This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on using tailored messaging and approaches to meet the unique needs of families. Building Doctors is the featured speaker.

This presentation describes how PG&E is using advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) to enhance their advanced home upgrade whole-house retrofit program, on-bill financing, and residential pay for performance (P4P) program.

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 energy efficiency financing for low- and moderate-income households, including a sector overview, consumer protections, financing products, and lessons learned.

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.

This document defines consumer protection policies for California's statewide Open PACE program, which is implemented at the local level for residential and commercial property owners. Property assessed clean energy (PACE) programs enable homeowners to finance energy efficiency, renewable energy, and water efficiency improvements. These recommended consumer protection policies can help guide PACE Program implementation to ensure homeowners realize maximum benefit.

This presentation introduces the Energy Programs Consortium report, Residential Property Assessed Clean Energy (R-PACE) - A Primer for State and Local Energy Officials. It also covers R-PACE statistics, program details, comparisons with other financing options, and consumer protections.

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 presentation covers the public process to encourage stakeholder participation and input in developing the criteria  for a comparative assessment of energy efficiency financing programs.

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 summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on how organizations can diversify and grow new revenue streams and types of financing approaches used to make resources stretch further and help homeowners finance upgrades. Speakers include Connecticut Green Bank, Sealed, and Craft3.

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 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 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 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.

Energy burden is the percentage of household income spent on home energy bills. In this report, ACEEE, along with the Energy Efficiency for All coalition, measures the energy burden of households in 48 of the largest American cities. The report finds that low-income, African-American, Latino, low-income multifamily, and renter households all spend a greater proportion of their income on utilities than the average family. The report also identifies energy efficiency as an underutilized strategy that can help reduce high energy burdens by as much as 30%. Given this potential, the report goes on to describe policies and programs to ramp up energy efficiency investments in low-income and underserved communities.

This report, informed by leading research and real-world examples, highlights practical online and in-person tactics that contractors can use to promote social interaction and social comparison among homeowners to make energy upgrades a "must-have" in U.S. homes.

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.

Energy efficiency is good for you--and for the air you breathe, the water you drink, and the community in which you live. This fact sheet shows how saving energy reduces air and water pollution and conserves natural resources, which in turn creates a healthier living environment for people everywhere. It includes the stories of a family in Pennsylvania and a hospital in Florida.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on developing messaging and branding strategies.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on changes and trends in the market for home energy upgrades.

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.

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 presentation covers the New York On-Bill recovery financing, Home Energy Lending Program's (H.E.L.P.) loan program, and California energy efficiency financing products.

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

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on the benefits and challenges of local programs connecting to national campaigns.

This report lays the groundwork for a dialogue to explore regulatory and policy mechanisms for ensuring that efficiency financing initiatives provide value for society and protection for consumers. Through case studies of Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, California, and Maryland, it explores emerging issues that jurisdictions will need to tackle when considering an increased reliance on financing.

A number of states are beginning to recognize Demand Reduction Induced Price Effects (DRIPE) as a real, quantifiable benefit of energy efficiency and demand response programs. DRIPE is a measurement of the value of demand reductions in terms of the decrease in wholesale energy prices, resulting in lower total expenditures on electricity or natural gas across a given grid. This paper reviews the existing knowledge and experience from select U.S. states regarding DRIPE (including New York and Ohio), and the potential for expanded application of the concept of DRIPE by regulators.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on marketing techniques for lower income and other underrepresented populations.

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 webcast covers a report that is a comparative analysis of utility-run behavior programs, which lays the groundwork for further program development by developing a classification scheme, or taxonomy, that sorts programs into discrete categories.

Presents the loan loss reserve guidelines for the Arkansas Residential Energy Efficiency Loan Loss Reserve Program.

The California investor-owned utilities -- Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), Southern California Edison (SCE), Southern California Gas (SoCalGas), and San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E), referred to collectively as the IOUs or Joint Utilities -- are designing seven energy efficiency financing pilot programs at the California Public Utilities Commission’s (CPUC's) direction. To help inform the pilot design process and subsequent evaluation efforts, this report summarizes a comprehensive review of 15 existing financing programs representing noteworthy program models across the United States and around the globe.

