The goal of the Marketing Education & Outreach (ME&O) Program is to motivate consumers to take action on energy efficiency/conservation measures and change their behavior. The program strives to both increase consumer awareness and facilitate the ability to act and incorporate technological advances or behavior change using all available resources to reduce energy and choose clean energy options. This Five-Year ME&O Strategic Roadmap includes two main sections: (1) the objectives, strategies, and metrics for customer engagement and how these strategies will lead greenhouse gas reduction and energy efficiency goals of the California Public Utilities Commission.

This document reflects what the California Public Utilities Commission’s customer engagement campaign will accomplish from April 1, 2017 through March 31, 2018. It also includes goals and objectives, target audiences, high-level approaches and strategies, metrics, and implementation roles and responsibilities for each strategy.

This toolkit describes how to strengthen residential energy efficiency program outreach and marketing efforts through data-driven, tailored efforts to change behaviors. One of the greatest challenges facing the residential energy efficiency market is motivating people to take steps to save energy. This toolkit provides guidance, resources, and examples for applying community-based social marketing (CBSM) to increase the number of homes that are energy efficient.

This tool from Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E) provides homeowners with a list of contractors, based on their location, to schedule an energy assessment or in-home consultation.  It also provides a direct link to state license information.

This tool provides Southern California Edison (SCE) and Southern California Gas (SoCalGas) customers with a list of Energy Upgrade California participating contractors, home performance skills, license information, and the languages spoken by the contractors.

The adoption of intelligent efficiency applications is increasing across multiple sectors of the economy. This report analyzes over two dozen of these applications in the buildings, manufacturing, transportation, and government sectors. We describe the technologies involved, characterize their use, and quantify their deployment. We also look at several enabling and cross-cutting technologies and the use of intelligent efficiency in utility-sector energy efficiency programs.

This report provides a comprehensive review and analysis of home energy upgrade programs with proven track records, focusing on those with robustly verified savings and constituting good examples for replication. This meta-analysis describes program models and implementation strategies for direct install upgrades; heating, HVAC replacement and early retirement; and comprehensive, whole-home upgrades.

This presentation includes examples of 16 programs' creative marketing materials.  The Better Buildings Residential Network held a March Madness tournament to find the most creative residential energy efficiency messages during March Peer Exchange Calls. Sixteen marketing campaigns were featured in a bracket challenge on the calls, and participants made their picks. Residential Network member the Fuel Fund of Maryland was chosen as the winning message for its Watt Watchers campaign.

This presentation covers details of an in-store market test for Super-Efficient Dryer (SED) marketing collateral. Five different marketing message concepts were created based on previous consumer research. The concepts include: an image, a headline of the key benefit, and a brief product description to drive credibility.

Utilities and regulators increasingly rely on behavior change programs as essential parts of their demand side management (DSM) portfolios. This report evaluates the effectiveness of currently available programs, focusing on programs that have been assessed for energy savings. This report focuses on behavior change programs that primarily rely on social-science-based strategies instead of traditional approaches such as incentives, rebates, pricing, or legal and policy strategies. The objective is to help program administrators choose effective behavior change programs for their specific purposes.

The presentation covers evaluation findings from California’s Statewide Marketing, Education and Outreach (SW ME&O) program.

This report presents findings from the Cross-Cutting Process Study of California’s 2013-2015 Marketing, Education and Outreach (ME&O) efforts. This study has three overarching goals: to assess how well coordination occurs between the Statewide ME&O administrator and the Investor Owned Utility (IOU) and Regional Energy Network (REN) Program Administrators (PAs); to document ME&O design and implementation activities, and to document how consumers engage with ME&O.

The purpose of this study is to document the effects of California’s Statewide Marketing, Education and Outreach (SW ME&O) program. The primary objective of this study is to assess the effectiveness of SW ME&O efforts overall, as well as against established performance metrics.

The presentation covers evaluation results and recommendations for California’s Statewide Marketing, Education and Outreach (SW ME&O) program.

