How Utilities Can Deliver Energy Incentives to Underserved Communities
You want your energy programs to help everyone they are intended to help – including communities that are often underserved. Oftentimes, programs are specifically designed for these communities, which could be defined by ethnicity, language, income, or geography.
The problem of course is that it is often these very characteristics that make it more challenging to make contact with and engage the people your energy programs will help.
Take Solar for All, for example. This is a program designed for the express purpose of extending the financial and environmental benefits of solar energy to communities that often cannot access them.
So how do you effectively engage and communicate with underserved communities about energy programs designed to help them?
The answer is to leverage the unique nature of in-person, face-to-face communication.
Barriers to sharing utility energy programs with underserved communities
There are all sorts of energy programs that, if people knew about them and realized they qualified for them, would deliver profound and life-changing benefits, especially to communities that sometimes get left out of modern innovation and technological advancement.
Incentive programs such as HOMES, HEEHRA, Solar for All, and other utility programs are often just sitting there, waiting for more people to access their benefits. Here are a few obstacles that make that positive outcome more difficult.
Language barriers
It’s exceptionally difficult to cross language barriers using traditional media. With few exceptions, most advertising has to pick a language. That choice automatically excludes anyone who doesn’t know that language.
Many underserved communities do not speak English. And while it’s true utilities could create advertising in other languages, the targeting and expense required to make sure it gets in the hands of the people it was designed for can get costly – in terms of money as well as time.
Cultural barriers
Oftentimes, the language barrier is compounded by a cultural barrier. How we do things in the United States may not be how various residents grew up doing them in their cultures. It’s hard to communicate cross-culturally, even when both parties know the same language. Humans simply don’t do things or think about things in the same way.
These challenges can inhibit the effectiveness of most traditional media marketing efforts, especially in situations like energy programs, where you aren’t really selling anything. For many recipients, it feels like marketing, so they assume you’re selling something. With cultural barriers added on top of that, misunderstanding your intentions will be pretty easy.
Confidence barriers
Where other barriers are present, many people feel intimidated by something new. They don’t want to get scammed. They don’t want to feel less capable or unable to understand it. The processes required to engage with something new can lead people to retreat to what is familiar, what is known. When this happens, they decide to ignore your energy program literature.
Self-defeating barriers
Other times, people can be accustomed to not qualifying for things, so now they just assume this is not worth their time. “This isn’t for me,” they think. If all they have to go on is an online ad, a direct mail piece, or an email, that thought is more than enough to prevent them from taking any action.
All four of these barriers will quite easily resist most traditional marketing media efforts. It’s always easier to do nothing than to do something.
But when someone is standing right at your door – and is able to communicate with your language or culture – the whole game changes.
Advantages of using energy ambassadors
If you tried to engage all your targeted customers in person, it would require extensive changes in your personnel and expertise. You’d need to hire, train, equip, and monitor the performances for a team of reps going out into communities.
And it would be kind of a waste of money because once the work was done, you wouldn’t need many of those employees anymore.
By using energy ambassadors from Power Direct, you don’t have to do any hiring, training, or monitoring. We take care of all of that.
All you have to do is share with us your customer data to help with targeting the right households, and then make sure we understand the goals of your campaign and whatever details we need to know about the energy programs we’ll be talking about with customers.
Our team does the rest.
This is a temporary task requiring particular skills and limited expertise. Our teams can be trained to carry out the communications and lead generation campaign with great efficiency and effectiveness.
Real-time auditing and tracking
Power Direct employs real-time auditing and tracking technology so you can get updated at any time how the team is doing. You can see where they are, which households they’ve visited, progress toward the goal, and so much more.
You can verify they are completing the required tasks and recording the relevant data. We also use on-location auditing techniques to visually verify the EAs are working their assigned targets.
Detailed response data
Energy ambassadors will record whatever data will be most helpful to your utility. Typical response data we track includes things like:
- People who accepted the program
- People who asked for more time or more information
- People who want to talk to a rep
- No one home but front door media was left behind
- Turned down offer
Front door media is another component of Power Direct’s service. It’s a major part of our business, so when we train energy ambassadors, we can also equip them with literature we produce on your behalf. When household members aren’t home, or when people want to consider your offer but want more time, giving them something that empowers them to learn more helps keep your offer on their minds. And, if your reps contact them later, you will know they had some literature given to them, and can refer to it in any future communication efforts.
Superior targeting
Power Direct is well-known for its elite targeting capabilities. We have access to several thousand demographic characteristics that we regularly use to design marketing campaigns for our business clients.
For utilities, you have access to all this same data. When combined with your customer data, you will be able to target your energy ambassador campaigns to make sure audiences are met with the optimized personnel.
This is how you demolish all those barriers mentioned earlier.
For example, we can target all households under a certain income limit who speak Spanish. Another group might be households that own their home and at least one car who speak Vietnamese and have kids.
With our targeting capabilities, you can drill down to audiences this specific. Then, we can train an energy ambassador who speaks these languages and understands the cultural forces in play.
There is no comparison between how effective this type of communication will be compared to sending an email, direct mail campaign, or online ad. The response rate generated by your energy ambassador campaign will redefine campaign success metrics within your utility.
It’s that good.
How well does this really work?
Evergy ran a campaign using Power Direct to implement their goal of distributing compact fluorescent lights to thousands of households. Simple idea. Clear goal. Here’s what Mike Schifman, the Energy Efficiency Program Manager at Evergy, said about his results:
“Evergy partnered with Power Direct Energy to provide grid-use data analysis, secure product warehousing and distribution services for our CFL (compact fluorescent lighting) program. The goal was to deliver a direct-to-door bag to 50,000 homes. The program was a great success, both in terms of garnering consumer participation, and achieving significant KWh reduction. It took just five days to deliver all targeted households.”
Five days. That’s how long it took to hit the goal for this campaign, and they saw immediate reductions in energy usage.
How can energy ambassadors deliver results for your utility?
Find out what Power Direct Energy’s EA program can accomplish for your utility. Look at your energy programs – the ones you want to see implemented for underserved communities – and talk to us about designing an energy ambassador campaign to get the results you’ve been longing to see.
Touch more communities, save energy, and extend the benefits of modern energy innovation.
