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.

On Efficiency Maine’s "Find a Residential Registered Vendor" locator on its website, customers can see the services each contractor offers, sort the list by distance from the homeowner, and differentiate contractors based on number of projects completed and customer satisfaction. All contractors are added to the list when they meet the program's requirements.

This document profiles the Chicago-area non-profit Elevate Energy, which offers a full-service energy efficiency retrofit program for owners of and tenants in affordable multifamily buildings in eleven states.

This flyer provides information about the program's upgrade process, financing, benefits of the program and of home energy upgrades, and eligibility requirements.

This presentation provides an overview of the Energy Savers program for affordable rental housing, its loan structure, and lessons learned.

This calendar provides Illinois Home Performance's participating contractors with information on upcoming residential energy efficiency trainings or events on topics such as HVAC quality installation and an introduction to building science.

This free hotline is provided by Illinois Home Performance to help homeowners and energy professionals find quick answers to building science questions.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on key challenges and opportunities to deploy neighborhood energy programs. Speakers include the City of Orlando, SEEDS, and Research Into Action, Inc.

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 summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on unique challenges for energy efficiency and weatherization programs serving lower income residents in single-family and multifamily housing. Speakers include American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, Elevate Energy, and Energy Outreach Colorado.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call summary focused on leveraging smart tech, health and/or utility data to increase participation in multifamily energy efficiency programs. It featured speakers from The Network for Energy, Water and Health in
Affordable Buildings, New Ecology, Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, and Emerald Cities Collaborative.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on how recent policy changes have impacted residential energy efficiency program implementation. Speakers include Efficiency Maine, Michigan Environmental Council, and Groundwork Center for Resilient Communities.

Year in review annual report which includes program data and success stories.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on how home energy upgrade programs can interact and connect with the real estate market.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on ensuring contractor networks work for both energy efficiency programs and participating contractors.

This webcast in a multi-part series highlighting efforts by state and local agencies, non-profits, and utilities to bring energy efficiency and renewable energy (EE/RE) to low-income communities.

This case study features Better Buildings Residential Network members Elevate Energy and the International Center for Appropriate and Sustainable Technology (ICAST), nonprofit members that develop energy efficiency solutions for multifamily and affordable housing communities.

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 the process evaluation of the Connecticut Multifamily (MF) Initiative, which leveraged the state's Home Energy Solutions (HES) and Home Energy Solutions-Income Eligible (HES-IE) programs. The objective of this process evaluation is to provide actionable recommendations about how to improve the design, delivery, and administration of the MF Initiative.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on communicating non-energy benefits that homeowners and building owners are most interested in. Speakers include Elevate Energy, Green & Healthy Homes Initiative, and Skumatz Economic Research Associates, Inc.

This report presents the results from a comprehensive impact and process evaluation of Efficiency Maine's Low-Income Multifamily Weatherization Program.

This paper examines the current state of energy efficiency financing, highlighting segments of strength such as cars, green buildings, and energy service companies, and offering areas that are underserved, including residential low-income and moderate-income households and multifamily housing.

This case study addresses multifamily energy upgrade experiences by two members of the Better Buildings Residential Network—Elevate Energy and the International Center for Appropriate and Sustainable Technology (ICAST).

This report includes evaluation analysis and findings from the Eversource New Hampshire Home Energy Report pilot program.

Ivy Knoll Senior Retirement Community used PACE financing to make significant building improvements of systems that were outdated or energy inefficient. Through PACE financing, Ivy Knoll management was able to select improvements that had the highest energy savings but also came with higher upfront costs for the 7-story, all-electric building.

This paper analyzes Bank of America's $55 million initiative to provide low-cost funding and grant support to advance energy efficiency investment in low- to moderate-income communities. The funding supported community development financial institutions (CDFIs) in developing and enhancing efficiency programs for residential, commercial, and multifamily buildings. We report on loan performance, energy savings, and the degree to which the savings offset the cost of the energy efficiency investment.

This publication summarizes program design, marketing, workforce development, and other key takeaways learned during Peer Exchange Calls.

The Better Buildings Home Energy Information Accelerator aims to make energy data more accessible to home buyers, realtors and others. This presentation covers how Colorado launched a statewide residential labeling initiative that made home energy data available at point of sale, and how partnerships in the Northeast are incorporating energy efficiency into the Multiple Listing Service (MLS), with Vermont pioneering the regional effort.

In this project, the U.S. Department of Energy Building America team Partnership for Advanced Residential Retrofit (PARR) worked with Elevate Energy on three tasks: to conduct pre- and post-retrofit analysis on the income and expense data of 13 Chicago-area multifamily buildings, to compare Chicago income and expense data to two national samples, and to explore the ramifications that energy-efficiency retrofits have on nine Chicago-area neighborhoods.