This report explores how governments and energy efficiency implementers could help stakeholders better analyze and act upon building performance data to unlock savings.

This report identifies opportunities for Connecticut's Home Energy Solutions program (HES) to increase savings related to air sealing, duct sealing, and insulation.

This report is a guide to all customer-facing financing products—products offered by a lender directly to a borrower—used to pay for energy efficiency. Intended for state and local governments that are deciding whether to start a new program, tune up and existing program, or create a Green Bank, it provides information on the full range of financing product options for target participants, the tradeoffs of various products, and potential advantages and disadvantages for different types of customers.

This report presents the process evaluation results on the statewide Home Upgrade Program and includes findings on program operations, participant engagement, non-energy impacts, contractor characteristics, and contractor-customer interactions.

This presentation covers Energy Upgrade California marketing plan to educate and empower businesses and consumers across the state of California to promote energy efficient practices and product.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on approaches organizations can use to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of home upgrade programs, including strategies to streamline data entry and make continuous process improvements.

Achieving energy savings goals and improving customer and contractor satisfaction while staying cost-effective makes managing home energy upgrade programs challenging. DOE's Home Upgrade Program Accelerator is working with program administrators to identify strategies that overcome challenges and achieve better results. The Arizona Home Performance with ENERGY STAR program completed process improvements that improved contractor satisfaction and deceased quality assurance labor.  Build It Green implemented software improvements to their utility program's online rebate applications portal to accelerate data processing.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on opportunities and challenges in the Southeast and holistic, whole house approaches for working in hot and humid climates.

Better Buildings Home Upgrade Program Accelerator partners, Build It Green, Enhabit, and NeighborWorks of Western Vermont, discussed steps for streamlining program processes, and strategies to improve data management, contractor relationships, and customer experiences. Tools and resources were presented as examples of how these ideas can be implemented in programs across the country.

This presentation covers the strategies, objectives and metrics for Energy Upgrade California.

The benefits of energy efficiency upgrades beyond money and energy savings include non-energy benefits that are often not communicated well. Multiple non-energy benefits include lower home maintenance costs, improved air quality and less sick days for adults and children, greater resiliency, and lower emissions. This presentation covers examples of how your program can fully realize the potential from all of these multiple non-energy benefits.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on how to assess, reassess, and initiate organization partnerships.

The multifamily sector can be hard to reach when it comes to energy efficiency programs. Besides being diverse and complex, the sector presents a unique set of challenges to efficiency investments. The result is that multifamily customers are often underserved by energy efficiency programs. Drawing on data requests and interviews with program administrators, this report summarizes the challenges to program participation and identifies best practices that programs can use to reach and retain large numbers of multifamily participants.

This presentation discusses how Energy Upgrade California streamlined its program through improvements in its HPXML and IT software.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on integrating health and home performance and discussed connecting energy efficiency and health.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on strategies for scaling up and growing residential energy efficiency programs or contracting businesses. It covered PG&E's Residential Energy Efficiency Program's Pay for Performance (P4P) program. It also covered priority areas to consider when scaling up a program, such as contractor sales and marketing training and maintaining quality.

This Guide is designed to help state and local policymakers to take full advantage of new policy developments by providing them with a comprehensive set of tools to support launching or accelerating residential energy efficiency programs. The Guide focuses on four categories of policies that have proven particularly effective in providing a framework within which residential energy efficiency programs can thrive: incentives and financing, making the value of energy efficiency visible in the real estate market, data access and standardization, and supporting utility system procurement of energy efficiency.

This document summarizes top marketing and outreach takeaways shared by Better Buildings Residential Network members during spring 2015 Peer Exchange Calls.

The Better Buildings Residential Network Social Media toolkit can be used to help residential energy efficiency programs learn to engage potential customers through social media. Social media can build brand awareness concerning home energy upgrades and the entities working on them, which can lead to more energy upgrade projects taking place in the long run. This toolkit will help program managers and their staff with decisions like what social media works best for various program needs. When aligned with other marketing and outreach efforts, social media can be a useful tool in attracting home energy upgrade customers. Note that social media changes constantly, so users of this toolkit need to regularly reassess their methods and review results to ensure goals are being met.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on community-based outreach and organizing strategies to market home energy assessments and upgrades.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on approaches to generate demand for energy efficiency upgrades at multifamily buildings.

