Nearly half of the world’s 7.3 billion inhabitants use the internet. 73% of those people are considered active social media users. In fact, by 2020, it is expected that 95% of your rate paying customers will have either grown up during the age of digital technology or be considered “digital converts” and fully digital saavy. Digitally Engaging your customers is no longer a choice; if you aren’t using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or YouTube to engage and communicate with your customers, you are missing a golden opportunity.

The utility sector has always been viewed by the public as “boring”, but we all know the utility sector is not only vital to our customers’ daily lives, but sometimes even interesting! Utilities are made up of interesting and innovative infrastructure, operated by dedicated and talented employees, and built upon a mission to provide essential services to the communities around us.

Like anything that is “new” and “different” integrating Social Media into utility communications can seem challenging when you start to consider all the necessary elements and policies, however, thousands of utilities are utilizing social media to communicate with their customers. Some of these utilities have seen very positive results: increased customer interaction, improved image in the community and repaired customer trust and relationships. These are all really important to have on your side when a storm or other disaster hits, when a rate increase is proposed or another potentially hot issue needs attention.

Those utilities that experienced such positive responses have several things in common. Consider the following when integrating Social Media into your communications plans:

1) Have a Plan!

Every Plan should have goals and objectives. A social media plan is no different. Why are you doing this? What do you hope to accomplish? Are you hoping to improve customer image? Communicate weather related issues and outages? How will you measure your success? Conduct surveys? Number of followers or likes? Change in number of phone calls received versus handled on your social media platform(s)?

2) Tell a Story

Customers do not connect with the utility, they connect with the stories that you share.

• Employee stories: Your employees are already dedicated and talented, but your customers don’t know this. Share short little stories that make your employees “just as human as your customers”. Consider grouping your stories into types of positions – a day in the life of a… “wastewater operator”, “lineman”, “meter reader”, “councilman”… etc.

• Customer stories: Every little pat on the back from your customers is worth sharing through Social Media. Or maybe you have those few customers who are actively engaged in your daily operations you could highlight. Maybe they show up to every council or other public meeting, maybe they take advantage of your rebate or other utility programs, or maybe they are always first to report any infrastructure issue in the community.

3) Photos, Photos, Photos

Studies show that people are spending less time reading and more time looking at photos. If you get a “tltr” (too long to read) response to one of your posts, you really need to consider integrating photos! Social Media platforms like Instagram (400 million active users upload 80 million photos each day) are built on the sole use of photos to tell stories.

• Photos of storm/weather related damage are always popular (only during or just after though, timing of photos is crucial). Posting photos during a storm also reminds your customers that you are aware of the issues out there (on the street level) and are working on them!

• Infrastructure photos. You might be surprised about how many photos your “on the ground” staff take with their smart phones while they are working. Keep them on your radar and work in a process to get a hold of some of those photos. Not everything will be applicable, but photos of infrastructure that has failed, has been fixed, is really innovative, saves water/energy/water quality, are all different views you could share—remember to mix it up. Sharing only failed infrastructure might send the wrong message.

• Beautiful views of the community. Create a “sense of place” for your customers. Mountains, sunsets, parks, flowers, spring, winter…some utilities have been successful holding “contests” to solicit local photos from their customers through Social Media.

4) Work Weekends

Ok, not really, but your customers spend more time on Social Media on the weekends, so you should try to schedule your posts to go out on the weekend when it makes sense. Social dashboards can help you do this efficiently, or if you are using Facebook, take advantage of the “scheduling” option. You can spend a couple hours in one day posting a month’s worth of posts, and schedule them to go out at a later date and time. If you can have someone monitoring those posts during the weekend, to generate quick responses, that would be ideal. Otherwise, just make sure you are only posting the higher profile issues at a time when you do have dedicated staff to respond to posts.

5) Give Thanks

If one of your customers takes the time to respond to or share one of your posts, or shares a positive message about the utility, take a few seconds to thank them. This small act of thanks with this one community member will be seen by and transferred across your followers, helping the utility gain that “human” element needed to become a trusted resource.

Resources:

https://www.brandwatch.com/

http://smartgridcc.org/

 

These days, with technology driving your customers to seek information that is quick, visually attractive, engaging, and to the point, it has never been more important to create effective outreach materials. Fortunately, there are a few things you can do to increase your chances success. Below is a list of the most common mistakes that we see in outreach materials:

1. Too much text: Too much text can cause your audience to tune out before they have even started reading. Before starting development of your materials list out one to three main ideas you need your customer to take away. Only including information relevant to those main ideas is key. Having a second set of eyes review and edit your text can be really helpful, too.

2. Low resolution photos: Photos are still worth a thousand words. Take the time to make sure the photos you are using are high resolution. A good rule of thumb is to make sure the file size is a minimum of 1MB. The higher the resolution, the crisper the photo will print.

