East Bay Community Energy (EBCE) is Alameda County’s local electricity supplier. EBCE provides cleaner, greener energy at lower rates to its customers. As a not-for-profit organization governed by a Board of Directors, EBCE reinvests earnings back into the community to create local green energy jobs, local programs, and clean power projects.
EBCE hired Circlepoint to provide branding development, community outreach, marketing, and customer notification services as it launched its service for commercial and municipal accounts in June 2018 and residential accounts in November 2018. Circlepoint developed and designed a multi-faceted plan for building program awareness, engaging potential EBCE customers prior to launch, supporting the agency’s website and design needs, and participating in customer notification/enrollments in collaboration with EBCE staff and vendors.
We built off the existing EBCE logo to create an overall brand identity and unique names for each of the EBCE sub-products. This included brand guidelines that serve as a framework for brand use and help maintain a consistent look and feel across all marketing efforts. We then built the program website, EBCE.org, to serve as the centerpiece for all program marketing efforts. In addition to informing the public about Community Choice Aggregators (CCAs), clean energy, and EBCE program benefits, the website provided all visitors with an engaging experience. Key content on the website was translated into Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Hindi, to accommodate the various ethnic groups across the county.
We developed marketing materials for EBCE, including a program brochure, banners, tablecloths, PowerPoint templates, and other promotional items. We also developed a business guide for staff to use when meeting with decision makers and business owners. The business guide includes key messaging, statistics, infographics, and the benefits of a CCA.
We also worked closely with EBCE staff to identify in-person engagement opportunities like tabling events, stakeholder presentations, and one-on-one meetings with key stakeholders and stakeholder groups.
We assisted EBCE staff with fulfilling the required notifications process for program launch, which includes sending four pieces of direct mail or customer enrollment notices to Alameda County residents and businesses. We also developed a script for the customer call center to ensure messaging was consistent for all customers.
In the lead up to the commercial and residential customer launches, we developed and delivered media campaigns, which included PSAs, print ads, digital and social media ads, TV ads, and an animated video posted on the website that explains the goals of EBCE and the benefits of its service.
All these efforts resulted in an opt-out rate at launch far below the 5% set by EBCE, and ensured EBCE was a trusted service provider for its customers.
