A Message for the Living...

Maybe you didn't know it, but March is National Kidney Month. In fact - March 10th is World Kidney Day. Certainly not the most glamorous day of the year is it? I'm sure it's not even on most people's calendars. 


The green ribbon is very fitting since March 10th is
World Kidney Day. Cuz just a week later, most kidneys
are getting a serious workout on St. Patricks Day.

Lets face it. There probably won't be a lot of people wearing green ribbons next week like the more popular pink, yellow, and red ones. But that doesn't make the kidney any less important. I am most certainly not talking about the kind of things that get cleared up by drinking some cranberry juice...

Chronic Kidney disease affects 26 Million Americans - and most people don't even know they have it. Kidney disease is often silent without any symptoms, it can sneak up on you, especially those who are not aware of the major risk factors. If you have high blood pressure, diabetes or a family history of these conditions or kidney disease - you should get your kidneys checked. Find out more information about screening here.

Okay - Now to what I really want to talk about.

PLEASE BECOME AN ORGAN DONOR

The human body is amazing. A living person can give up some lung, liver, or pancreas to save another person's life, and still live a relatively normal life themselves. But by far the most donated organ by a living person is the kidney. Remember this next time you wake up in a hotel room bathtub packed in ice: If you donate your kidney to a family member in need, they have a 70% chance of being around 5 years later to thank you for it. Take a look at this graph from 2009 (latest they had)...

The gap between what is needed and what is available keeps growing as our population ages. Currently:

•  110,460 people waiting
•  18 people will die each day 
•  1 donor can save up to 8 lives

This is a tremendous opportunity for you to make a difference in the lives of others after you're gone. You may think it's nothing to check off a box on a form. But it's a random gift of kindness to a complete stranger - and LIFE IS the greatest gift of all.

Go here to learn more information about becoming an organ donor... http://www.organdonor.gov/

Here at Remembered.com, we celebrate lifetimes. We want you to have a long and healthy one.

We're going to try to build awareness for National Kidney month by making memorials just 99 cents.

We hope you'll appreciate a 90% off sale, and if you've lost a loved one - create a memorial that all your family can share by getting the coupon here: http://remembered.com/healthy-kidney-month 

Thanks!

Andy & the staff @ Remembered.com

Doing something special for #WorldAIDSDay

Hiya,

I hope everyone had a Happy Thanksgiving and there's a lot we all have to be thankful for. It's been awhile since we've last posted and there's been a lot of development here at Remembered.com in the last few weeks. But before talking about what we've done, let me tell you a bit about what we are doing for World AIDS Day.

AIDS has killed more than 25 million people, and an estimated 33.2 million people worldwide live with HIV, making it one of the most destructive epidemics in recorded history. And although it may not be in the limelight like it once was - AIDS is still a very much here and taking lives much too early.

World AIDS Day, observed December 1 each year, is dedicated to raising awareness of the AIDS pandemic caused by the spread of HIV infection. It is common to hold memorials to honor persons who have died from HIV/AIDS on this day. For this reason, we are offering Free Memorials for anyone who has been lost to AIDS or HIV complications for the entire month of December. Details here:

You can help spread the word and bring about more AIDS/HIV awareness by posting this on your Facebook status:

#WorldAidsDay - World AIDS day is TODAY! Paste this message to your status - Help us build HIV/AIDS Awareness. http://bit.ly/ihgJa6

Okay - now onto our latest developments for Remembered.com ...

• We've put in place a new firewall to protect against DOS attacks and bad people on the internets.
• We've added a Memorial Wall, which lets invited friends and family post comments and condolences
• We've upgrade our Facebook Connection and are able to take advantage of Facebook's more powerful API features and functions.
• We've added a new activity list, which shows all the activity associated with a memorial.
• We've integrated Remembered.com even more with Facebook, allowing activities to stream over.

Hopefully you like everything we've accomplished so far, and if you have any suggestions be sure to
let us know about them here... http://remembered.com/suggestions

Thanks!

Hey - Do you think we're just a bunch of boobs?