3. Photo subject doesn’t match the message: An example of this is a rate increase. Including photos of kids playing at a local park might not be the best choice (unless the rate increase is going to pay for parks, of course). Customers can see right through an effort to “hide” the truth. Be transparent, be honest, and only include photos that will help your customer understand your message.

4. Clip art: Simple clip art might have its place somewhere, but including graphics that match your message, are eye catching and look professional draws the customer in. Though they typically come with a price tag, the value often outweighs the cost.

5. Contrasting color themes: Way back in elementary school, we all learned about colors and the color wheel. Maybe later in art class, you learned about complimentary colors and contrasting colors. When designing outreach pieces, the principal is the same. Make sure you are choosing colors that complement each other and speak to the purpose of your material.

6. Lack of focus: Keep your customers engaged so they hear you. Focus on one or two main ideas and get right to the point! Outreach specialists often have many messages to convey. It is tempting to include as many as possible into a single outreach piece. This will create an unintended consequence: your customers will tune out completely. Quick and focused ideas are not only easier to digest, they are what your customers are seeking.

7. Use of crazy fonts: When it comes to attracting your customers, let the graphics, colors and layout do the work. Use a simple and familiar font for the text. With a nearly endless amount of fonts at our fingertips, it can be tempting to incorporate the craziest font to attract your customers. Unfortunately, the more extreme your font, the more likely you will deter your audience.

8. Use of different fonts: If you are designing a brochure, use no more than one or two fonts. A similar issue to using awkward, crazy, fonts is using many different fonts. It is important to keep the font simple and familiar.

9. Product doesn’t match the purpose: Spend some time really thinking about who you need to send the message to and the best way to reach them. If you are trying to send a message that applies to all of your customers, a bill stuffer might be a great way to do that. If you only need to reach a few neighborhoods, a door hanger might be a better choice.

10. Spending Too Much Time: Many of us might be great communicators, but lack graphic design ability. Without the skill, knowledge and tools of a graphic designer to create great outreach materials, you might find yourself spending 3 or 4 times the hours a graphic designer would spend. Consider your budget early on, and decide if it might actually be more cost effective to bring in a professional to lay out your vision for you!

 

…and Tips For Reaching Them!

1) Mobile Businesses

Carpet cleaners, pressure washers and painters are among the top three mobile businesses known to be polluting local waters. A moving target, they can be hard to reach, but here are a few tips:

• Increase the “Report a Spill” outreach efforts to residents, let them report the issues to you.

• Form a regional group with nearby jurisdictions to develop a regional campaign. Don’t forget to include the local business licensing office(s).

• Ensure you understand the audience before developing any materials. Market research can save you a ton of time and resources in the long run, and better ensure success.

2) Home Owner Associations

Private facility maintenance in residential areas can be difficult to enforce, but can have a high impact on water quality if successful. Inactive associations, high board member turn over, and lack of reserves are just a few of the hurdles.

• Find the list of associations in your area. In many states, home owner/neighborhood associations are required to file paperwork with the state, which could include a mailing address, contact person, and possibly even board members and annual budget.

• Request a timeslot at upcoming HOA meetings to give a presentation about “Local Requirements Regarding Your Stormwater Facilities” or “Help Available to HOAs to Maintain Stormwater Facilities”. This could be done broad scale if you have a mailing list, or just start by calling the few you have and keep working to improve your inventory of contacts.

• Offer an annual or bi-annual “workshop” for HOAs, making sure you plan to highlight the regulations, the issue, and tips or assistance for helping HOAs succeed in bringing (or keeping) their facilities into compliance. WORKSHOP TIP: Offer free snacks or free giveaway items as an incentive!

3) Internal Staff

With NPDES permit requirements and associated state requirements evolving, internal staff are raising to the tops of outreach specialists’ priority lists across the county.

• Meet with the managers of the staff you need to train to better understand their point of view. Find out more about the challenges you might face before you even begin to design a training program. Consider busy times of the year, varying schedules and access to computers.

• Videos are a great way to provide training to internal staff. Once developed or purchased, there is no longer a need to be there in person to train internal staff; a very efficient use of resources in the long run.

• Consider your tracking method before you begin training. How will you measure success and track your progress? Written or online exams can be a great way to do both.

 

With so much required language, it is difficult to get your customers to read your Water Quality Report (CCR), no matter how important the information is to know and understand. How do you overcome this challenge? Here are 3 tips to increase the readership of your Water Quality Report this year:

1) Add Coupons

Many utilities have incentive-items like water saving kits or hose washers, but have a hard time letting their customers know about them. A “coupon” creates the feeling that the giveaway is limited and valuable, something that a small paragraph of text simply cannot do. So add a few coupons to your report this year, and be ready for the people to come pouring in! Here are a few examples of how other utilities are integrating coupons into their water quality reports.

