By Joey Haas
Transcript from the video interview with Kim Libertini at Goodgrief.
Heather:
Hi everyone. And thanks for checking in with us at Funeral Innovations: Trends, Tips and Technology, where we chat with industry leaders to discuss marketing trends, business tips, and technology innovation, and discuss how digital marketing helps you better serve your families. I’m Heather, I’m the director of marketing here at Funeral Innovations.
Joey:
And I’m Joey, I’m the marketing and design coordinator at Funeral and Innovations. And today our guest is Kim Libertini. She is the co-founder of the grief support app Goodgrief. Hi Kim!
Kim:
Hi, thank you so much for having me.
Heather:
Thanks for joining us to kick us off. Can you just tell us a little bit about yourself and your business?
Kim:
Sure. So by day I am a K-12 STEM director, educational administrator, and my co-founder by day is a writer who writes for environmental conservation in the Southeast. Together, we are two single moms that are deeply rooted in grief and we are the co founders of the group.
Heather:
Excellent. And can you tell us a little bit about the app, how it works?
Kim:
Sure. Goodgrief app is a social network for loss. It matches individuals based on who they lost and then tries to connect them through one to one in app texting and photo sharing.
Joey:
Awesome. And so do you think you could talk a little bit about how the app got started?
Kim:
So both Robin and I are deeply rooted in grief and we were connected by a mutual friend. I had lost my, both of my parents, my mother to longterm illness. I had lost my marriage and then further down the line, I had been in a relationship with my partner and he had died suddenly. It was a mutual friend of my partner’s that connected me with Robin because at the time she had just received information that her mother was dying of metastatic breast cancer, stage four, and had chosen to not to receive treatment. And her marriage had ended. And so this mutual friend thought that together somehow because the two of us had navigated similar forms of grief that we could support one another. He connected us through a text message. And for a year we supported each other just through texting. We became each other’s lifeboat of support. And after a year of doing this, we realized that we were onto something and that somehow we should offer this to others. And there was value in connecting to an absolute stranger because they really don’t know who you are in your everyday life. They don’t know who you were before grief struck your life, and they have no expectations of who it is that you should be. And so we felt like through connecting people this way, the doors could kind of open for people to have honest and raw conversations about the emotions that are associated with grief.
Heather:
And so tell us your co-founders name?
Kim:
Robin Boyd.
Heather:
And are you guys in the same area?
Kim:
We are not. I live here in New York, in Huntington, New York, and she lives outside of Atlanta and Decatur, Georgia.
Heather:
So for that year, you hadn’t met each other in person?
Kim:
That’s correct. We had not met each other in that year and we still have not met to date. So together we formed this company and we developed this app and that was back in 2017. When we launched the idea, it was 2018 when the app went live. And to date now in 2020, we still haven’t met in person.
Joey:
Wow. So how has, how has been managing the app kind of from two different areas? Like how has that been working for you guys?
Kim:
So, I mean, I think that we’re lucky because this world of technology makes possible some things that weren’t always possible years back. And so a lot of our meetings are here online, just like how I’m meeting with you today. And a lot of our information in terms of documents and other things we share through Google Docs and, you know, together, we, we carry meetings on a weekly basis and we schedule them through, you know, through our calendars, but ultimately all the work that we need to do can really be done digitally.
Joey:
That’s really cool. Could you, could you talk about how you sustain your organization since you guys are for-profit?
Kim:
Sure. So, you know, one of the things that Robin and I are committed to is this idea that the app itself and the services that it provides to the grief community really should be free. And because these individuals who are suffering from loss and so essentially in order to keep it sustainable our revenue comes from the advertising, right? So we’re seeking individuals that have a vested interest in the community to advertise insider app. And those individuals may be offering support, maybe grief services. And then we can offer them advertising to this population of individuals.
Heather:
With resources that those individuals might need.
Kim:
Absolutely. So these can be on bereavement resources. They may maybe some type of bereavement group counseling resources. They could be one on one individual psychological support. So there are all sorts of forums, including a funeral services and other things, because we know, especially during a time like this, we know that some individuals may be in hospice care and those the family members are inside our app because they need support of what navigating this path is like. And they need support in terms of how they’ll handle the care after death and what that means for the family.
Heather:
That makes a lot of sense to me. And I think that leads right into our next question about how do you match people up? How what’s the process like for the person? And can you just talk a little bit about like who your users are? I was thinking it was only after a death, but it sounds like it starts even before.
