Gail Rubin (L) and Mike Stafiej (R), president of PICLIF
PICLIF is an app which launched in January 2017, providing a way for multiple people to contribute photos to instantly create memorial videos. The company was a new exhibitor at the ICCFA expo, there to introduce funeral directors to this groundbreaking service.
“Anyone who knows the person who passed away can download our mobile app, or use our website, to share photos directly from their phones, from Facebook, they can use our built-in scanner to scan physical pictures,” explained Mike Stafiej, president of PICLIF. “We’re a collection point, we give them the ability to pull it all together as a crowd-sourced video.”
While this sounds like this might be a technology for the younger generations, Stafiej says they’ve actually had great responses from baby boomers and seniors in their 90s.
“At this point, a lot of people have a smart phone in their pocket. The typical person making funeral arrangements is 45 to 55, and that demographic is very in touch with the technology… We make it easy. Rather than you digging around for photos and scanning them, we’re going to allow everyone to help you out and contribute photos.”
An average memorial service has 75 to 100 pictures contributed by 12 to 15 different people collected through the app. PICLIF’s proprietary software puts the images together with an option of a life timeline tagged with specific years. The memorial video can include words, such as quotes the person used to say.
Stafiej had a few friends die in 2015, and his experience with wanting to contribute photographs to the memorial videos at those funerals prompted him to formulate the PICLIF app. They worked with funeral directors to find out what they needed to make it feasible for them. “It turns out this takes way too long to do, they don’t have the resources to do it, it’s an efficiency problem. We made it quick and also very valuable for their clients.”
PICLIF is available to be used with partner funeral homes and can be downloaded from the Apple App Store and Google Play. The app is currently being used in 50 services a week. Learn more at www.PICLIF.com.
