By:   Tom Fowler
12/19/2000

The Internet's growing role in American life also is making it a big part of the American way of death.

Houston's Arrangeonline.com has signed a deal with Internet giant America Online to offer access to a national database of obituaries. The company hopes the lure of a huge database of death notices will draw consumers to a variety of related services, including contacting funeral homes to arrange for the inevitable and sending condolences and flowers.

The company now has more than 5 million obituaries in its database gathered over the past 15 years. New notices will be continually added.

The collection trumps the repository for similar information held at the Mormon headquarters in Salt Lake City, which contains 300,000 announcements.

These notices attract researchers building family trees or histories, or just keeping up with the friends and relatives.

Obituaries are one of the most popular features in newspapers, which makes them valuable content for the Internet, said Nadine Smith, chief executive officer for Arrangeonline.com.

"AOL knows that this content is relatively sticky in that people will spend a good deal of time reading through it and will want to act on it, by sending flowers or a note," Smith said. "It has a potential to be a real traffic driver."

One feature, "Obituary Alert," notifies users of deaths of friends or family. It can search new and old obituaries based on name, date, hometown, place of birth, place of death, alma mater, church or other criteria.

The site, which was introduced at the annual convention of the National Funeral Directors Association in Baltimore this fall, will offer a lot of other information including: directions to funerals, nightly rates at nearby hotels, suggestions for local restaurants and links to send flowers.

For a price, a user can even post an online memorial.

It can be reached through AOL's "News Channel" and the "News, Sports & Issues" sections on the 2000 Digital City sites AOL runs in major metropolitan areas.

It plans to make money by charging funeral homes a small fee for posting the obituaries, collecting for online memorials, and will take a cut of sales of products, such as flowers.

The company doesn't plan to sell ads and offers many of its obituary searches for free. The company has raised nearly $9 million in private funding for the Web site.

Arrangeonline.com was founded by Layng Guerriero and William Kilroy, executives with Houston's Aegis Asset Management. When the pair acquired an Oklahoma-based company that sold preneed funeral plans -- a form of insurance that pays for a person's funeral -- they looked to the Internet as a sales channel.

"It soon became apparent from talking with others in the funeral industry that there was a much greater need out there," Smith said.

It's difficult to sell something new in this industry because it is is relatively decentralized and relies heavily on one-on-one relationships. They decided to connect with established businesses that have strong ties to funeral home directors, Smith said.

Guerriero and Kilroy approached the National Funeral Directors Association, the nation's largest professional organization for the industry, looking for an endorsement. They also connected with Continental Computer, a Jonesboro, Ark., company that provides financial and planning software for 40 percent of the U.S. funeral homes.

In June, Continental purchased Arrangeonline.com and turned it into its online subsidiary. The company formally launched this fall at the funeral directors' annual conference, where an exclusive endorsement was announced.

Financial details of the deals were not released.

The relationship between AOL and Arrangeonline.com is not exclusive, an AOL spokeswoman said, but there are no other sites connected to the company that offer the same services. Financial details of that relationship were also withheld.

Arvin Harrell, owner of Harrell Funeral Home in Austin, has yet to see any customers take advantage of the Arrangeonline.com services through him, but he said he's only been offering it for a few weeks.

"Most of what we do is done on a personal basis at the time of the funeral, and on the local level," Harrell said. "But if there's one thing that does stretch out beyond that, it's the obituary. If someone can find that information from far away, it's possible they may want to send flowers or a note, or get directions if they're coming in from out of town."

There are a number of other uses for timely obituary data, Smith said. The financial services industry could use the information to stop sending targeted mailings to the deceased, while the data also could help head off fraudulent use of a deceased's credit card, a problem that costs Visa about $30 million a year.

Smith added: "We need to be careful not to use this information in ways that are offensive to the families and funeral directors, however."

© Copyright 2001 Houston Chronicle