2022 Annual Report

With our exclusive P3 Casket Price Protection Plan, funeral homes can lock in wholesale costs of Matthews Aurora^™ Funeral Solutions caskets or urns on qualifying Homesteaders-funded policies. For 25 years, this program has helped minimize expense and risk for firms and client families.

We continued to build upon the success of our exclusive funeral business conventional loan program offered with The Bancorp Bank. The program meets a demand for lending solutions within the funeral industry beyond a traditional SBA loan. This option benefits independent funeral home owners who wish to acquire and refinance multi-unit funeral home businesses. 

In 2022, The Bancorp Bank closed multiple loans that helped firms realize their goals for the future.

There is great momentum with this partnership, and we look forward to continuing to facilitate these financing solutions that allow funeral home owners to make their plans for growth and success a reality. 

Funeral professionals need tools that help deliver exceptional experiences for families at every step – experiences they’ll remember and recommend to others. Created by preneed experts and powered by Salesforce, the EnGauge customer relationship management (CRM) system fulfills those needs while helping firms centralize their operations. With EnGauge, preneed agents can connect with families at the right time to share the benefits of funeral planning and build stronger relationships for their firm.   

The EnGauge team has continued to enhance the system to add advanced functionality while streamlining how funeral professionals manage everyday interactions with families. Recent highlights include the development of duplicate lead checking and policy matching to help agents and funeral homes keep their customer databases clean, complete and up to date, enabling them to have more effective conversations with families and team members.  

Our text-based aftercare program helps funeral professionals more effectively connect with families through highly personalized messages. 

Nearly 1,500 funeral home locations used text-based aftercare in 2022 to strengthen relationships with the people they served. 

These texts are links that keep funeral homes engaged with families as they need support during the months following the loss of a loved one. The momentum of that relationship between the funeral home and the families leads to positive reviews on the funeral home’s Google Business Profile. 

In 2022, text-based aftercare was responsible for helping firms gather 17,692 5-star Google reviews. 

In our pursuit to help more people design a better farewell, we continued to focus on strategies to connect with consumers in meaningful ways. As another major step toward that purpose, we developed a proprietary, data-driven program to help us further understand the consumers we have served and connect with more consumers who are the most likely to benefit from our services. Leveraging this information, we can communicate more effectively with consumers, meeting them where they’re at in their preplanning journey. 

From the beginning, eFuneral has focused on helping funeral providers connect with consumers while maintaining or increasing the value of the services.

Through custom online storefronts, eFuneral has helped over 138,000 families make their final arrangements while securing millions of dollars in funeral sales.

In 2022, eFuneral also introduced new pricing tiers to meet the varying needs of funeral homes. 

The training and development team expanded its reach in 2022, offering insurance continuing education credit hours for 18 states and funeral director continuing education credit hours for 11 states. 

The team provided many convenient continuing education and development opportunities to help funeral professionals grow their expertise. 

• Homesteaders offered 16 virtual continuing education events in 2022 with 2,704 total registrations — 21% of whom were new to Homesteaders’ continuing education courses. 
• Attendees earned 8,112 continuing education credit hours — up nearly 10% from 2021. 
• When asked on a scale of 1 to 5 how satisfied they were with the course, attendees scored Homesteaders’ courses at 4.5 out of 5. 
  

We continued to expand our use of Benekiva’s platform that offers an efficient and effective claims process.

In 2022, there were 1,378 claims processed using Benekiva, and we focused on system enhancements that provide an even better experience for users. 

Momentum from this work in 2022 will help us move forward with plans to expand the system to 28 states and more than 1,000 funeral homes. In addition, even more improvements are planned to help streamline processes and increase efficiency.