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Funeral services group

Funeral services group: one system for every marketing team, executive committee reporting in one click

My client is a European funeral services group, present across the entire value chain: funeral homes, crematoriums, site construction and insurance. Its marketing department brought me in to redesign its management system and bring its teams and in-house creative studio together around a shared way of working.

1 · Context

A European funeral services group, the company operates across the entire value chain: funeral homes, crematoriums, site construction and insurance services. The group was built through successive acquisitions and recruitment, to the point of becoming a major group.

Its Marketing and Communications department runs a portfolio of cross-functional projects: branch openings, national campaigns, employer branding and foundation initiatives. It relies on specialized teams and an in-house creative studio, serving hundreds of local brands.

At this scale, project coordination, visibility and governance are not tooling questions: they determine the group’s ability to keep its commitments, internally and in the field.

2 · Challenge

The brief at a glance

  • Make Notion the shared tool of every team
  • Connect every project to the creative studio
  • Consolidate executive committee reporting
  • Measure studio output with no extra data entry
  • Simplify to drive adoption

The challenge was not to roll out Notion, which was already in place, but to make it useful. The first version, designed without starting from actual usage, had up to 70 properties per project page: only 10% of the department had adopted it, and many experienced it as a constraint rather than a support.

Split across several teams, the department worked in silos. Requests to the creative studio came in verbally and by email, forcing designers to re-enter the information for their own tracking, while projects and deliverables were scattered across private pages, servers, Teams and Notion.

For leadership, the stakes were concrete: a consolidated marketing calendar. Every master calendar prepared for the executive committee took meetings and at least two hours of formatting, built from Excel files that had become unreadable.

3 · Roadmap

  1. 1

    Ten in-depth interviews

    Interviews with department heads, Media, Studio, Social Media, Foundation and other key functions, to understand each team’s needs.

  2. 2

    Mapping real workflows

    An analysis of how information actually flows between teams, and of the friction it meets along the way, rather than of theoretical processes.

  3. 3

    Relational information system

    An architecture connecting projects, tasks and deliverables, replacing the old logic of static tags.

  4. 4

    Streamlined pilot

    Key workflows, including creative requests to the studio, tested in a smaller environment before the full migration, with a simplified interface organized into contextual sections.

  5. 5

    Executive committee reporting

    A master calendar fed by the teams’ projects, and a custom tool that exports it in the group’s brand format.

  6. 6

    Studio reporting

    Deliverables linked to studio tasks: production metrics consolidated with no extra data entry.

  7. 7

    Migration and adoption

    Data migrated during a quieter period, followed by team workshops and structured onboarding.

4 · The transformation

Before

  • Notion adopted by only 10% of the marketing department.
  • Up to 70 properties per project page: a tool experienced as a constraint.
  • Teams in silos, and a studio briefed verbally and by email.
  • Information scattered across private pages, servers, Teams and Notion.
  • At least two hours of formatting for every executive committee report.

After

  • Every marketing team brought together in a shared system that works for each of them.
  • A master calendar fed in real time by the teams’ projects, exported in the brand format in one click instead of two hours.
  • Every project connected to the creative studio: information is one click away.
  • Studio production metrics, by deliverable type, reported to the executive committee with no data entry.
  • An ongoing collaboration, now focused on amplifying the work with AI.

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