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 report summarizes the impact analyses of National Grid's and Eversource Energy's Home Energy Report (HER) programs. The evaluation team conducted three distinct impact analyses related to these HER programs: Cohort-Specific Impact Analysis; Mapping Analysis; and Dual Treatment Analysis.

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 summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on challenges and strategies for working in cold climates.

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 technical reference manual provides detailed, comprehensive documentation of resource and non-resource savings corresponding to the Energy Efficiency Fund program and individual Conservation and Load Management (C&LM) program technologies.

This Multifamily Technical Reference Manuals (TRMs) provide documentation for the Trust's calculation of energy and demand savings from energy efficiency measures.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on how to generate energy upgrade customer leads and allocate those leads to contractors.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on standardization of effective practices across a program territory.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on the advantages, challenges, and effective creation and management of statewide energy efficiency alliances.

This guide identifies 12 best practices for policymakers, regulators, and program administrators to help building owners invest to increase the energy efficiency of multifamily affordable housing.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on how energy efficiency initiatives relate to real estate marketing.

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 paper describes existing barriers to integrating energy efficiency data into real estate markets, and illustrates recent efforts to address them. National cross-industry collaborations have resulted in standard data collection and transfer tools that allow home performance data to be shared across industries. Real estate markets in some regions have begun including these data into multiple listing services (MLS), making them visible during real estate transactions.

The study involved on-site visits to 180 single-family homes across Connecticut. The team assessed compliance with the weatherization standard using both the prescriptive and performance paths and made recommendations to improve program quality.

This form is used to itemize energy conservation measures as an eligibility requirement under Efficiency Maine's Home Energy Savings Program.

This report builds and expands off of previous research by collecting and evaluating data from 800 Illinois Home Performance (IHP) retrofits. This study investigates homeowner measure package choices in the Illinois Home Performance with ENERGY STAR® (IHP) program compared to cost-optimal choices determined through Building Energy Optimization (BEopt™) modeling software.

Insights from Efficiency Maine related to Workforce Development.

Illinois Home Performance provides co-branding opportunities for participating contractors, including co-branding on program marketing materials.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on driving demand for energy efficiency by leveraging service calls and emergency repairs.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on choosing and developing program evaluation.

Efficiency Maine developed this online portal, where many of its program forms are available for download (e.g., program overviews and manuals, participation agreements, and related application materials).

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on gathering and communicating loan performance data.

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

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on the features and eligibility of the PowerSaver Loan Program. 

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on the benefits and challenges of program automation.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on the challenges, strategies and advantages of  operating as a prime contractor.

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 peer exchange call summary focused on unique fee-for-service revenues as related to program sustainability.

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

This peer exchange call summary focused on sales training assistance programs for contractors.

In this video interview segment, Andy Holzhauser of Greater Cincinnati Energy Alliance discusses the importance of making early investments in infrastructure (i.e., staff and technology).

Efficiency Maine created a code of conduct for contractors to follow when working in homes. The code is available for download on the Efficiency Maine website, and dictates guidelines for respecting homeowners' property and communicating with the homeowner about appropriate information. Users on the Efficiency Maine website can search a list of vendors that have agreed to follow the code.

This video explains how Efficiency Maine helped contractors gain sales and business skills through training, which helped the program improve assessment-to-upgrade conversion rates and homeowner satisfaction.

In this video interview segment, Andy Holzhauser of the Greater Cincinnati Energy Alliance discusses the importance of programs empowering contractors to sell upgrades and loans.

In this video interview segment, Andy Holzhauser of the Greater Cincinnati Energy Alliance discusses how programs can create more effective loan products by first identifying existing loan products and then working to make them better for homeowners and contractors.

This case study explains how Efficiency Maine provided contractor sales training to boost upgrade conversions.

This peer exchange call summary focused on the challenges and strategies for marketing commercial financial products and attracting financial institutions.

This peer exchange call summary focused on activities to streamline service delivery to customers.

This presentation includes the brands, website addresses, and images for most of the Better Buildings Neighborhood Program partners.

This Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Clean Energy Policy Brief describes how adding sales skills to contractors' existing technical expertise helps convert more assessments into comprehensive home energy upgrades. It profiles Efficiency Maine's contractor sales training and includes a list of resources.

This webcast offers information on successful marketing strategies, as well as design considerations and market research insights for creating and marketing successful projects in specific neighborhoods.

This peer exchange call summary focused on the challenges and effective combinations of quality assurance strategies.

Webcast on the DOE Residential Retrofit Program Design Guide, which focuses on the key elements and design characteristics of building and maintaining a successful residential upgrade program.

This report analyzes the energy efficiency opportunity presented to the greater Cincinnati region. Analysis of the region and the Greater Cincinnati Energy Alliance (GCEA) programs shows potential energy cost savings, including positive cash flow from energy cost savings that consistently exceed loan payments, for both residential and nonprofit participants. Investment in energy efficiency could make counties more competitive, create jobs, reduce pollution, and help homeowners and nonprofits make cross-cutting building improvements.