Impact
This work converted tens of thousands of physical records into a searchable digital format, pulled the client's entire operation into a single unified platform, and gave them scalable infrastructure and deployment pipelines built for future growth. The system they have now is maintainable, documented, and ready for the next team or the next phase — whichever comes first.
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