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Letter from the Chair:
Dedication to personalization
Julie A. Burn
Julie A. Burn chairs the ICFA Personalization Committee. Committee members are Steve Bittner, Linda Darby-Sempsrott, David Brownworth, Andrea Vittum, Slivy Edmonds and Lynn Illig
jburn@wilbertinc.com
The ICFA Personalization Committee has only seven members, but in a way, it has more than 6,500 members. That's because in practice, every ICFA member participates in the committee's charge, which is encouraging the personalization of funeral and cemetery products and services.
The committee started the KIP (Keeping it Personal) Awards contest four years ago because we realized the best ideas for creating meaningful funeral and memorialization experiences would come by drawing on the knowledge and experience of the entire ICFA membership.
Winning ideas have ranged from community events that have taken massive amounts of time and money to plan and execute to simple, inexpensive best practices devised by inventive sales counselors.
During the first three years of the contest, no single organization received more KIP Awards than Evergreen-Washelli Funeral Home and Cemetery under the leadership of the late B. David Daly, CCFE, whose untimely death last summer saddened us all.
Dave loved winning and encouraged his employees to enter the contest, yet he was never one for hoarding knowledge. In an article in the May 2004 ICFM, Dave said that people who have been successful in our profession "understand that in order to get something out of a study group or association you first have to be willing to give to the group."
No one was more generous than Dave in "giving to the group." He freely discussed ideas with colleagues, convinced that in the end he and his organization would benefit from the exchange. Dave exemplified the ICFA spirit of sharing as well as the KIP way of thinking. To honor his memory, the Personalization Committee has renamed the awards the B. David Daly KIP Awards. We hope others will honor his memory by sharing their ideas, and encouraging their employees to do so, as well.
KIP the column
In this issue, we take an in-depth look at some of the 2004 contest winners (announced in the March-April ICFM) and kick off a new column, appropriately named Keeping It Personal. We came up with the KIP contest as a way to gather ideas by giving ICFA members an incentive to tell us about what they're doing to provide families with personalized service. The column will give us another way to disseminate the information we've collected.
When you come right down to it, the KIP awards are just another way for ICFA members to learn from each other. The free exchange of ideas in an effort to improve our own businesses and elevate the profession as a whole is the essence of the ICFA.
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