Our Best Posts of 2014

While we are usually a modest group of people, you’ll excuse us as we pat ourselves on the back a little. 2014 has come to a close and a lot happened to Qeepr in this short year. We were featured on the front cover of the Funeral Business Advisor Canada magazine, we were featured in the Canadian Funeral News Magazine and featured in Funeral Business Advisor Magazine. We launched an innovative new API for Funeral Professionals and the Qeepr team had booths at a Canadian Funeral Convention and the National Funeral Directors Association Convention in Nashville! Our founder answered questions on WhatsYourGrief.org and we were heavily featured on ConnectingDirectors.com. Finally, we partnered up with and raised money for the David Suzuki Foundation while raising awareness of environmental issues and green burial alternatives.

We also launched into our blog and have not looked back! We’ve had the opportunity to write on the some fascinating topics ranging from grief support, death awareness, legal matters, unusual deaths and must-see TED Talks. We thought it would be great to look back at some of our best and most popular blog posts of 2014!

*click on the pictures to be brought to the blog posts

5. The Top 10 Strangest Deaths

This was one of the best blog posts to write and also an opportunity to show off our incredible photoshop skills(as seen above). The top 10 strangest deaths held a lot of surprises and was shared quite a bit on social media and related blogs. It is probably our second most popular post of all time. We wrote about the King who ate himself to death(get why we put a donut next to his portrait?!), the Mcgill frat boy who killed Houdini, a roasted Saint and many more bizarre ways people have met an untimely end. Death is a serious matter but it can be nice to take poke fun at something experienced by the entire human race.

4. Buried Beneath Our Parks

This post introduced our readers to our home town and a little local flavour. That local flavour specifically, was buried underneath one of our most famous statues. This blog post written by one of our interns was very popular and made it to the front page of The Main Montreal. Before Montreal expanded to it’s current size, large chunks of what now make up our core were once burial grounds holding upwards of 38,000 people. There are currently still bodies buried under the park and the issue of moving those bodies raises many ethical concerns.

3. Who Has the Right to Make Decisions About Your Funeral

Ah, legal statutes. Nothing says exciting reading like pages and pages of legal statutes. Well regardless of whether or not it will put you to sleep, our blog post about who legally has the right to make decisions about your funeral is one of our most visited posts. It has even become an important reference on Wikipedia! Laws in the United States dealing with burial, next of kin issues and funerals are murky and change often. Luckily we wrote a State-by-State breakdown to make your lives, and the lives of your next of kin that much easier.

2. Famous Catacombs From Around the World

This blog post was inspired by a summer trip to Europe where much to the dismay of yours truly, no catacombs were visited! Time just did not allow for it. Having known of the Paris catacombs, we decided to investigate other famous dark and scary places of death. The results were surprising! We wrote about catacombs outside of New York City, the dozens of catacombs in Rome, mad monks and offered advice on how best to travel to these destinations. Our post ended up being retweeted dozens of times and featured heavily on Facebook. Next up, we’re going to actually start visiting some of these places!

1. The Environmental Impact of Funerals

Our number one post! We created this infographic in early 2014 and we were not prepared for how popular it would become. We were featured on Inhabitat.com, The Canadian Government website, CalebWilde.com among others! All in all, it gathered over 200,000 views on Facebook and was shared hundreds of times on social media. Importantly, this was all for a great cause. For every share of our Facebook post, we donated money to the David Suzuki Foundation. In the end we got to test our creative skills, learned something new along the way, increased awareness of environmental issues and partnered up with an incredible organization. It was a great start to 2014.