2) Use Local Photos

Local photos, especially on the cover of your report, make your customers stop and say, “Hey, I know where that is!” then they will be more likely to open it up and check out what is inside. Using local photos of things like, water storage facilities, utility employees, or other local points of interest keeps them browsing through the information you need them to read.

3) Add Local Programs or Project Updates

Local information about upcoming water utility projects, treatment plant upgrades, water conservation goals, water-saving incentive items, or even upcoming community events can help give a local and calming feel to a somewhat overwhelming collection of required language and tables. Plus, this helps build trust – that the water utility is here to provide valuable information, not just wasting time and money.

 

At a time when the economy is stressed and budgets are strained, some municipalities are seeing an increase in their approval rates for budget requests and grant applications. They are also building trust and “buy-in” from their customers while also seeing a real change in behavior for the good of their communities. How is this possible?

Community Based Social Marketing is defined as inspiring behavior change for the greater social good. It is a tool box of techniques designed to measure behavior change and ensure your outreach programs and materials are truly effective and, ultimately, a responsible use of public funds. When you tackle water conservation, stormwater pollution, energy efficiency or FOG (fats, oils and grease), social marketing will allow you to take your outreach programs to the next level — giving an upper hand in your next budget planning session!

So why aren’t all municipalities using social marketing to develop their outreach programs?

The benefits might seem obvious, but for those new to social marketing the process can seem overwhelming, time-consuming, and cumbersome. In basic terms — it requires outreach that breaks from the past. Traditionally, municipal outreach program goals include sharing as much information as possible with as many people as possible, using as few pieces as possible. This allowed municipalities to check many public outreach projects off their list in a very cost effective manner. Social marketing, on the other hand, is centered on bringing laser focus to specific target audiences and specific target behaviors. Using social marketing, municipalities tend to reach smaller audiences, yet have a higher likelihood of achieving true and lasting behavior changes from that smaller audience.

Training your brain to think a little differently is not an easy task. Below you will find the basic framework for implementing social marketing techniques for your next project. Once familiar with the basic steps, and with a little practice, you will start gaining the clarity and confidence necessary to take social marketing by storm in your jurisdiction!

1) Choose the target audience. In the past, your target audience may have included the “general public”, but social marketing and the “general public” are like oil and water. You want to choose a target audience that will provide you with the greatest impact. Let’s say you want to address overwatering the lawn, then choose an audience that is more likely to overwater their lawn. This is a little bit of an educated guessing game, but the next steps will help you define that audience. Think of your target audience as a single person, and be specific. For example: a married male homeowner in a subdivision with strict covenants, in his 30s, with children, who works out of the home full time, and is on the upper end of the middle class.

2) Defining the target audience. The further you can define and truly understand your target audience, the higher the likelihood for a successful project. Using the target audience example from above, here are a few things you might want to try to obtain from your target audience to define them:

1) How they prefer to receive communication about yard care.

2) Their beliefs surrounding the target behavior of using less water on the lawn.

3) Barriers and benefits to using less water on their lawn.

There are various market research tools to help you successfully define your specific target audience. Each situation will have different needs, so you will want to consider the end goals, your target audience, and your budget before selecting a method that is right for your project. Here are a few of the most popular market research methods:

> Internal brainstorming workgroups. Typically this is the lowest cost option, but consider the pros and cons of internal workgroups first. Internal workgroups can be helpful if you are able to select members who closely match your target audience, but risky if you really need statistically significant research results. You will likely get viewpoints from only a few people, which could be spot on or really skewed — there is no way to tell until the project is over and all the money is spent!

> Online Surveys. Telephone surveys are becoming a thing of the past. With dwindling home phones, large generational gaps in the users, and the “do not call list”, it is becoming more and more expensive to successfully conduct telephone surveys. Online surveys are fairly inexpensive to conduct and links to the survey can be shared on websites, social media sites and via email. This method can be very successful, but the process must be thought out, incentives offered for completing the survey (gift cards or drawings) and be well advertised.

> Focus Groups. Focus groups can be very expensive to conduct, but typically provide you with very in-depth qualitative or conversational data. Typically, they require a facilitator, members from your target audience (compensated with gift cards, cash, or other appealing items), and an interview to pull insights about their actions, beliefs and thoughts surrounding the target behavior.

3) Setting goals and objectives. Goals without objectives are nearly impossible to accomplish. Objectives without goals may never allow you to see true behavior change. The difference between goals and objectives are often overlooked. A GOAL is a broad principle that guides your project (typically not measurable), where OBJECTIVES are specific, measurable steps that you would take to meet your goal.

