Lee Senderov on Building Foundation Partners’ Future-Forward Digital Ecosystem

Lee Senderov imagines a world where the families and communities served by Foundation Partners Group are connected, informed and able to easily and conveniently engage with providers however they prefer. This year, Senderov and the Foundation Partners team have made incredible progress toward that goal with the introduction of their Afterall digital platform, the acquisition of end-of-life planning tool Cake, and recent integration with memorials powerhouse Chptr. 

“Like Cake, Chptr clearly aligns with our strategy for Afterall — building a single source for connection, community, content and commerce around end-of-life,” says Senderov, Foundation Partners Group chief marketing & digital officer. 

Borrow and apply

Senderov believes that deathcare can learn a lot from non-deathcare industries, everything from auto repair to Amazon. She encourages her team to “borrow and apply” — to adapt the best practices and most effective tactics from other industries to the world of deathcare. It’s a thoughtful technique that works when “copy and paste” just isn’t practical. 

“As we look at the ecosystem of consumer digital products and experiences out there, we see a lot of similarities in what some of the most forward-thinking companies and websites are doing,” says Senderov. “I’m by no means saying that funeral service needs to become Amazon, but we can borrow and apply best practices to be more approachable for consumers. The world is moving so fast, and we’ve got to keep up with consumer expectations.”

So far, Foundation Partners’ growing digital ecosystem is not only keeping up with the expectations of consumers, but also exceeding the expectations of team members in Foundation Partners’ more than 250 funeral homes, cremation centers and cemeteries. The feedback Senderov has received since integrating Cake’s massive catalog of resources into the Afterall platform has been phenomenal.

“I cannot tell you how many funeral directors called me and said, ‘We love the resource section,’” she says. “It’s a one-stop shop for families to find out everything from how to cope with grief and what to think about when planning a celebration of life to ‘Should I start thinking about planning for myself?’ We pull a lot of this information from questions our funeral directors receive from families that select us.”

Intentional and integrated

Adding Cake and Chptr to the Afterall ecosystem enables Foundation Partners to meet consumers where they are and make more options available to every family they serve. Each joint venture or acquisition decision is made carefully and intentionally to ensure that both partners are working toward a common goal.

“Over the last three years we’ve invested very heavily in our technology,” Senderov says. “We want to be known as that partner that is forward-thinking and innovative. I wouldn’t say that we’re aggressively going out there to acquire, but we are aggressively always seeking new partners that we believe are innovative and doing interesting things in our profession. So, where those partnerships or joint ventures go in the future, it’s always based on where that company is, where we are and if it’s the right fit.”

For Foundation Partners, both Cake and Chptr met all those criteria.

“We really connected the team at Chptr and the innovative platform they are building,” she says. “In addition to providing families with memorial videos and digital death notices, Chptr’s integration also enables sharing that content with local media and TV stations nationwide. We found that very compelling.”

Senderov says that her company’s decision to bring Cake into the fold also made perfect sense, as Foundation Partners had already established a great relationship with Cake’s founder Suelin Chen, and was impressed with her accomplishments and offerings. Since launching Cake in 2015, Chen had built an extensive digital catalog of more than 5,000 articles and tools for end-of-life planning and bereavement support.

“It was a great fit,” she says. “Not just from a synergy standpoint in terms of us thinking they had a really interesting approach to content, but even more than that, we thought they had an interesting approach to testing new products and ideas with consumers and being able to rapidly iterate on those to see what resonates and what doesn’t.

Complementary components

The recent additions of Cake and Chptr truly complement the Afterall platform, which brings together Foundation Partners’ deathcare providers, expanding both their reach and the options they can offer the families we serve and the community at large. 

For example, families choosing direct cremation through Tulip — another important component of the Afterall ecosystem — can now enhance their overall cremation experience with Chptr’s digital storytelling tools. 

“I think some people in the industry believe that families that choose direct cremation don’t want hands-on experiences or to memorialize their loved ones,” Senderov says. “In reality, families choosing direct cremation are memorializing their loved ones, just not in a traditional setting. Working with Chptr, we now can offer families more ways to celebrate and honor their loved ones on their own terms.”