Monitor the effectiveness of contractor and workforce development efforts, motivate improvement, address low performers, and adapt on a regular basis.
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Develop processes, strategies, and procedures to continuously improve your organization’s operations and position in the market.
Develop the procurement, outreach, and loan support resources required to perform your financing activities.
Communicate pertinent results of evaluations to program staff, partners, and stakeholders.
Develop a detailed plan for launching and operating your program that integrates all program components into a process that is customer-friendly and efficient for contractors and other partners.
Implement contractor coordination and workforce recruitment and training in concert with other program components
Develop workforce and contractor engagement procedures, forms, and materials
Manage third-party impact and process evaluation activities by coordinating with evaluators, transferring data, and overseeing evaluation deliverables.
Publicize benefits and lessons learned resulting from your organization’s success in the market.
Communicate program results to contractor partners and workforce development stakeholders.
Identify and implement systems and tools that will support data collection and data quality necessary for effective evaluation.
Communicate the results of your financing activities to internal and external partners.
Develop processes to evaluate your organization’s strengths, weaknesses, and market position on a regular basis.
Focus on the continuous improvement of your financing activities by tracking and evaluating data, responding to feedback, and modifying strategies when needed.
Identify and develop needed resources to position your organization in the market and maintain a viable business model.
Solidify your program strategy and decide which customers you will focus on; what products, services, and support you will provide; and how you will partner with contractors and others to deliver services to your customers.
Determine processes for collecting and sharing data about key contractor metrics and workforce development activities.
Launch your financing activities in coordination with other program components.
Establish relationships with organizations that can help deliver your program by enhancing your knowledge, resources, capabilities and access to customers and contractors.
Establish program goals and objectives to clarify what you want your program to achieve and to guide program design and implementation over time.
Create your organization’s business plan, which describes how your operational and financial structure will support the delivery of energy efficiency services.
Define your business model, including market position, products and services, type of customers, financial model, governance structure, and the assets and infrastructure your organization needs.
Identify and engage organizational partners in your business model design.
Monitor the effectiveness of marketing and outreach strategies and adapt as needed.
Communicate marketing and outreach results internally and to partners.
Implement marketing and outreach activities in coordination with other program components to generate demand for your program's services.
Create your program's branding guidelines and materials to elevate program visibility and support your marketing and outreach efforts.
Establish an evaluation plan that will allow you to determine how your financing activities are impacting the market.
Determine if enhancements to existing financing products or the development of new products are necessary to allow you to achieve your goals and objectives.
Develop a plan to implement your financing activities, with defined roles for financial institution partners, contractors, customers, and your program.
Develop a plan and metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing and outreach strategies.
Develop a marketing and outreach plan that details your strategies and tactics, workflows and timelines, staff roles and responsibilities, and budget.
Decide on priority target audience segments, messages, and incentives that will motivate customers.
Identify and partner with financial institutions that can provide capital, underwriting, and other functions to enable your customers to access financing.
Establish goals, objectives, and timeframes for your financing activities.
Establish relationships with organizations that will assist with program marketing and outreach.
Determine how your target audience currently funds energy efficiency services, to what extent upfront cost is a barrier, and whether improvements to their financing options would increase the uptake of energy efficiency measures.
Establish or update your organizational mission, vision, and goals to encompass energy efficiency programs.
Identify and prioritize potential target audiences based on their likely receptivity to your program's services.
Learn about the capabilities and services of existing contractors and training providers working in your market.
Survey existing and potential demand for energy efficiency products and services based on an understanding of policies, housing and energy characteristics, demographics, related initiatives and other market actors.
Establish specific marketing and outreach goals, objectives, targets, and timeframes.
Design a residential energy efficiency program that integrates marketing and outreach, contractor coordination, incentives, financing, and program evaluation to provide customers with the products and services they want through a customer-centric process.
Ensure that your program’s customers will have access to affordable financing, so they can pay for the services you offer.
Identify your organization's preferred market position by assessing existing market actors, gaps, competitors, and potential partners. Develop a business model that will allow you to deliver energy efficiency services.
Develop evidence-based insights into your program’s performance through third-party process and impact evaluations. Learn how to develop effective data collection strategies and timely evaluations to identify important program achievements as well as opportunities for making program improvements.
Spur consumer demand for your program's services by understanding your target audience and motivating them to act using effective messaging, marketing and outreach tactics, and attractive program offers.
Develop contractor engagement, quality assurance, and workforce development plans that include strategies, workflow, timelines, and staff and partner roles and responsibilities.
Improve your program’s efficiency and effectiveness through regular information collection, assessment, decision-making, adaptation, and communication.
Develop the necessary materials, tools, and staff capacity to effectively deliver and manage your program.
Develop a strategy for communicating program impacts and benefits to key audiences to create and sustain support and engagement.
Ensure a positive customer experience with your program from launch through implementation over time.
