This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call emphasizes the health benefits of upgrades to make your program relevant to potential partners and audiences. Speakers include the City of Fort Collins, Colorado and  Green & Healthy Homes Initiative Greater Syracuse, Home Headquarters.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on best practices on upgrades for zero energy ready homes. Speakers include  Florida Solar Energy Center and BIRAenergy.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on key challenges and opportunities to deploy interactive engagement strategies including customer segmentation, loyalty and reward programs, and gamification. It features speakers from Fiveworx, ICF International, and Cool Choices.

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 summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on how to deploy smart home technologies and analyze their data.

Take you on a tour of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Better Buildings Residential Program Solution Center content and functionality and explore how you can use the Solution Center to help design, implement, and evaluate residential energy efficiency programs. Program examples focus on contractor engagement and workforce development. Learn how to 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, and refining program processes over time.

This document features lessons learned shared by Better Buildings Residential Network members during Peer Exchange Calls held during Fall 2015.

This document features lessons learned shared by Better Buildings Residential Network members during Peer Exchange Calls held in Winter 2016.

This document features lessons learned shared by Better Buidlings Residential Network members during Peer Exchange Calls held during Spring 2016.

Building on the strategy of creating a sustainable workplace, many companies have been focusing their efforts on developing a sustainable workforce. This approach to combining sustainability initiatives and employee engagement creates a value chain that has positive impacts for employers and employees alike and the communities they live in.

This handout summarizes the key lessons learned regarding marketing and outreach contained in the Better Buildings Residential Program Solution Center.

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

Real estate professionals are increasingly aware that today’s homebuyers consider heating and cooling costs, efficient appliances, and efficient lighting to be important factors in home purchase decisions. Residential energy efficiency and real estate stakeholders, however, agree that the home resale process frequently fails to account for the value of high-performance home features. If investments in energy efficiency were more accurately reflected in home resale prices, homeowners could have greater confidence that these investments would be recouped at resale, and they might make more investments in efficiency.

This report shares the results of a research study conducted to understand the awareness and perceptions of potential consumers regarding ductless heat pumps and heat pump water heaters. The results were intended to help the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance improve messaging and marketing themes related to these products across the northwest region.

The Consortium for Energy Efficiency has collected information from its membership for each of the past four years on the behavior-based programs currently underway and how these programs are being evaluated. This presentation describes the annual data collection effort and highlight the key findings of this research to date. Results discussed will consider the social science knowledge most commonly incorporated into the programs captured, as well as methods used for program evaluation and overarching lessons learned from the program administrator community.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on effective messaging.

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 document summarizes top takeaways shared by Better Buildings Residential Network members on Peer Exchange Calls, from tips to collaborating with utilities to cost-effective rebate models.

This Better Buildings Residential Network Partnerships Toolkit includes templates, tools, guides, and examples to help energy efficiency organizations engage in partnerships that leverage resources and strengthen their programs.

This worksheet can help you organize your ideas and methods for creating an effective evaluation plan.

This summary report provides scientific results, lessons learned, and recommendations for driving energy efficiency in existing buildings on an urban scale. It includes program marketing lesson learned, such as: personal outreach and call to action events are critical marketing opportunities.

This webinar is the third (in a series of six) hosted by USDA Rural Utility Service (RUS) and focusing on the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Loan Program (EECLP). The first in a two-part series, this webinar shares best practices from the more than 40 competitively selected state and local governments who participated in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Better Buildings Neighborhood Program, including market position and business model, program design and customer experience, evaluation and data collection, marketing and outreach, financing, and contractor engagement and workforce development.

This webinar is the fourth (in a series of six) hosted by USDA Rural Utility Service (RUS) and focusing on the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Loan Program (EECLP). The second in a two-part series, this webinar shares best practices from the more than 40 competitively selected state and local governments who participated in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Better Buildings Neighborhood Program. This webinar focuses on data collection and continuous improvement, partnering with financial institutions, community-based outreach, and quality assurance of contractor work. It also features a case study from Jackson Electric Member Corporation about their audit tools, rebates and loans, tracking and reporting, and marketing and advertising strategies.

SEEA created this document to inform the planning, design and delivery of early-stage energy efficiency programs in the Southeast. This document captures general concepts essential to the successful development and implementation of robust program portfolios, as well as lessons learned from prior experience on the regional and national levels.

The report, the second in a series of reports on smart meters, presents concrete examples of findings from behavior analytics research using data that are immediately useful and relevant, including proof-of-concept analytics techniques that can be adapted and used by others, novel discoveries that answer important policy questions, and guidelines and protocols that summarize best practices for analytics and evaluation.

This publication presents examples of the value that insights from behavior analytics can provide to programs (as well as pointing out its limitations).

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 webcast discusses the savings and cost-effectiveness of home energy reports programs.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on programs and outreach for faith-based organizations.

This presentation provides an overview of the results and lessons learned from 41 community partners that participated in the Better Buildings Neighborhood Program. It also provides an overview of the Better Buildings Residential Program Solution Center.

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

This database provides comprehensive information on state, federal, local, and utility incentives and policies that are in place to support renewable energy and energy efficiency.

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

As part of the Rhode Island Energy Challenge, National Grid called on its Rhode Island residential electric and gas customers to take a pledge to “Find Your Four” as part of a statewide community initiative to encourage homeowners to find four ways to save energy at home. A participant survey revealed that Rhode Island residential customers liked hearing energy conservation/efficiency information via the Challenge; the Challenge had them thinking and acting differently; and the Challenge had customers participating more actively in energy efficiency programs. This report provides more information on the campaign’s major impact in helping National Grid accomplish important goals, including those related to portfolio savings and customer-centric program outreach and engagement.

This report demonstrates the results achieved to date by the Southeast Energy Efficiency Alliance. It highlights the experiences of Consortium programs, their successes driving further investments in energy efficiency improvements, and the challenges that hindered their progress. It also details the infrastructure, resources, and opportunities that support the deployment of energy efficiency programming, and the approaches that the Consortium has found best suited to the region.

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 report provides the results of the Consortium for Energy Efficiency-sponsored 2013 ENERGY STAR Household Survey, which collects national data on consumer recognition, understanding, and purchasing influence of the ENERGY STAR label, as well as data on messaging and product purchases.

Links to case studies of residential projects and contractors under the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA)'s Home Performance with ENERGY STAR program.

The Small Town Energy Program (STEP) toolkit gives a complete overview of STEP from planning to implementation. It also includes access to a wide variety of materials developed by the program, including: local asset materials, partner materials, personnel materials, program administrative materials, outreach materials, and surveys. STEP has posted these toolkit documents with the hope that it will assist other small towns and communities in building and running more energy efficiency programs.

This blog post outlines basic needs for a successful marketing program: a plan; a budget; and to launch, track, evaluate, adjust, repeat.

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.

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.

Presentation about the pro forma to evaluate the impact of program marketing on contractor revenue developed by the National Home Performance Council.