How to Write a Funeral Program
What to Include, What to Skip, and a Few Ideas That Will Surprise You
Most people will pick up a funeral program, scan it once, and then hold onto it for the rest of the service — not to read, but just to have something in their hands.
That's the real job of a program. And once you understand that, writing one gets a lot easier.
What Is a Funeral Program or Memorial Program?
The terms are often used interchangeably, and for most families, the distinction doesn't matter much. Technically, a funeral program refers to a service where the body is present, while a memorial program is associated with a celebration of life or service that happens after burial or cremation. But in practice — and for the purposes of this guide — both documents serve the same purpose and contain the same kinds of information. We'll use both terms throughout.
A funeral program does two things at once.
It's a roadmap for the room — it quietly answers "what's happening next?" without anyone having to ask. Who's speaking. What songs. Where to go after. For a room full of people in grief, that small orientation is a gift.
And it's a keepsake for the years — tucked into a drawer, placed in a memory box, scanned and sent to relatives who couldn't be there. Many families say the program is one of the few physical objects they hold onto.
But there's a third purpose that almost nobody talks about.
Grief makes people feel unmoored. Having something to hold — something with a person's name and face on it — gives the body a quiet anchor while emotions run high. The funeral program isn't just paper. It's a physical point of contact with the person who's gone. That matters more than most people realize when they sit down to design one.
What Size Is a Funeral Program?
This surprises a lot of people: there's no single standard size. Search online and you'll mostly find two formats — but if you've attended many funerals, you've probably held that smaller trifold card, the one that tucks neatly into a pocket or purse. Here's what's actually out there.
- Bifold (half-fold) — A standard 8.5" × 11" sheet folded in half. Finished size: 5.5" × 8.5". Four pages of content. Easy to design, prints on any home printer, and the format most online guides describe as the default.
- Trifold brochure — An 8.5" × 11" sheet folded into three equal panels. Finished size: roughly 3.7" × 8.5" when closed. Six panels of content — well suited to services with more to include: longer biographies, hymn lyrics, reception details.
- The smaller trifold card — The compact, pocket-sized program you've probably held at a funeral and always wondered about. It's closer to 4" × 5.5" when folded and fits easily into a purse or jacket pocket. This format likely exists because some funeral homes or print shops produce trifold programs from a half-sheet of cardstock, yielding two finished programs per full sheet — a practical way to reduce per-program printing costs on premium stock. It may also simply reflect what a particular regional supplier defaults to. Either way, it's more common than most guides acknowledge, and genuinely lovely to hold onto.
The honest answer? Ask your funeral director. They know exactly what formats their print supplier offers, what will look best within your budget, and what families in your area typically receive. There's no wrong size — any format, designed with care, does the job beautifully. For a deeper look at paper weights, fold types, and print specs, this guide from Funeral Prints is a genuinely useful reference.
What a Funeral Program Looks Like: A Sample
Sometimes it helps to see one before you start. Here's a sample funeral program created with TreulogyAI, using Betty White as a tribute subject — styled to show both the cover and the interior content laid open.
The trifold format gives you six panels to work with — a cover, an order of service, a life tribute, a family section, a legacy note, and an acknowledgement. Enough space to say something real, without becoming a reading assignment.
Here's what the actual program wording looks like — generated entirely from a set of memories and stories entered into TreulogyAI.
▶ Read the sample program wording
The following is an excerpt from a sample memorial program generated by TreulogyAI using publicly available information about Betty White. It is presented here to illustrate what program wording looks like when generated from real memories and stories.
Life Tribute
Betty Marion White was born on January 17, 1922, in Oak Park, Illinois, to Horace Logan White and Christine Tess White. From the time she was a little girl, Betty had a gift for making people laugh — a gift her parents recognized early and encouraged warmly. Her family moved to Los Angeles when she was still young, and it was there that Betty's love of performing took root. She pursued it with a quiet, steady determination that would define everything she did for the next eight decades.
Family
Betty married three times. Her first two marriages were brief. It was her third — to television personality Allen Ludden — that became the love story she carried for the rest of her life. They were married in 1963. Allen passed away in 1981, and Betty never remarried. "Once you've had the best," she said, "who needs the rest?" She remained devoted to his memory for forty years.
Legacy
Betty White spent 80 years in front of a camera, and somehow managed to make every decade feel like her best one. She broke barriers for women in television when there were very few to follow. She made America laugh through seven decades of change. And she never stopped showing up — not for the work, and not for the animals she loved so fiercely. The Humane Society, the Los Angeles Zoo, and countless shelters across the country were the recipients of her quiet, persistent generosity. She was 99 years old. She was working until the end. She was, by every measure, the real thing.
A Personal Remembrance
What made Betty White impossible not to love wasn't the awards or the records or the longevity — remarkable as all of that was. It was the sense that she was genuinely glad to be here. Every interview, every appearance, every offhand remark carried the feeling of someone who had found exactly what they were meant to do, and was grateful for every single day of it. That kind of joy is rare. It doesn't age. It doesn't go out of style. And it doesn't leave easily — which is why, for so many people, it still hasn't.