Kim:
So what’s unique about our, our app is individuals login and they create a profile and then essentially it’s who they lost, when they lost them, how they lost them. And we define loss as lost cause. And so essentially loss could be a relationship, right? It could be loss of a person that you once were connected to. And a lot of times we see people, for example, that login and they create loss due to illness and Alzheimer’s seems to be the cause. So, you know, so when we say loss, oh, it’s really a loss of an individual that played a role in our lives in one particular way. And for example, in Alzheimer’s we see that they are no longer that person anymore. And there’s that grief that, that people feel because of that. So they indicate age, perhaps if they have some type of religious affiliation or not, they indicate whether or not they would like to connect with various people by creating a list of preferences in their profile. So for example, I might feel better, more connected to individuals that lie between the ages of 35 to 50, right. And then now that narrows the pool of individuals that I might matched with, I might be non-religious. And so I might want to connect with someone that’s more spiritual. I might the only one to connect to single women. Right? And so I can, I can select that through the preferences.
Joey:
That’s cool. It sounds really customizable. And I, and I didn’t realize that you can kind of customize who you’re getting matched with as well, all in terms of narrowing those preferences down. So that’s really cool. So what’s the most important thing you think people should know about grief? You know, either through, you know, hearing about your app or not, what’s, what’s the most important thing?
Kim:
So I think for the people that are in the midst of grieving, it’s really important to know that there is no time limit on grief. And you know, and I know a lot of times society, places, these timeframes and people really think there’s something wrong if they haven’t hit those marks in terms of moving forward. I also think that there’s no right or way to grieve and that grief is different for everyone based on the types of events that may have occurred in their life or whether or not they are experiencing some form of compounds inside our app. We allow individuals to select multiple losses and that will also fold into how it is that they respond to people inside our community. And they may be further down the line with the loss of their mother, but the loss of their partner may be in the acute stage. And so there shouldn’t be expectations on what it is that they should do to properly grieve. And that grief is just going to be different for everyone.
Heather:
Once the people have their profile set up, then are they offered matches, and they can accept them or not accept them? Or are they put into more of like a chat room or how does that work?
Kim:
So they’re offered a series of selections and the selections are ordered based on when an individual was last online. So the most recent will fall at the top and the most distant will fall towards the bottom of their selections. It is then up to them to initiate a conversation. And then it’s up to the receiver, whether or not they want to accept based on the individual’s profile that has reached out. So for example, I might reach out to you, but you might say, oh, well, our religious affiliation doesn’t really match. And I really feel like I would connect better to someone that was more aligned with me. And so you can just decline that that match and that connection, or you could go ahead and accept.
Joey:
So can you kind of have multiple conversations going at the same time? Is that you know, an option or is it a limited?
Kim:
No, it’s multiple conversations. You can be carrying on as many chats as you want. But the chats themselves are one-on-one. So unlike what you see in, for example, Facebook groups or open blogs sites, what happens typically, what we found was that someone will have an emotion that they want to express. They put that down in the chat and what happens is every one in the entire chat room or in the blog can then respond to that person. And they’re open to any type of conversation with regards to that, we found that sometimes your emotion kind of gets pushed to the bottom of the feed and isn’t received because there are a series of other comments and other things that tend to scroll. So what’s nice about this feature is that it’s just one-on-one every conversation. And so you’re not open to large groups.
Heather:
Very cool. That’s a great solution. Talk about, a little bit about how has your app been received? What do people love about it? Have you gotten any pushback?
Kim:
Sure. we have, we’ve had a lot of stories about the app. People reached out to us regularly. Some of the interesting things that we heard were there was a woman that was serving overseas and she had suffered a loss and the nearest bereavement center was two and a half hours away for her to receive some type of counseling support. And so the only way she found getting support was actually through our app and it just made it feasible given, you know, her hours of duty that she was able to connect with people when she needed them. We received information like a feedback information from the gentleman who was inside our app. He lives in a very small community. He has lost his, lost his wife to suicide. There were no other individuals in his community that had suffered that type of loss. He had had two children and he was struggling with how do I move forward, keep some level of consistency in the lives of my children as a single dad who just, and also process this fact that my wife just commit suicide. And so he found this network of individuals inside our app that had also lost their spouse to suicide. And he felt very connected and supported, and they shared the joys of moving forward and, you know, and big milestones of their children as well as they processed the experience of losing a spouse to suicide together. And so that was something that he felt like he would have never found in any type of bereavement group through his town.