This infographic illustrates program accomplishments between 2011 and 2014.

This presentation covers lesson learned for PACE from the Toledo Port Authority, innovative real estate finance solutions from the Ygrene Energy Fund, and financing energy improvements on utility bills.

Fact sheet that provides an overview of the Energy Impact Illinois Loan Program.

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.

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.

This webcast provided an overview of on-bill financing programs, and presented three case studies: Manitoba Hydro, New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, and Pacific Gas & Electric (California).

This report provides an overview of the current state of on-bill programs and provides actionable insights on key program design considerations for on-bill lending programs.

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

This report is a comprehensive research study of energy efficiency in Northwest residential buildings. It includes a metering study, a single-family report, a manufactured homes report, and a multi-family report. In addition, it includes state-by-state energy use reports, as well as end-use consumption data.

This webcast discusses the background for U.S. Department of Energy’s Smart Grid Investment Grant (SGIG) consumer behavior study effort; the various utilities who are participating and what they each plan to include their respective studies; the quantitative results and qualitative lessons learned thus far from these studies; and the types of research will be undertaken by LBNL over the next several years.

This packet contains all the contractor reporting and verification forms required by Energy Impact Illinois.

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

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on using social media for long-term branding and marketing.

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 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 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 adapting and adjusting financing strategies after a program was implemented.

This paper establishes the size of the potential retrofit market in the United States, and examines the emergence of new financing models that offer the promise of overcoming historical barriers to energy efficiency.

This U.S. Environmental Protection Agency resource is intended to help state and local governments design finance programs for their jurisdiction. It describes financing program options, key components of these programs, and factors to consider as they make decisions about getting started or updating their programs.

This report provides state and local policymakers with information on successful approaches to the design and implementation of residential efficiency programs for households ineligible for low-income programs.

This webcast discusses financing program RFPs and contract terms and conditions.

This webcast shares useful and effective strategies for getting local leaders to support local government's energy efficiency goals.

This report provides an overview of residential customer information and behavior efficiency programs, and identifies key challenges to and solutions for increasing the penetration of these programs nationwide.

Presentation providing an overview of financing programs, a strategy for continuous improvement, tools for program management, a risk management strategy, and common risks associated with financing programs.

This report helps policymakers understand how electric and natural gas utilities can achieve greater efficiency by establishing numeric energy savings targets and goals for energy efficiency programs.

This peer exchange call summary focused on developing rebate/incentive programs to generate a demand for sustainable programs and products.

This peer exchange call summary focused on different tenant and resident education programs and how to make them complement larger programs.

Outlines five public-private financing mechanism options for energy efficiency upgrades programs, including on-bill financing, PACE financing, and loan loss reserve funds.

This report presents results, recommendations, and case studies of energy efficiency financing programs.

Presentation describing on-bill repayment programs and providing financing lessons learned.

This report presents best practices for operating successful portfolio-level efficiency programs, including assessing efficiency potential, cost-effectiveness screening, and developing a portfolio of approaches.

This webcast highlights lessons learned from programs that have used loan loss reserve funds.

Webinar presenting methods for increasing communication within a marketing team. LA County and Oregon BBNP grantees also share their experiences regarding market research and outreach strategy development.

This report summarizes the issues and approaches involved in motivating customers to reduce the total energy they consume through energy prices and rate design.

This report considers consumers' perspectives on policy and regulatory issues associated with the administration of energy efficiency investments funded by ratepayers of electric and natural gas utilities.

Webcast with information on financing structure design for four energy efficiency upgrade programs, including methods used to conduct market evaluations.

Report that identifies and evaluates the sufficiency of available financing options to help low-income populations, particularly communities that have been historically overburdened by air pollution (i.e., "environmental justice communities"), invest in resource-saving measures, such as energy efficiency and water conservation.

This webcast discussed program administration for PACE financing programs.