The MF HERCC Recommendations Report 2015 Update expands the 2011 publication, and delivers explicit and refined recommendations for multifamily energy efficiency program administrators and implementers.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on how to create and maintain relationships with contractors and auditors.

The benefits of energy efficiency extend beyond energy savings. Homes, commercial buildings, and industrial facilities gain comfort, health, and safety benefits from energy efficiency programs. Additional benefits for businesses include savings on maintenance, materials, and the costs of regulatory compliance. On the supply side, electric utilities enjoy reduced system costs. Focusing on the residential, business, and utility sectors, this report examines each of these multiple benefits, their role in program marketing, and current best practices for including them in cost-effectiveness testing.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on approaches to improve and sustain quality customer service for residential energy efficiency work.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on three programs that would engage homeowners in energy efficiency programs.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on how to involve homeowners in staged energy efficiency upgrades and what information is appropriate to share with them at each stage.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on how pet-based marketing can promote residential energy efficiency.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on changing an organization's home performance business model and expanding the services offered.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on how to use web and mobile applications to generate and increase customer demand.

Among the many benefits ascribed to energy efficiency is the fact that it can help create jobs. Although this is often used to motivate investments in efficiency programs, verifying job creation benefits is more complicated than it might seem at first. This paper identifies some of the issues that contribute to a lack of consistency in attempts to verify efficiency-related job creation. It then proposes an analytically rigorous and tractable framework for program evaluators to use in future assessments.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on types of incentives.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on combining solar and home performance energy efficiency.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on the benefits and disadvantages of combining solar and home performance goals simultaneously.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on strategies and advantages of combining energy and water conservation services.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on energy modeling in multifamily homes.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on evaluating and demonstrating the cost-effectiveness of energy upgrades to programs.

This plan outlines a brand and marketing strategy to establish Energy Upgrade California as California's central energy management brand and motivate residential and small business energy consumers to take action to better manage their energy use through the brand's comprehensive statewide marketing, education, and outreach campaigns.

This plan presents the marketing education and outreach plan for Energy Upgrade California's financing pilots.

This marketing plan describes a social mobilization approach that leverages social networking, including social media, and word-of-mouth marketing to raise awareness and drive customers to program services. It provides strategies and tactics to target audiences most likely to participate, building on market research and audience segmentation to develop a message platform specifically designed to address their key motivating factors and barriers.

This contractor process flowchart from EnergySmart Colorado includes the phases of contractor qualifications review and preparation, site work, and follow up.

There are more than 17 million multifamily households nationwide, yet they remain a significant and mostly untapped opportunity for energy efficiency gains. Many cities and states that have embraced energy retrofitting as a job creator and boon to both the environment and economy have yet to address potential savings in multifamily properties, primarily because of obstacles not faced by single family and commercial properties. This paper discusses two barriers -- a lack of information and financing -- that stand in the way of multifamily energy retrofits.

Table summarizing financing options for Colorado residents in EnergySmart Colorado territory.

Summary of minimum standards and requirements for the Massachusetts HEAT Loan program.

In this video interview segment, Ludy Biddle with Neighborworks of Western Vermont describes the benefits of one-on-one communications between customers and the Neighborhood H.E.A.T. Squad program's energy advisors.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on ways to reach out to landlords.

Quick summaries of strategies various programs have used to improve the efficiency of delivering efficiency.

Overview of lessons learned from EnergySmart Colorado's energy advisor model.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on introducing and building interest in multi-family energy efficiency.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on new and updated revenue strategies.

This radio interview highlights how the NeighborWorks program in Vermont is raising awareness of home energy efficiency measures among residents through neighbor-to-neighbor outreach.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on state policies that help promote energy efficiency.