Heather:
Yep. That makes a whole lot of sense, hold onI one second Joey. And have you had any pushback from people about having an app like this?
Kim:
So initially when we launched the app, one of the things that I can tell you is that we were initially a pay per use app. So our target was, you know, it was $4.99 a month and we were making it sustainable through the user and the pushback that we received was you really shouldn’t be charging anyone that’s in the process of grease for this service. We want this for free. And so we responded to that that feedback and, you know, within six months we pulled it back, the pay-per-use admin is now free for all users at this time. Right.
Joey:
And I was going to say that I bet it’s pretty rewarding to kind of hear about the personal stories that you guys have positively impacted like you were sharing a little bit earlier and to see the good that your app is bringing to people. I bet that’s, like I said, really rewarding. I want to ask, so what is your app’s relationship with funeral homes? And do you guys do any partnerships with funeral homes at all?
Kim:
Sure. So there are a few local funeral homes that both Robin and I have reached out to, and they’ve been handing out our cards inside the packages on that kind of go home with the families. And so we have that, we did do some work with with some funeral places, for example paired with Little Miss Funeral. I don’t know if you’re familiar and the Traveling Funeral Director to work for grief awareness day. And so we had done a video series with both of them. And then we also worked with Marian Thomas, who is from the Funeral Zone and that’s in the UK. And so they also list us as a valuable resource on their site.
Heather:
Gotcha. Yep. Is there something you think funeral directors can learn from what you’ve learned from your app?
Kim:
In terms of what we’ve learned from the app, I think one of the biggest pieces of advice to funeral directors would be that those days when families and individuals that are going through services, everything is very foggy. There’s very little that you remember about those moments. It’s almost as if you’re acting because there’s these series of tasks that you need to complete, but you’re not you’re not fully vested in the moment. It’s, you know, it’s a very like outer experience because the grief fog is so thick. And so I would, I would definitely say to take care in careful explanation of the process, I would also say to write things down because a lot of times there’s this loss of memory with the severe emotions that are kind of going on with someone that’s grieving. So having clear cuts directions and information provided to them for a slow digestion would be good. And I also think that it’s important to offer some type of support post-service, so to connect with other services that can support these families as they move away from the immediacy of the service to the processing of the actual grief.
Heather:
Yeah. But aftercare piece, we hear that a very important piece to definitely.
Joey:
So I noticed on your website that you do a very good job of promoting the new stories that you guys have been featured in. Do you think you could talk about how that has helped your business?
Kim:
Sure. So, you know, we’ve, we’ve been featured in a lot of different stories, Huffington Post, and we were on Fox News. We did CNN HLN network. And what we saw was as each of these kind of rolled out we could see a gigantic influx of user base in whatever areas of the country the posting was kind of serving or where it was showing. So for example, if it was rolling out in Detroit, we saw a large membership come from Detroit because our users actually in their profile indicate where it is that they’re located. So we were able to trace it as it moved across the country.
Heather:
Before we get to our very last question, how do people get ahold of you? Or how do they get ahold of the app if they want to participate? Either as an advertiser or as a, as a person who’s grieving?
Kim:
Sure. So you can contact us through our web page. We have a blog it’s blog.goodgriefapp.com, and there’s a contact us button there. You can download us in the App Store and we are also on Google Play. We’re under Goodgrief. And then you just connect with the Social Network for Loss. And you’ll see our symbol. It’s like the upside down teardrop. That’s our symbol in the app store. And then you can email us good.grief.app2017@gmail.com.
Heather:
Great, thank you for that, Kim. And this is the last question we ask everybody this question, what’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned from serving in this profession or this industry?
Kim:
I think, you know, technology is forever changing and it’s changing fairly rapidly. And I think that as leaders in, you know, in app technology, you need to be responsive. You need to be reflective and you need to be always willing to update and make changes accordingly.
Heather:
That’s a good lesson. That’s one we believe in too. That’s a lot of what we do.
Joey:
Alright, so that is it. Thank you so much, Kim. We really appreciate your time and thanks so much for joining us this week on Funeral Innovations: Trends, Tips, and Technology. So we’ll be posting this video on our blog, on our YouTube channels, and you’ll be able to access it on our Facebook feed. And we’ll be back with another show next week. So make sure to check back in with us. If you have any topics you’d like to see discussed or someone you’d like to hear from in an interview, make sure to comment it down below and be sure to visit our funeralinnovations.com. Have a great day. Thanks so much.
Heather:
Thanks so much, Kim, have a good day.
