Making the loss of someone a little less stressful

Helping grieving families

Losing someone is an emotionally devastating time. The last thing grieving families need is to spend many hours on the phone or filling out paperwork to notify service providers of their death. Not only is it extremely stressful having these painful conversations over and over, but the process can drag on for months. Most don’t even know where to start or who to notify.

Easing the burden

Customer research indicated that bereaved families had over 40 different services to contact. Reducing this additional stress became a top priority. With funding from the Digital Restart Fund, the Australian Death Notification Service was introduced to help ease this burden.

This free government initiative provides families with a single online location to notify multiple organisations that their loved one has passed away. More than 80 national and state organisations have joined the program, including government agencies, local councils, banks, telcos and utility providers.

A simple process

This service turns a lengthy, emotionally charged process into a simple and straightforward one that takes around 15-20 minutes to complete.

Approximately 168,000 people die in Australia each year

• On average a death will impact 4 individuals directly and 10 indirectly, with up to 40 organisations needing to be notified. 
• It can take over 30 hours of a customer’s time and up to 40 forms to notify all required organisations after a person dies.  
• It previously took up to 42 days on average after a death for family members to start notifying organisations. 

The Australian Death Notification Service has: 

• saved close to 34,000 hours by reducing the administrative tasks required  
• had over 106,000 unique site visits
• sent over 45,000 notifications to partner organisations, such as banks and utilities providers.