A free death notice from the first call. The wider circle, informed and returning. Your own plans, one tap away.

By widening, and warming, the audience that meets your business. A free notice from the first call can reach far more of each family’s circle than a donation-led invitation. Those people experience your local funeral home helping the family, return as arrangements develop, and find a clearly attributed Plan ahead route to your own Choice Funeral Plans each time.

Anyone interested then enters your own journey, where you collect their enquiry and any permission to stay in touch.

A restrained, optional item in the app’s menu, to the left of Donations, with a card on the home page above them, labelled clearly as Funeral Partners’ Choice Funeral Plans.

It appears in the app only, quietly in place on each visit, with no pop-ups or reminders. The shared notice and the update emails carry family news alone. The label, placement and how often it appears are a proposed configuration, for your team and your plan provider to shape, test and refine.

It opens your own planning site, choiceplan.co.uk, in the person’s browser. No names, email addresses, notice or user identifiers, or funeral details are placed in the link, and the link is set not to reveal the notice it came from.

A static source code, identical for everyone, can show you in aggregate how many visits the notice brings to your planning pages.

Funeral Partners and your plan provider, APCL. The provider owns the substantive planning content, and decides the wording and when, and to whom, Plan ahead is available.

ohu implements the approved placement, and can share usability observations and aggregate usage to help you improve it. Planning decisions stay with you.

We are designing ohu’s role as a software and publishing supplier: ohu provides the notice service and a clearly attributed link to your own site. Your plan provider owns the planning content and the customer journey, and ohu takes no plan enquiries, and neither recommends plans nor advises on them.

How the placement is communicated, and on whose approval, would be agreed with APCL and confirmed by a focused legal review of the actual screens before launch.

No. The proposal involves no plan commission, lead fee, per-click payment, sales guarantee or special rate for ohu users. That keeps the planning relationship clearly yours, and the notice service independent of plan sales.

No. Updates carry the family’s news and the funeral arrangements, and nothing more. Planning appears only where people choose to look for it in the app, so every message the circle receives is one the family would send.

Your plan provider decides, in line with its Consumer Duty and vulnerability obligations. Plan ahead can be quietly available during the weeks around the funeral, held back until afterwards, or restricted further.

It uses no urgent, fear-based or personalised prompts. It is simply there for whenever someone is ready.

No, and that is what gives your local businesses the widest possible distribution.

Under UK rules (PECR), the email addresses people give for family updates can’t be used to promote a service without their specific consent. So the updates carry family news only, and ohu doesn’t pass anyone’s details on for marketing.

Keeping marketing out of those first steps keeps the barriers low. More people add their name and email, pass the notice on and come back as arrangements develop, so the network effect stays high and more of each circle sees your local funeral home at its best.

Marketing requests come later, and stay under Funeral Partners’ control. People who tap Plan ahead enter your own Choice Funeral Plans journey, where you collect their enquiry and any permission to stay in touch.

Thirty thousand funerals a year, multiplied by an illustrative 100 people informed about each, gives three million potential connections a year. That is before adoption, actual viewing and people who appear in more than one circle.

It shows the scale of the starting point, not a forecast of plans. The real figures are ones we would measure together.

Not normally. Your arranger stays in your own case system. With the organiser’s agreement, the details already noted on the first call pass once to ohu through an agreed connection. ohu prepares the notice, and a short introduction with a button is added to the follow-up email sent after the call.

There is no ohu login during the call, no retyping and no browsing frames on the family’s behalf.

To begin, only details your arranger already notes, such as the name of the person who has died, the date of death, the organiser’s name and contact details, and the local funeral home.

Later, three or four optional questions (the style, any religion or belief, family members to mention, and what to say about the funeral at this stage) make the draft more personal. The exact field list would be agreed with your team.

As part of the first call or the arrangement meeting, in language that fits naturally with how arrangers already help families share the news. For example:

“As it can often be difficult to keep track of who has been told, and then to make sure everyone receives the funeral details and any updates, we include a free death notice as part of our service, designed for us by ohu.

I can start it for you by suggesting a design and wording, and then send you a link to look over. All you need to do is confirm that you’re happy with it, or make any changes you’d like. Shall I start that for you?”

The arranger then waits for a clear yes before anything is shared.

Very little, by design. The arranger makes a short offer and, later, may ask three or four simple questions, all within your own system. ohu prepares the notice, a short introduction and a button are added to the follow-up email sent after the call, and ohu supports the family from there.

During the early phase, one of the things we want to measure carefully is whether this feels light enough in a real branch.

Yes. ohu is designed to reduce time and effort for arrangers by using an API to receive simple, standard information already captured in your own case system.

