EEC Perspectives

California’s decision to go to 100% carbon-free electricity by 2045, passed late last month by the state legislature and awaiting Governor Jerry Brown’s signature, means electric utilities and electric cooperatives in the Golden State will have to up, yet again, their clean energy communications. That applies to electric utilities and cooperatives located outside California, too, as customers increasingly prefer cleaner forms of electricity.

I understand and agree that utilities face serious operational and financial challenges to get to 100% carbon-free energy.

But conducting clean energy communications is a lot easier — providing your communications are closely aligned with your customers’ preferences and expectations. If they are not, now’s the time to tune up your messaging and graphics.

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Clean Energy Communications: Recognize the Ground is Moving

Fortunately, a recent article I wrote for Public Power magazine shows electric companies of all kinds — public, private and cooperatives — ways to structure that clean energy conversation with customers.

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Credit: Energy News Network

“Poles and wires are boring, but people are interesting,” a utility communicator once told me. I agree completely: The best way to feed your audience, especially customers, the information you want them to know is to embed it in a compelling story focusing on people. Whether it’s still or video photography, the image draws the audience (customers) in and carries the weight of the story. Once an image connects to an audience member’s (customer’s) heart, their ears are more likely to hear the words that explain and support the image. This applies to utility customer communications in so many ways.

You could think of it as feeding sugar-coated broccoli to your children or inserting your dog’s heart-worm medication in a glob of peanut butter. It may sound a little sneaky, but it works. Ask any parent or dog owner. Julie Andrews sang about this in “Mary Poppins”: “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down in the most delightful way.”

It’s a point worth considering by utility communicators and marketers who want to communicate more effectively with customers. Living as they do in fact-rich environments, filled with information about kilowatt-hours, volts, amps, circuit-miles of wire, emissions, cubic yards of cement, therms and hundred cubic feet of water, practitioners can be tempted to rely on facts, rather than peoples’ stories, when communicating with or marketing to customers.

This is especially true when it comes to complicated or technical issues like prices, pollution, energy efficiency, environmental regulation or energy efficiency.

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