Watch: Brady Cox and Ryan Thogmartin on OneRoom Stories

At the Funeral (un)Conference in Scottsdale this June, OneRoom CEO Brady Cox sat down with Ryan Thogmartin, founder of Connecting Directors, to talk through Stories, the newest addition to the OneRoom platform. Their conversation was recorded and streamed live for the room. Watch the clip below, or read the full transcript if you'd rather take it in that way

  One Room is a streaming company, which is video. Yes. But this is an audio- Audio tool, product, service, experience.

That's right. It's a, it's a audio experience.

Yep. Again, the emotion side of it, you said earlier that not every funeral has these crazy wild highlight moments, but I don't know that even in the most basic funeral, like, that I've ever been a part of, there was still a audio moment where there was value, whether it was the, the passage that the pastor read because it was so applicable to the deceased ... or it was, you know, someone just standing up and telling a really quick short story or a grandchild saying something. It's emotional, but it's not always this grandiose highlight funny moment ... but the audio of that, that's, to me, where I think this is so interesting. Yeah, it- I may be missing the point, but-

No, no, no, no, no, it, absolutely not, that is the point. And so when, when we looked at all the key moments, which were again these short videos that we've been created, and when we first came to make stories and we're waiting to see what would get produced, we were looking at some of these going, "There's not gonna be any stories in here." And there's four, two or three-sentence pieces ... and we're like, "I didn't hear that," and it sounds amazing by itself. And so, you know, we've built them in a way that you can obviously listen to them quickly, and they're beautifully presented. But then you can download them to your phone and revisit them whenever you want.

That's my next question. Right? Yeah. So you can just keep hitting it every day. And then, 'cause it's on your mobile, you can, or any, any other device, you can forward it. So I can text it to someone ... put it on social media, um, put it on Facebook. and so that's an important element to it. We nearly called it Shareables because we do believe  that a lot of these are gonna move around.  

But Stories is great, and I was just with somebody a few months ago that pulled up an old voicemail on their phone- and listened to it. So you're literally tapping into the emotional side of grieving that is healing at any moment, at any time.  And you might just wanna share that bit with someone

I really see a lot of value. It makes a ton of sense, and I like that it can be downloaded, it can be saved on a device, it can be shared out. Like, I have a voice note that I play before every single, like today, anytime I'm speaking, it, it's a, it's a quote from a pastor. Right. I play it every... I recite it over and then I walk into the room. So, like the audio moves differently than video does. There's power in video. There's power in images. But audio can transcend different environments. Yep, yep. That's cool.

And so, you know, one thing I didn't actually touch on in terms of what we've done for the recording is we've actually built a platform that everybody can come back to. So instead of just handing it out to the, as I said, to the immediate family, everybody in the chapel, everybody online, anybody that wants to come to it any time in the future can come back to the funeral home's website or to ours and find that decedent and get access to these things. So I just wanted to make that clear that's a really important part of the change that we've made, is making all of this accessible to anybody that knew that person.  

But the thing with the, the Stories, once you do download it, it has the logo of the funeral home on it, right? So at the end of it, we do put presented by and it's the logo of the funeral home. Very small OneRoom logo and a big funeral home logo. So every time that gets shared, again, that's more brand representation. That's great.  And it's attention so they can then put that on their own social medias, or they can, tie it back to their obituaries.

And sort of speaking to obituaries, Rohan from Chptr is very excited about putting Stories on TV and so are we. And so we'll probably have another announcement about that in the coming months.

I'm thinking from the social application of it, like the ability to overlay this over top of photos The audio over top of the photo being shared from the funeral home standpoint as well versus like obits are great, but like if you can actually share stories and I don't know, my marketing brain goes crazy with this. Yeah.

They're, they're really nice little assets, right? They've got the transcription of what's actually being said on them set to really nice backgrounds, which we've only just started on.  We'll probably tailor those and allow people to choose perhaps. Um, so it is envisaged that they're own digital asset rather than just the audio piece. And there's a full press release on connectingdirectors.com that, that is the full write-up about what this is, how to get more information about it, how to connect with your team.