4) Identifying Barriers & Benefits. The more barriers to a change in behavior overcome and the more benefits you can put out in front of your target audience — the higher the likelihood for success. Barriers and benefits do not necessarily need to be complicated, or even difficult to address. Often this step is pulled from the work you completed during your market research after defining your target audience. From our example above, a barrier to reduce water used on a lawn might be that the target audience simply does not know how much is too much. A benefit might be that they would be able to reduce their water bill by using less water and still having a healthy lawn.

5) Writing a positioning statement. Simple, but incredibly important, this one sentence will provide focus and clarity when the project starts to feel overwhelming or gets off track, giving back the confidence you need to keep moving and reach the project goals and objectives — measurable behavior change. Write your positioning statement similar to the following (fill in your project information in the parentheses):“We want (Target audience) to see (target behavior) as (describe the benefits that the target audience would encounter)”From our example above:

“We want homeowners in subdivisions to see reducing their water use for lawn watering as an easy way to reduce their water bill, protect the groundwater supplies and still have a nice lush lawn.”

6) Developing a Marketing Strategy. Though it may sound intimidating, once the target audience has been defined, goals and objectives are set and barriers and benefits are identified, a marketing strategy will pull it all together in a creative way! This is where you want to decide which outreach tools, materials or products will inspire the change in behavior you want to see. From our example above, the marketing strategy might include incentives or reminders like an automatic shut-off hose timers (given freely to a resident), a postcard with a handy “suggested watering schedule” that could hang on a fridge or maybe a reminder sticker that they could stick on their hose reel.Consider hiring a consultant to help you with the marketing strategy. This is a great way to save you time and gain creative marketing insight from the professionals. A consultant can also help you prioritize your “outreach toolkit” by providing estimated budgets for the development portion of the project.

7) Developing an Evaluation Plan. Evaluation is another very important aspect of social marketing but takes time and careful thought. The results of evaluating a social marketing project are often needed in order to gain approval for future budget requests and win grants. Frankly, the results from a successful social marketing project are hard to compete with. Evaluation requires you to really think about how the materials will be designed and distributed, followed by how you will actually measure a change in behavior. From our example, you may want to start with a pilot group of people from one neighborhood. Then monitor their water use/water bills in the months following project implementation. Hiring a consultant to help develop an evaluation plan can also be a good use of resources if you have limited time or just feel the need for a few new ideas!

 

Timing is Everything…but What is the Best Time for Outreach for Utilities??

Let’s talk about timing with outreach materials. There are so many programs, tips, updates and announcements to communicate, that planning on what to say and when to say it can be tricky. It’s one thing to just throw it out there for the heck of it and cross it off your to do list. It’s another to develop a strategy and actually set goals, objectives for behavioral change and action from the messaging distributed.

When it comes to outreach, specifically utility outreach, there are two main schools of thought.

ONE: Expose the content to your customers early and get them thinking, a couple months early. As the saying goes; April showers bring May flowers. What happens now provides results a month (or two) down the road. Think of retail stores for example. Swimsuits are in stores in February along with shorts and summer fashion. Seasonal fashion is always in stores a few months before the actual season. Then, when the season its, they rotate to the next season. Or, to tie it to utility topics; consider landscaping tips a couple months before it’s landscaping season so the ‘seed is planted’ (pun intended). That way, customers see the information and have time to process and plan. If they are considering changes to their landscaping, they have information that may sway their decision towards the drought resistant tips you are providing.

TWO: The time is now. This mentality is sometimes unintentional and may be just a last minute decision. If compared to retail stores, it’s the ad you see for the weekend sale, going on this weekend! Taking it to utilities; everyone is wearing multiple hats and has a lot to do, so if it’s not urgent, it’s often not done. If it’s not high water use season, then no need to discuss water savings. Or, if it’s not the rainy season, there’s no reason to discuss yard debris pick up, pet waste or other stormwater/storm drain concerns. But, if it is that time of year, then it’s time to communicate. With this strategy, customers see/hear/read the outreach and the goal is that they will take more immediate action.

So, which is better? Which is correct? ONE or TWO?

Our recommendation: Number THREE!

THREE: We could call it the Christmas Strategy, although Christmas in October is a bit annoying. It is still an example that serves the purpose here. Option THREE is a combination of ONE and TWO. If you provide ideas a couple months in advance, then offer reminders when the time is upon them, customers are much more likely to take action. Marketing research shows that customers need to see messaging multiple times, so providing content spread out over time creates more impressions, opportunity for engagement and better results in the end.

So provide drought resistant landscaping ideas a couple months before landscaping season starts. This plants the seed for ideas, budgeting and planning. Then, offer additional or even the same content again when the season is here. You can apply this to pre-pay or online bill programs, stormwater education, conservation both electric and water for few ideas.

So, when you are planning your next outreach campaign, think of the timing and make sure to capitalize on your opportunities for success with communications a month or two in advance and then again right when the event or offering is most pertinent.