This avoids unnecessary re-entry of details, reduces repetition and errors, and saves time for both your arrangers and the family. We would plan the connection around your IT team’s roadmap for your own software, and keep it clearly defined, so it is easy to maintain.

ohu is presented as a specialist service your firm has chosen to offer free to bereaved families, to help ensure nobody is missed and to make communication around the funeral easier to manage.

Your firm’s name, details and branding remain central throughout the family experience. ohu is clearly identified as the specialist provider of private, targeted death notices and ongoing communication, while the funeral director remains the lead throughout everything around the funeral.

This is intentionally different from wider channels such as local and national newspaper notices, which are designed for broad reach. ohu is designed for focused, private and ongoing communication with the people who should see the notice and any later updates.

Yes. Each funeral home’s own name can introduce the service, with Funeral Partners alongside where you choose. How local and group identity appear is one of the choices your team would shape.

ohu supports the family with the notice, messages, RSVPs and cards, including by WhatsApp and email. Your arrangers remain focused on the funeral arrangement itself; we don’t want branches carrying product-support questions that should sit with us.

During the early phase, every participating firm has a named ohu contact and a clear route for support.

ohu supports the family’s communication. It does not replace personal calls or other ways of telling people about a death.

Often a younger relative will manage the notice and updates for the wider family. This helps keep everyone aligned, gives people the same answers to common questions, and helps the family manage communication and likely attendance over the fortnight.

The offer is made only when it feels right, and the family can start later, at the arrangement meeting, or not at all. Nothing is shared until the organiser chooses. Families who don’t want to notify a wider circle can simply decline.

ohu helps a family create a private, beautifully presented death notice and keep people updated in the days that follow.

It can hold funeral details, reception information, directions, livestream links, tribute links, charity or donation information, RSVPs, guest questions and digital messages. Recipients can also send a physical card if they want to, with ohu handling design, print and post. Where you choose, it also carries a clearly attributed Plan ahead link to your own funeral-plan service.

The service is deliberately focused on the communication layer around the early notice and the immediate coordination period.

Families now often announce a death through the same tools they use for everyday life: WhatsApp, Facebook, text messages and email.

Those tools are familiar, but they were not designed for bereavement. Information fragments quickly. People are missed. Plans change. The family ends up answering the same questions repeatedly at the point when they have least capacity.

ohu gives the family one calm place for the notice, the details and the updates.

ohu sits earlier in the journey.

Your newspaper notices, website notices, tribute pages, charity links and donation pathways continue as they are. ohu helps the family’s circle find those existing services at the right moment, through the private notice and update flow.

The firm’s existing choices stay intact. ohu makes them easier for the right people to reach.

Yes.

The announcement service, event details, RSVPs, updates, digital messages and core family experience are free to use. This is not a free trial and not a limited teaser.

The free service has to stand on its own, with nothing to pay to make it work properly.

Through one optional service: printed condolence cards.

If someone receiving a notice wants to send a thoughtful card, ohu designs, prints and posts it for them. In the funeral sector, that is the only thing ohu charges for.

The family does not need to pay to make the notice work properly, and ohu takes no commission or fee linked to funeral plans.

Physical cards are an optional way for friends, colleagues and relatives to send something tangible.

They are not required for the notice, the event details or RSVPs. They sit quietly alongside the free service for people who want to send something more considered than a text message.

ohu handles the design, wording support, printing and posting.

The family starts with the people they know should be told.

Recipients can then pass the notice on to others who may need to know: old colleagues, neighbours, club members, distant relatives or friends from earlier parts of the deceased’s life. Each person shares the link themselves, so nobody is asked to add another person’s contact details. This helps close the gaps that often appear when a family is trying to remember everyone under pressure.

The family remains in control of the notice and the circle around it.

The family, or an authorised arranger, updates the notice once.

Everyone who asked for updates receives the change by email, and anyone opening the notice sees the latest version. This avoids the usual chain of repeated calls, forwarded screenshots and out-of-date group messages.

This is particularly important when dates, times, venues or livestream details change.

Recipients open the notice from a link in their browser, with nothing to download and no account. Choosing updates needs only their own email address. This follows public-service design guidance, which recommends letting people use as much of a service as possible before asking for an account.

The organiser’s private view, with the circle and replies, has stronger protection than the shareable notice.

The family sees who has chosen to connect: people who add their name and email in one step, which confirms the notice has reached them and brings them the family’s updates. That gives a clear, private picture of who has been reached, and who may still need to be told.

A shared link can’t prove that every intended person has read it, so we describe it as better coordination, not a guarantee.