Did you know that 12.15% of women will have breast cancer in their lifetime? October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month and we're doing our best to contribute to awareness by offering free memorials for anyone who has passed due to breast cancer. Did you know that if you catch it early enough - your 93% likely to be still kickin' after 5 years. Another interesting fact is if you're ever diagnosed, taking aspirin is a great way to improve your odds of surviving.

We're hoping that awareness of catching it early will help increase long term survival rates and well, give us less business here at Remembered.com.

We got a lot accomplished since leaving Beta. We did a bunch of tweaks to the website layout. Launched a new Funeral Notice service that we think will take a lot of time and distance out of the bereavement process. Put our first sets of ads onto Facebook (which are doing quite well, as opposed to Google Adwords) and things are rolling along. Traffic to our website is up 88% week over week and the average visitor stays for about 5 minutes and views 5 pages of content. All good numbers for a site that's just starting out.

But as good as news gets, it's never good enough is it? This week was a bit humbling for me. I hired a consultant (I know!) to review our site and give us some ideas to a. make process improvements and b. build traffic. Oh - well here's the punch line - He's a Rabbi. Yep - He knows a bit about life and death business. But those weren't his only qualifications - he's been awarded Entrepreneur of the year and mentioned in dozens of business magazines. What the heck - why not find out if what we're doing is errrrr.... Kosher?

Apparently, we are a bunch of boobs (at least this month) and we have absolutely no idea what we're doing. In 45 minutes our good Rabbi proceeded to give me a L O N G list of things that need to change. Some ideas were great - like having a way for people to donate to charity right from the memorial, or putting testimonials from people on the site. Other ideas - like raising the prices to $39.95 and $19.95 for memorials took a little more convincing. I'd rather keep it affordable for everyone. On a scale from 1-10 I'd give our man a 9. So if you've got a small business and you need a little bit of accelleration give the good Rabbi a shout out.

So be on the lookout for a bunch of changes to the website next week. I leave you with this thought :


Q: Most bees make honey, but there is a certain type of bee that makes milk. What kind of bee makes milk?


A. Boo Bees!

Save your groans, you know you're going to repeat it at work tomorrow.

Two weeks in - How we doin'?

Well it's been an interesting 2 weeks since we launched. Where do I start?

We're still struggling to get the shopping cart customized so that we can accept payments on the site. The software we selected is new, and they're still ironing out the bugs as we go. So much for collecting money out of this thing. The good news is that we can now offer and accept coupons on the site - so let the 100% discounts begin! (or uh... continue...)

We've gone through testing a new invite system that allows us to send HTML emails, and we did quite a bit of testing to make sure they don't arrive in your spam box when they are sent. It also has the ability to put people's photos in the email. That should be coming online this week. Fingers crossed.

We knew at some point we'd have to make a policy decision on handling memorials for pets. Then lo and behold we get our first PET MEMORIAL.  Yes, it's a pet mouse. Yes, it's from Germany. Yes, it's in German. What can I say? We now accept Pet Memorials. Guess somebody needs to update the Terms of Service. (And write a version of it in German.)

We've started running ads across a number of websites. Many are flash ads that I can't display on this blog - and some traffic is finally rolling into the site. But I really don't care for the quality of the hits you get at Adwords. Most people just close the box as soon as it pops up. There must be a better way to get people's interest...

Marketing is never easy when the subject matter is death. The press (who ironically make quite a living telling us "who died today") has really been hit or miss with our product launch. Here's a miss: Nicole Ferraro who covers Web 2.0 sites at InternetEvolution.com doesn't really care for our "social deathworking" moniker - or the subject matter in general. She found a place selling cremation jewelry - which even I admit is a bit creepy. I mean, even I draw the line at selling you a coffee mug with Uncle Joe's picture on it while his funeral is going on. It's a tightrope we walk when we're dealing with a sensitive subject, and there's very little room for humor. But every day I learn there's a little bit of room for humor, when I told one of our programmers about her negative take on things, his first response was "She's really cute."  Programmers...  ;-)

Check out her cuteness, her tirade against the ghouls of the internet (and my response) here.

That's it for this week. Tune in next week for more fun from Ghoul Central, where another press release is sure to drive the media into a somnabulistic typing frenzy. Or not...