Identify the right questions to ask, appropriate metrics to collect, and the processes needed to initiate third-party impact and process evaluations.
Solidify your program strategy and decide which customers you will focus on; what products, services, and support you will provide; and how you will partner with contractors and others to deliver services to your customers.
Establish metrics and measurement strategies for understanding whether you are effectively achieving your program goals and meeting your customers’ needs, while identifying areas that can be improved.
Establish relationships with contractors who will deliver program products and services, and with organizations that train and certify workers.
Establish objectives, targets, and timeframes for your program to support local contractors and the type and quality of service they provide to help meet your program’s goals.
Research and analyze the specific barriers, needs, and opportunities for a residential energy efficiency program in your community.
Support and partner with the workforce who will deliver your program’s energy efficiency services by understanding their capacity, recruiting contractor partners, enabling technical training and business development support, fostering clear communication, and refining program processes over time, in partnership with your workforce.
Programs that enabled contractors to install energy saving measures during the home energy assessment were more successful than those that did not. Based on a comprehensive analysis of over 140 programs across the United States, programs that provided direct installation of some low-cost measures...
Programs that offered several paths for customers to upgrade their homes—for example through a choice of single or bundled measures, staged upgrades over time, or a comprehensive whole home upgrade—were found to motivate greater homeowner participation and generate higher energy savings, according...
Several successful residential energy efficiency programs offered multiple types of home energy assessments to appeal to a wider spectrum of homeowner interests and needs. These ranged from online home assessments to brief walk-throughs to full diagnostic testing. A comprehensive evaluation of over...
To develop a successful business model, Better Buildings Neighborhood Program partners found it critical to have a strong understanding of the external environment within which they operated. This included who their customers were, who their competitors and partners were, what key policies governed...
In order to craft a sustainable financial model, organizations need to identify long-term sustainable revenue sources. As with the Better Buildings Neighborhood Program, grant funding can be a great way to get an effort off the ground; however, grant funding does run out, leaving the need to secure...
Many residential energy efficiency programs run into challenges maintaining an appropriately sized, well-trained workforce from program launch through maturity, as well as through the fluctuating demand of the seasons of the year. Some programs found that their contractors preferred a smooth annual...
Home energy assessments and upgrades can offer more than just energy savings benefits. They can make homes safer, enhance home value, and reduce health risks for residents. Better Buildings Neighborhood Program partners found that emphasizing the full range of benefits that upgrades offered helped...
Effective home performance contractors require many types of skills and expertise. To help individuals develop those skills, programs can target training on the specific topics and skills needed for successful home performance work. Many Better Buildings Neighborhood Program partners found that they...
Even with the best contractor partners, a program may sometimes encounter difficulties that require remediation. Consistent with Home Performance with ENERGY STAR program principles, many Better Buildings Neighborhood Program partners discovered that they could address these difficulties by...
Your program will rely on its contractor base in order to succeed, so take steps to ensure that the capacity of the workforce is sufficient to launch your program and to maintain it as it grows. An evaluation of over 140 programs found that successful programs fostered and maintained relationships...
Establishing strong, collaborative partnerships with one or more lending partners is critical for successful delivery of affordable home energy lending. These partnerships are typically created through a request for proposal (RFP) process which can encourage market competition and help to attract...
Many home performance programs have confronted the challenge of how to reach out to more customers and to improve conversion rates of customer interest into completed upgrades. Realizing that the contractor is a primary face-to-face link between customers and the program, some Better Buildings...
A residential energy efficiency program’s success is dependent on the quality of work that contractors conduct in customers’ homes. Indeed, an in-depth examination of selected program strategies found that effective quality assurance and quality control programs provided a foundation for quality...
Early on, many Better Buildings Neighborhood Program partners focused on providing customers with a range of contractors to choose from, while providing contractors with access to customers. Customer feedback received by some programs, however, indicated that customers were confused or overwhelmed...
Many programs used the information they gathered through their quality assurance efforts to recognize contractors that deliver consistent, high-quality work. Rewarding good contractor performance can help you build trust, strengthen partnerships, and boost workforce morale. You can incentivize...
Better Buildings Neighborhood Program partners found that conducting surveys of program participants that focus on tangible, easy-to-answer questions, such as the timeliness of service and the quality of work, resulted in better feedback. By including open-ended questions and questions about non...
Many Better Buildings Neighborhood Program partners found that program dashboards—regularly updated, easily accessed, summary reports of key metrics—helped them identify problems and monitor program progress toward their goals. Depending on the program’s goals and needs, dashboards included metrics...
Contractors are more likely to serve as program champions when the program engages with them throughout program design, delivery, and improvement. Your contractors are the primary contact points with your customers, and the quality of their interactions and services strongly influences how customers...