This study of Energy Upgrade California aims to: establish baseline consumer brand awareness; understand consumer associations with the brand; and understand consumer awareness of energy management and bill savings opportunities and barriers to taking action on those opportunities.

This study reviews consumer-facing energy-focused websites and their related assets to provide a comprehensive roadmap for website development to transform and optimize the Energy Upgrade California web portal to better support the program efforts facilitating consumer and small business participation.

Example survey about a homeowner's experience with a visit from an energy advisor as part of EnergySmart in Boulder County, Colorado.

This paper first details industry best practices for contest administration, including tips for developing an overall contest plan and timeline, product sponsor recruitment, building a dynamic informational website, maximizing customer participation, selecting the winning home, seamless installation management, capturing and documenting project results, conducting a high profile media open house and facilitating customer workshops that educate homeowners and strengthen trade ally relationships. This paper then presents results and key lessons learned from more than 20 contests supported with funds from local community sustainability programs, utility energy efficiency programs, and U.S. Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds between 2008 and 2012.

This study looks at evidence of capitalization of energy efficiency features in home prices using data from real estate multiple listing services (MLS) in three metropolitan areas: the Research Triangle region of North Carolina; Austin, Texas; and Portland, Oregon. These home listings include information on Energy Star certification and, in Portland and Austin, local green certifications. Our results suggest that Energy Star certification increases the sales prices of homes built between 1995 and 2006 but has no statistically significant effect on sales prices for newer homes.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on the strategies and challenges of using holidays and other seasonal events to market energy assessments and upgrades.

This peer exchange call summary focused on moving from assessments to upgrades in multifamily buildings.

This report explores the approaches and research needs identified in the Building Retrofit Industry and Market (BRIM) Initiative through in-depth discussion with residential energy upgrade experts including a discussion of Marketing & Outreach and the program/contractor interface.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on trends in contractor conversion rates.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on working with the real estate sector to promote and drive demand for energy efficiency.

This peer exchange call summary focused on leveraging home inspectors and others in the real estate transaction processes.

In this video interview segment, Marty Treadway of Energy Smart Colorado discusses how to avoid contractor frustration by testing data collection tools before deployment.

This publication summarizes some of the incentives offered by Better Buildings Neighborhood Program partners.

This peer exchange call summary focused on raising awareness and integrating the value of energy efficiency into transactions with the real estate sector.

This webcast includes slides and information on programs' use of concierge programs to support contractors. It highlights two program examples: Clean Energy Works Oregon (now Enhabit) and Vermont NeighborWorks.

This webcast includes slides and information on programs' use of concierge programs to support contractors. It highlights two program examples: Clean Energy Works Oregon (now Enhabit) and Vermont NeighborWorks.

This guide shows HVAC contractors how to get started in the home improvement market. It explains the approach of treating a house like a system and provides step-by-step instructions on setting up a home performance contracting business.

This peer exchange call summary focused on the relationship between contract pricing and customers.

This progress report provides community members and others interested in EnergySmart with a clear snapshot of its progress. The report also provides a timeline of energy efficiency policies and programs in Boulder County.

NeighborWorks of Western Vermont (NWWVT) contracted with The Cadmus Group, Inc., to evaluate its H.E.A.T. Squad program. The evaluation activities informed two main areas of interest: program and market effects, and impact and cost-effectiveness. To inform the evaluation, Cadmus surveyed participant and non-participant homeowners and interviewed program stakeholders.

This paper explores ways in which program administrators are using social norms to spur behavior change and, as a result, curb energy use. In recent years, home energy reports (HER) programs have applied the concept of social norms to the energy efficiency context. These feedback programs inform customers of how their energy consumption compares to their neighbors' and provide other information about their usage, with the goal of enticing customers to change their energy use behavior to improve their relative neighborhood ranking.

This peer exchange call summary focused on multifamily information technology tools for project information, marketing, assessment, tracking and evaluation.

This peer exchange call summary focused on adapting and adjusting financing strategies after a program was implemented.