From Policy to Participation – Closing the Gap in Utility Programs
Clean energy is hot. The momentum has been building for decades, and it’s showing few signs of slowing down. More and more people, businesses, and governments are investing in energy efficiency, DER (distributed energy resources), and electrification programs.
But here’s the problem.
Relatively speaking, approving energy policies is easy. Allocating budgets is easy. Setting targets for participation among ratepayers is easy. Again – relatively speaking. Relative to what, you might ask?
Consumer participation.
The most challenging aspect of creating, launching, and building energy efficiency and renewable energy programs isn’t in the planning. It’s in the implementation. Getting people in real communities to actually sign up and participate in these programs is proving to be far more difficult than most people imagined.
The participation gap – why utility customers don’t enroll
It’s not that ratepayers don’t want clean energy or lower energy bills. Of course they do. Everyone wants lower bills. The challenges that stand in the way of getting more customers to join your utility’s energy-related programs aren’t about the customers. They are systemic, built up over many decades due to a variety of forces. Here are a few.
Information overload
People are bombarded with information, and it’s flooding toward them from all directions – news, social media, marketing, and more. Breaking through all that clutter is very hard, especially when you’re trying to sell them on programs laden with acronyms and dry language.
Low trust
Utility companies aren’t high on the list of organizations and institutions most people think of as being highly trusted. “This is the place that sends me a bill every month, and it keeps going up no matter what I do.” That’s what the utility is for most people.
You want to help these people? You’ll need to find a way to break through their many years of hardened skepticism.
Complex eligibility rules
Some energy programs really do sound great, but the burden of finding out if you qualify can take a ton of work. Many people will quit the process because it doesn’t seem worth it.
Rules ranging from income thresholds to property ownership barriers to an avalanche of documentation requirements can squelch any interest or curiosity in your energy-related programs.
Digital media shortcomings
Digital communication is getting more and more difficult to navigate for companies, including utilities. So many passwords. So many emails coming at us in our numerous email addresses. Ads everywhere. And many of them aren’t even real – conjured up by AI or by scammers.
Communicating effectively through digital media about complex programs is inordinately difficult.
Behavioral inertia
Even if you manage to break through all these other barriers, many people still won’t act, simply because taking action requires effort. It will always be easier to not do something than to do something. So, unless ratepayers find a committed motivation to do something about their situation by engaging with your energy programs, they’ll settle for the status quo. Knowing is not the same as doing.
Break through trust barriers with in-person engagement
How do you break through information overload?
Go at the customer’s pace.
How do you build trust?
Talk to customers in person rather than from a distance or through a screen.
How do you make rules clearer?
Address them in a timely manner when customers are ready, not all at once.
How do you use digital media effectively?
Use it as a tool to support in-person communication efforts.
And how do you overcome inertia?
By going at the customer’s pace.
This is why face-to-face outreach works, and works far better than any other method of engaging with utility customers and ratepayers. There is simply no substitute for going out in the community and talking to people.
This is precisely why – even in our digital age – many political candidates still go door-to-door. Because no other approach comes close to producing as many sincere conversations.
Face-to-face outreach works. It allows customers to ask questions, find out what your energy-related program is and why it’s relevant to them, and feel empowered to talk about it and navigate it at their own pace, as opposed to feeling convinced and sold.
With in-person engagement, you can give utility customers:
- Instant clarification and answers about eligibility and benefits
- Real-time opportunities to address objections
- Trust and sincerity
- Personalized messaging to each household or business
When you send out trained teams of what Power Direct calls energy ambassadors, you can communicate complex policies and eligibility rules in plain language, and you can do this no matter what language the customer speaks when you target your outreach effectively.
You can also remove friction caused by all the problems of impersonal communication, and ensure follow-through by walking customers through the process – often right on their doorstep.
What are energy ambassadors?
Energy ambassadors are trained brand representatives who venture out into the community to engage with utility customers in person. Power Direct employs and trains teams of ambassadors for utility companies to send out and engage their customers regarding anything that would be best served by in-person communication.
For many, this means energy-related programs such as energy efficiency improvement programs, renewable energy subsidies, opportunities for low-income households, energy audits, and more. Many utilities have been mandated to offer these programs and reach certain quotas and goals for enrollment.
As professionally trained ambassadors, these specialists will adhere to local ordinances while using strategies such as door-to-door surveys and in-person engagement to pre-qualify and enroll customers in your utility’s programs.
These are not sales contractors. They are not temp workers you have to process through HR. They are not 1099s. They are your representatives, but are trained and managed through Power Direct so you don’t have to hassle with any of those things.
Remember – policies and plans are easy, but participation is hard.
Energy ambassadors bridge the gap between the two, and the result is far more engagement and response with your energy-related programs.
How well do energy ambassadors work?
With most forms of advertising and marketing, you measure impressions, and then hope a high enough percentage of those people engage through clicks, calls, signups, or other forms of response.
But with energy ambassadors, impressions are just low-level metrics. Your leadership team, as well as government regulators, will appreciate the much deeper engagement and monitoring metrics Power Direct uses to measure the effectiveness of our EA teams.
You’ll have data for:
- GPS verified activity in the communities you target
- Audited outreach efforts
- Enrollment and conversions for your energy programs
- Proof of equitable reach across income levels, race, household type, and other categories
We monitor each energy ambassador’s actions, and they record all the response data for each household they reach out to – even if no one is home. You’ll know who they visited, what happened, how that household responded, and at what time.
Bolster EA work with front door media
In addition to brand ambassadors, you can add even greater impact and firepower to your utility’s engagement efforts by using front door media. It works great in tandem with energy ambassador teams.
Front door media, such as door hangers, flyers, and other handouts and leave-behinds, enables ambassadors to engage customers even if they’re not home. Unlike direct mail and email, and very much unlike digital advertising, front door media won’t get lost in the tsunami of information overload and nonstop marketing everyone experiences.
It sits alone on the front porch, and gets seen and considered by nearly everyone who receives one. Plus, your energy ambassadors can use them as something to leave behind for customers who aren’t ready to enroll in anything, but are interested in learning more or engaging on their own.
How energy ambassadors benefit the utility
Energy ambassadors also enhance your ability to assess and improve your energy-related programs.
Because you’re talking with real people and having substantive, authentic conversations, you collect real-life response data, the kind of feedback you simply can’t get from impersonal, distant advertising efforts.
You’ll discover the real reasons more customers aren’t enrolling, and will be able to identify the friction points where people get stuck. With this information, you’ll be able to refine your programs, improve the language you use to describe them, and discover how to better engage different types of populations. The result will be higher long-term enrollment rates.
With Power Direct’s energy ambassadors, you won’t just get more signups for your energy-related programs. You’ll also gain feedback that will enable improved program design.
You win on the short end, and you win in the long game.
Program participation is the only outcome that matters
Policies don’t matter if no one applies them. Programs have little effect if hardly anyone signs up for them. And none of this happens by chance.
With Power Direct’s energy ambassadors, you’ll now have direct influence over who hears about your energy-related programs, and you’ll win far more signups than you ever had before. Because direct engagement results in trust and clarity, you can now use the power of human connection to deliver your programs to more customers – at scale – and they’ll be happy to learn your programs work for them.
If your program is in place but participation is lagging, the problem isn’t the policy. It’s the gap between that and actual customer participation.
Use Power Direct’s energy ambassador program to level up participation.