Many Better Buildings Neighborhood Program partners found that it was critically important to use compatible formats for data sharing and reporting with partners. Aligning data formats and collection plans with national data formats (e.g., Home Performance XML schema (HPXML), Standard Energy...
Many Better Buildings Neighborhood Program partners found that it was important to communicate during the program design phase with organizations and individuals that will collect or supply data for the evaluation. In this way, the involved individuals and organizations understand why the data is...
Though potentially challenging, establishing relationships for sharing energy consumption data is critical for evaluating program impact on energy and cost savings. Many Better Buildings Neighborhood Program partners found success by approaching utilities during the program planning phase, or at...
Paper-based or spreadsheet-based information collection processes can be low cost to develop and easy to roll-out, but more often than not, they become cumbersome to aggregate and store the data from many sources. Many Better Buildings Neighborhood Program partners found that investing in...
Successful programs use many channels to communicate accomplishments and results to stakeholders. These include word of mouth and products such as press releases, announcements on websites, case studies, and presentations. Many programs use earned media—especially local media when possible—by giving...
Measuring performance at key points in the upgrade process (e.g., assessments, conversion rates, and financing applications) has helped programs understand where their processes are working smoothly and where they are not. This information has helped them continuously improve their program design...
Many Better Buildings Neighborhood Program partners found that setting up their information technology (IT) systems early in the program design stage ensured that data terms and data entry procedures were consistently applied by all system users. Reaching agreement with stakeholders (e.g...
Many Better Buildings Neighborhood Program partners found that it is important to get buy-in from program staff and contractors on the importance of data integrity to the program mission and then to invest time to develop materials and train everyone who has a role in data collection and analysis...
Many program administrators have found that launching and scaling up a program often takes longer than planned for, especially when forming partnerships with contractors and lenders. New energy efficiency programs often need at least 2-3 years to launch and become fully operational. Across programs...
Several residential energy efficiency programs have successfully launched their efforts by focusing on completing early upgrades that build visibility for their program, create momentum, and allow programs to learn how to reach homeowners effectively. This early success provides results that the...
Programs that have developed strong and lasting partnerships have done so by identifying shared goals and seeking ways in which programs and partners can mutually benefit by advancing each other's missions. Even if partners don’t have the same goals as your program, you can still try to find ways to...
Successful programs know that it is not enough to get customers interested in their services. They know that homeowners that receive assessments but don’t undertake upgrades don’t receive the benefits of energy efficiency—and programs don’t get credit for energy savings. Instead of emphasizing...
Many programs that focused on a specific neighborhood or other small geographic areas have found it difficult to generate enough customer interest, partner interest, and upgrade activity to meet program goals. Regional or statewide approaches are often more attractive to contractors, lenders...
Some programs provide customers with a “certificate of completion” to recognize and reward homeowners’ accomplishment in completing an upgrade. Visible awards or affirmation, such as yard signs, window stickers, or favorable comparisons to neighbors can motivate homeowners to undertake upgrades...
In order to overcome lenders’ concerns over the risk associated with energy efficiency loans, many Better Buildings Neighborhood Program partners offered credit enhancements to lenders (e.g., loan loss reserve funds) to attract lender participation and to mitigate lender losses in the event of loan...
Given all of the other things that compete for your audience’s attention, it is critical that program participation steps are straightforward and easy to understand. Many programs have found that complexity makes it harder for interested homeowners to complete upgrade projects. These programs have...
Programs in many regions of the U.S. find that the concept of home performance is new to homeowners. Homeowners may not know how energy efficiency measures compare (e.g., energy savings benefits of insulation versus new windows) or have not heard about some effective measures, such as air sealing...
While homeowners may be interested in the benefits of an energy upgrade, many are deterred from completing an upgrade project because of the complex and unknown process. Often, a significant portion of homeowners who receive energy assessments do not continue with the upgrades. As part of the Better...
Historically, energy efficiency financing have required two sources of funding: credit enhancement funds to mitigate risk and support attractive financing, and senior capital to fund the majority of the loan principal. Some residential energy efficiency programs have successfully assembled loan...
Without an incentive, homeowners and contractors may limit themselves to smaller upgrade projects. Programs in search of more energy savings have found that some homeowners already interested in an upgrade are amenable to a bigger upgrade when coupled with better financing terms or larger rebates...
Financing can be a complicated topic for programs, and having staff with financing knowledge and expertise can be very valuable. Financing program administration involves working with lenders and understanding how they operate as well as understanding financial regulatory issues and loan product...
Many programs struggle with communicating the value of financing to homeowners. Financing can be a complicated topic, and ensuring that homeowners understand how their loans work and the benefits they will realize is important for converting interest into action. Many Better Buildings Neighborhood...
Homeowners do not benefit from access to financing if they don’t know about or understand options available to them. Contractors are often the primary transaction point for selling upgrades, and many programs have found that ongoing collaboration with contractors through sales training, regular...