Closest friends and family are told first. Before sharing with people who haven’t heard, families are reminded not to send the notice to anyone under 18, or likely to be deeply distressed, unless they know that person has already been told in person.

Yes. People still want to be told after an unattended cremation, and families may still organise a gathering or wake, which ohu can support. Families who don’t want to notify a wider circle can simply decline.

MuchLoved already does valuable work for your families, including shareable funeral notices, tributes and donations. A funeral notice usually comes later than a death notice, once the arrangements are known, and around 70% of your families still don’t choose MuchLoved.

Our opportunity is to start earlier, with a free, prepared death notice that almost every family has a reason to use, then support your own planning journey and the services each family chooses.

The test is whether that brings more families, and their wider circle, into a useful relationship with your local business.

Where a family chooses MuchLoved, the notice links to its page for tributes and donations, and returning visitors then find MuchLoved more often.

Overlapping ohu features can be hidden for that funeral. For these funerals, around 30% of the total, Funeral Partners needs to decide whether ohu also includes its event management service: the funeral details, RSVPs and updates.

ohu doesn’t pass recipients’ contact details to MuchLoved.

Facebook, WhatsApp and email remain excellent ways to share the link, and ohu gives them an organised destination. Meta itself acknowledged in 2025 that the experience of friends had diminished as Facebook expanded into other uses.

A shared notice has a deliberate design and a stable home for the information that matters to this funeral, with updates that reach the people who asked for them.

You could. The case for working with ohu is the dedicated product, operating capacity and continuing improvement we can provide, with your team controlling how your business and planning services are presented.

We would need to earn that place through adoption, reliability and continuing improvement.

ohu is being built with enterprise-software discipline from the start.

The family business behind ohu has more than 25 years’ experience working with the funeral sector and the NHS, and over 20 years delivering outsourced services for major UK banks, including large operational contracts at the scale of more than 500 people.

That background matters. It means security, process, access control, auditability, resilience and governance are not being added late. They are part of the way the service is being built.

ohu is cloud-hosted, with hosting and governance designed around UK and European expectations.

For corporate partners, we provide details of hosting arrangements, data regions, sub-processors and transfer safeguards as part of the due diligence pack.

The important principle is that cloud hosting does not mean loose governance. Data location, supplier access, retention and controls are all documented.

For the ohu service layer, ohu acts as an independent data controller. That means ohu takes responsibility for the privacy notices, data rights, retention, recipient communications, PECR controls, supplier governance and service-layer processing that sit within ohu.

Funeral Partners remains responsible for its own arrangement records and internal systems, and Funeral Partners or APCL is the controller for its planning site, enquiries and marketing. Where ohu performs particular technical work solely on your instructions, it may act as your processor for that work. The boundaries are set out in the data-protection schedule.

ohu handles data protection and electronic communications within the service, so arrangers are not left carrying that burden.

Recipient contact details are used only for the specific death notice and related funeral communications. We do not add people to marketing lists, we do not send general marketing, and we do not use those details for unrelated commercial purposes.

Messages are limited to the notice, funeral details, updates, RSVPs and family communication. Service emails stay service emails: they never carry plan promotions or invitations to marketing. Any optional service shown within ohu is presented only in that context and does not change this position.

No.

Recipient details are used only for the specific death notice and related funeral communication. We do not sell them, rent them, add them to marketing lists, or use them for unrelated commercial purposes.

This is a core trust principle for ohu.

Yes, but quietly and with human control.

AI may help suggest wording, select suitable card designs or reduce the amount of blank-page thinking a family or recipient faces. It does not approve notices, send messages on its own or make funeral decisions.

The family, and where relevant the arranger, remain in control of what is shared.

No.

Our position is that funeral, family and recipient data should not be used to train public AI models. Where AI suppliers are used, they are reviewed as part of our security, privacy and sub-processor governance.

ohu is being built as high-availability enterprise software, with monitoring, backups and operational processes appropriate to a service that families may rely on during a short and sensitive window.

During the founding partner phase, the engineering target is at least 99% uptime. As the service moves into broader corporate deployment, formal service levels, support response times and escalation routes can be agreed.

Not yet.

ohu is on the path to early ISO 27001 accreditation. We will not claim certification until it has been independently audited and awarded.

In the meantime, we can share our security-control approach, roadmap and due diligence materials with partner firms.

We can provide a due diligence pack under NDA. This can include:

• Company overview
• Security overview
• Data-flow diagrams
• Hosting and sub-processor details
• API architecture
• GDPR and PECR model
• Retention and deletion approach
• Incident response process
• Resilience and backup summary
• Insurance summary
• ISO 27001 roadmap
• Support model
• Draft heads of terms
• Data-protection schedule

The aim is to make review straightforward for legal, IT, procurement and data-protection teams.

ohu is new, but the operating experience behind it is not.