What Goes In: The Essentials
When families ask what to include, what they're really asking is: what will help people feel oriented? The answer is simpler than you'd think.
The basics that help the day run smoothly:
- Full name and dates — birth and death, written out fully
- A meaningful photo — ideally one that looks like them, not just a formal portrait; the one where their eyes are doing that thing
- Order of service — what's happening, in sequence, clearly labeled
- Names of speakers, officiant, musicians — people want to know who they're listening to
- Song titles — people will look these up later; they often become part of how someone privately grieves for years
- A short biography — three to five sentences is enough; this isn't the obituary, it's a reminder of who they were
- Survivors listed — immediate family, kept simple
- Post-service information — reception location, charity in lieu of flowers, anything guests need to know
Worth considering for modern services:
- A QR code linking to an online memorial or private photo gallery
- A livestream link if the service is being recorded for family at a distance
- A favourite quote, poem, or scripture that genuinely meant something to them — not just a generic "she is at peace" placeholder
With cremation rates in the US now above 63% — and projected to reach 82% by 2045 — many memorial services happen weeks or even months after death, and in locations that have nothing to do with a traditional funeral home. The funeral program often becomes the primary tribute document from that day. It's doing more work than it used to.
What to Leave Out
This is the section most how-to guides skip. It's also where real families run into real pain.
Long acknowledgment lists. Someone will always be left out — and they will notice. A single line like "Thank you to all who loved [Name]" protects everyone. The longer the list, the higher the risk of an unintended hurt that outlasts the day itself.
Complicated survivor details. Step-parents, estrangements, blended families — getting this wrong is the thing people remember. When there's any doubt, keep it to immediate family only, and talk to your funeral director about what's appropriate for your situation.
Cause of death. Unless the family explicitly wants it included, this is private information. It belongs to the family, not the room.
Too much text. A program that reads like a full biography becomes a reading assignment at the exact moment nobody has the bandwidth to read. Aim for what can be absorbed in sixty seconds. The eulogy does the storytelling — let the funeral program do the guiding.
Anything that needs explaining. If an element requires a footnote, leave it out.
Financial or estate details. Never.
A Few Ideas That Might Surprise You
The best funeral programs aren't just well-organized. They're specific. They carry something forward that wouldn't have survived otherwise.
A grief educator recently shared something that stayed with us. At her father's service, she found herself wishing she'd tucked a little s'mores kit into every program — graham crackers, chocolate, a marshmallow — because making s'mores together was something their family did with him. It was him, in a way no paragraph could quite capture. She didn't get to do it. But the idea is exactly right.
Here are a few ways to bring that same spirit of specificity to a funeral program:
Tucked inside the program
A recipe card. If they were known for a dish — Grandma's lemon squares, Dad's chili, the cookies that were always at every gathering — their recipe (handwritten or a clean copy) tucked inside the program is something people will actually keep and use. That's a living legacy sitting in someone's kitchen for decades.
A seed packet. Especially meaningful for gardeners, or for anyone whose memory you want to see grow. Plantable seed paper exists where the program itself can eventually be planted. The program becomes something that doesn't end.
A mini s'mores kit. Or whatever the equivalent is for your person. A single teabag with a note that says "have a quiet cup and think of her." A packet of hot cocoa. A piece of their favourite candy. The specific, unexpected gesture is the one people talk about for years.
In the design itself
A playlist. "Songs [Name] loved." Even five or six titles printed quietly on the back panel — with a QR code to a Spotify playlist if someone in the family can set one up. People listen on the drive home. The grief gets a soundtrack. That matters.
"Things they always said." The phrases. The nicknames. The jokes that only landed because of how they told them. A small sidebar of these, printed without fanfare, is the thing guests read and then nudge each other about. It sounds like the person.
A timeline of small moments. Not just the milestones — the real ones. The trip that went wrong in the best way. The hobby they picked up at 70. "1987 — discovered he could not, in fact, carry a tune." That's the stuff.
A space for guests to write. A small blank section titled "Your memory of [Name]" with a few lines underneath. Collect the programs at the door on the way out, compile what people wrote, and share it with the family afterward. The program becomes a crowdsourced tribute.
Who Actually Writes It?
Usually whoever is already writing the eulogy or other parts of the tribute.
Writing a funeral program tends to land on the son or daughter who is also managing logistics, coordinating family, communicating with the funeral home, and quietly holding everyone else together. It arrives as one more task at the worst possible time.
The blank page is the hardest part. Once you have the words — the biographical paragraph, the order of service, a quote that actually sounds like them — the rest is formatting.
That's exactly what TreulogyAI was built for. Families answer a few simple questions about their loved one — the stories, the nicknames, the memories — and get back the words already written. The memorial program language. The eulogy. The social post to share afterward. All from the same set of memories, so nothing has to be repeated.
If you're in that place right now — trying to find the words while managing everything else — you don't have to start from a blank page. We can help.
Looking for more guidance? Read our posts on how to write a eulogy and how to write an obituary — together, they cover everything a family needs to find their words.
