Putting a QR code on the order of service is the cheapest and most effective thing you can do with one, and hardly anybody does it.
Think about who is in the room at a funeral. Everyone who knew the person, in one place, on the only day they will all be together. They are carrying photographs you have never seen and stories nobody in the family has heard. Then they go home, and most of them you will not see again for years.
A code on the back of the order of service means every one of them leaves with a way to reach the memorial page whenever they think of something. That is the whole idea, and it costs nothing to add to printing you are already paying for.
What the code should point at
Decide this before you generate anything, because it is the part that goes wrong.
A memorial page is the usual answer. Photographs, a life story, and somewhere for people to add what they remember.
A donations page is the other common one, and it is worth thinking about whether to have both. Two codes side by side, clearly labelled, works better than one code that does two jobs badly. Label them. An unlabelled code at a funeral is ambiguous in a way that makes people hesitate, and the guess most people make is that it wants money.
A photo collection where guests upload from their phones on the day. Popular, and it does not replace a memorial page, because a shared folder tends to be forgotten within a year.
What it should not point at is a link that will change. Which brings us to the important part.
Use a code you can repoint later
This is the single technical decision that matters and it takes one minute to get right.
A static code has the final web address baked into the pattern. Print two hundred orders of service with a static code, and if that address ever changes, every one of those printed sheets is dead. You cannot recall them. They are in two hundred houses.
A dynamic code points at a short forwarding address that you can aim somewhere else at any time, without the printed code changing at all. If you move the memorial, reorganise it, or change provider in five years, the code in everyone's drawer still works.
For something printed in bulk and impossible to recall, this is not a preference. Use dynamic. There is a fuller explanation in how memorial QR codes work.
Be careful with free QR generators here. Many offer a dynamic code free and then require a paid subscription to keep the forwarding working. When that lapses, every printed code stops. If you use a free generator, check specifically whether the redirect expires.
Making it
- Get the destination live first. Even if the page only has one photograph and a name, publish it before you print. A code pointing at nothing is the commonest fault, and printing happens fast.
- Use the shortest address you can. A short link makes a sparser, chunkier code, which prints better and scans more reliably at small sizes. A long address makes a dense code that fails on cheap paper.
- Generate at high error correction if the tool lets you choose. Level Q or H. It costs a little density and survives fingerprints, folds and poor printing.
- Export as a vector file if you can, meaning SVG, EPS or PDF, rather than a small PNG. A screenshot of a code enlarged to fit a page will print blurred and may not scan at all. Any decent printer will ask you for vector.
- Keep it black on white. Not white on black, not tinted, not on a photograph. Cameras need contrast, and clever design is where codes go to die.
Size and placement on the page
For a code held at reading distance, about 20mm square is the sensible minimum and 25mm to 30mm is comfortable. Smaller than 20mm and you are relying on good light and a good phone, in a church, in November.
Leave white space around it. A quiet margin of clear white on all four sides, roughly the width of four of the code's own small squares. Codes crowded up against text or a border fail to scan and nobody understands why. This one mistake causes more failures than any other.
Put it on the back page, not the front. The front cover is for their name and photograph. The back is where people look afterwards, and it is where an order of service naturally falls open when set down.
Write a line of text beneath it. A bare code tells nobody what it is for. Something plain works best:
- "Scan to see photographs of Margaret, and to add a memory of your own."
- "Scan to visit John's memory page. If you would rather not, the address is thelifebehind.com/john"
- "Scan to donate to the hospice in Dad's name."
Print the web address in small type underneath. Not everyone at a funeral has a smartphone, and not everyone who has one will use it that day. A typed address means the page is reachable by anybody, and it also survives a code that will not scan for any reason.
Test it before it goes to print
Four minutes, and almost nobody does it.
- Print one copy at the actual final size, on the actual paper, from the actual file going to the printer.
- Scan it on two phones, ideally one iPhone and one Android, and ideally one older handset belonging to someone over seventy.
- Scan it in poor light, because a church in winter is not your kitchen.
- Check the page loads on mobile data rather than home Wi-Fi, and that it looks right on a phone screen rather than a laptop.
Then look at the printer's proof and check the code again on the proof itself. Codes get resized, recoloured and compressed in the print workflow, and a code that worked in your document does not always survive it.
Where else to print it
Once the code exists it costs nothing to reuse.
- Thank-you cards sent after the funeral. Arguably better than the order of service, because they arrive when the immediate rush is over and people have started to remember things.
- Memory cards handed out at the wake. Small cards with the code and one direct question to answer. This is what memory cards are for, and the question matters as much as the card: "tell us a memory" paralyses people, and "what is something he did that was completely typical of him?" gets answers.
- A framed card at the entrance, beside the photograph, where people gather anyway.
- The wake venue's table cards, if there is a sit-down meal.
- Newspaper and online obituary notices, where the format allows.
Is it appropriate?
Some people will feel it is not, and that is a fair position rather than an ignorant one.
Two things make it land well. Keep it small and put it at the back, so the order of service is still an order of service rather than a leaflet. And describe it in warm plain words rather than technical ones. "Scan to see photographs of Mum" reads very differently from "scan our QR code".
If there is anyone in the family who would find it jarring, ask them first. It is a two-minute conversation and it prevents the version where somebody is upset on the day.
Afterwards
The printed code does the introduction. What keeps the page alive is somewhere permanent for it to live afterwards: on the urn, the frame at home, the bench, or the headstone when it goes up. Any number of plaques can point at the same page, and there is a list of the places families actually use in where to put a memorial QR code.
Our memorial plaque with memory page comes with the page included and the same code you can print on anything. And if you cannot face building the page in the days before a funeral, which is entirely usual, we will build it for you from whatever you can send.