The business has worked with the UK funeral sector and NHS, and has over 20 years’ experience delivering outsourced operations for major UK banks. That work required disciplined process, security, governance, auditability, client reporting and operational resilience at large scale.

We are bringing those standards into ohu from the beginning.

The heads of terms should be plain, proportionate and familiar to a corporate funeral director. They would usually cover:

• Purpose of the founding partner phase
• Services included
• Branches or regions included
• Responsibilities of each party
• Data protection (UK GDPR) and PECR
• Security and hosting
• Support model
• Branding and co-branding
• Confidentiality
• Restricted activities
• Commercial terms
• Liability
• IP ownership
• Review points and next-step process

The document should feel like a sensible service agreement, not an over-engineered enterprise software contract.

The boundary is the communication layer around the early death notice and the fortnight of coordination that follows.

For clarity, the agreement can include a restricted-activities schedule. That schedule would confirm that ohu will not offer or broker funeral directing, funeral planning, prepaid funeral plans, flowers, probate, estate administration, legal services, financial services, insurance, CRM software or funeral case-management software.

The Plan ahead link sits within this boundary: it takes people to your own planning service, and ohu takes no part in the enquiry or sale. Putting the boundary in writing is simply the easiest way to make corporate review straightforward.

Yes. The founding partner phase is intentionally structured to support learning, iteration and refinement through real use and regular feedback.

As we work with founding partners, we can adjust workflows, strengthen processes, refine documentation and phase features in the right order as we move towards product-market fit. This ensures the service is shaped by real funeral director and family needs, not fixed too early in theory.

This gives both sides practical flexibility within a clear working structure.

The organiser’s screens in this introduction are rebuilt from an early version of ohu: the suggested notice, how it opens and sharing. The connection to your own system, your local branding, the Plan ahead placement and the measures are proposed configuration, to be shaped with your team and your plan provider.

Because the defaults are still open: whose name introduces the service, how local branding appears, what colleagues prepare, how family updates work, where an approved planning option sits, and how an interested person enters your own pages.

Your team can shape those choices around real branch practice and your provider’s requirements while changes remain easy to make.

The founding partner phase is a structured period of working with a small number of funeral directors before wider release.

ohu has been built around one specific job: helping families make an early death notice and keep people aligned during the fortnight of communication that follows. The founding partner phase is about refining how that service fits into real funeral-director workflows, branch routines, governance requirements and family conversations.

This is not about testing an unfinished idea on families. It is about taking a carefully built service and shaping it with the firms who understand the realities of bereavement care.

Because the quality of early feedback matters more than volume.

We want to work with firms who will tell us honestly where the product is useful, where the wording needs changing, where the workflow should be lighter, and where corporate governance needs more detail.

The aim is not to roll out fast. The aim is to reach proper product-market fit in a sector where trust, timing and tone matter.

We are looking to learn the things that only become visible in practice.

How arrangers naturally introduce the service. Which parts families understand immediately. Where a branch needs more control. What legal, IT and data-protection teams need before approving wider adoption. Which features reduce questions and which create them.

That feedback directly shapes the product and the partner model.

Success is practical, not abstract.

A family can share a private death notice without chasing dozens of separate messages. People who should know are less likely to be missed. Updates reach the right circle when details change. RSVPs and questions are easier to manage. Arrangers can introduce the service without it becoming another administrative burden.

For the firm, success means the service feels useful, safe, well-governed and easy to explain.

Success also means your firm is present earlier, and with more of the people who matter. Because the family shares the notice and their circle passes it on, your firm reaches an early, natural link with people who have not yet chosen a funeral director, long before they ever need one, and more of them choose to explore your own funeral plans.

And it means your firm is woven into the wider experience around the funeral: the hundred or more friends, colleagues and relatives who gather around each death see your name and your care throughout the fortnight. Not as advertising, but as the firm that looked after someone well.

We ask for a light but thoughtful working relationship.

A named contact. A small number of suitable families offered the service when appropriate. Honest feedback from arrangers. Short review conversations in the early weeks. A willingness to let us learn from the details rather than only from the headline outcome.

We do not ask for exclusivity, minimum volumes, branch-wide rollout or marketing commitments. The connection to your own system is agreed with your IT team and sized to suit its plans, and we do the technical work on our side.

Directly and visibly.

We will keep a clear product and operations backlog from founding partner feedback. Where something changes because of a partner’s input, we will say so. Where we cannot make a change, we will explain why.

The point of the founding phase is not to collect polite endorsements. It is to make the service better.