The funeral service profession's leading award program, the NFDA Pursuit of Excellence Awards, has made some exciting new changes for 2021, making the entry process easier than ever!
Historically, NFDA's Pursuit of Excellence Award required multi-location firms to qualify each of their funeral home locations separately, which required submitting a separate registration form and entry for each location seeking recognition. Because Pursuit of Excellence is a location-based recognition program, for multi-location firms, only those locations that actually earned an award were entitled to call themselves award-winning firms – not the entire business.
The reality of funeral service in 2021 is that most multi-location firms share staff, resources and, when hosting events (e.g., holiday services of remembrance, grief-support groups, community outreach events, etc.), does so as a business rather than as individual locations. Therefore, requiring separate entries from each location no longer makes sense.
NFDA has introduced a new entry process and registration fee for 2021: Funeral businesses need only submit one entry representing the work and accomplishments of all locations that operationally share staff and other resources (instead of separate entries for each location) and your registration fee is based on the number of locations in your business. That's right - just one entry for all locations!
Please review page two (2) of the Registration and Application Materials booklet for full details about the changes to the entry process and registration fee for 2021 (Materiales de inscripción y solicitud de búsqueda de la excelencia 2021 - Español). In addition to explaining this important change, this booklet is your guide to creating and submitting a successful entry.
For 2021, we will, once again, ask that all entries to be submitted electronically. Given the uncertain trajectory of the pandemic, electronic entries will give the Pursuit of Excellence Work Group the greatest flexibility in reviewing all of the entries submitted by participants. Click here to download the electronic entry form and for details on how to submit an entry for your funeral business.