Designing Programs Priority Communities Can Trust

Energy programs can offer meaningful value to households facing high energy burdens. Yet even valuable offers can go unclaimed.

The challenge isn’t always awareness. Sometimes it’s confidence: confidence that the offer is legitimate, that the process will be manageable, that the technology will work, and that the people delivering the program can be trusted.

For utilities and program implementers, that makes trust more than a communications consideration. It is a core program operating capability that can influence acquisition, conversion, completion, customer satisfaction, and future participation.

Trust has to be designed into the program itself.

Credibility Is Local

One of the clearest lessons from our work is that there is no universal formula for establishing trust. The organization that is credible in one community may not have the same standing in another. The utility itself may be the strongest source of legitimacy for some customers while carrying a more complicated relationship for others.

The most effective programs start by understanding those relationships and building them into program design.

That means treating community organizations as partners, not simply distribution channels. Strong partnerships require clear roles, appropriate resources, and compensation that reflects the work involved. Compensation alone, however, is not enough. Administrative and reporting requirements, volume expectations, and cost-effectiveness pressures are often designed for larger delivery organizations and can make sustained participation difficult for smaller CBOs. If utilities want these organizations to remain long-term program partners, they must invest in their capacity and structure the partnership around the distinct value CBOs provide—not simply the volume of enrollments they generate.

We’ve seen the value of this approach in our work with community action agencies and community-based organizations (CBOs) across an Illinois utility’s service territory. By helping partners identify local barriers, develop targeted outreach strategies, and strengthen their capacity to deliver energy efficiency services, we’ve built a network of trusted local partners reaching underserved communities. In one program, CBO partners became the strongest source of enrollment leads—demonstrating that community relationships can be a direct driver of program participation.

Every Handoff Is Part of the Experience

A program may involve an outreach team, call center, utility, community organization, contractor, and post-installation support. Customers experience all of those interactions as one program.

That means trust can be lost in the handoffs.

In our work, we design for consistency across those touchpoints—from how a customer first hears about a program to what happens when a contractor arrives at the door. Staff and contractors need the training, tools, and information to communicate clearly, work effectively across cultures and languages, explain expectations, and answer questions. The lesson from these efforts is that credibility should not depend on a single interaction. It should be reinforced throughout the customer journey.

In one ZIP-code-based outreach effort in Southern California, we coordinated with the public utility serving the area to introduce the program before field teams arrived. Flyers, emails, and other materials included the utility’s name, giving customers advance notice of the outreach and a familiar source through which they could verify the program and its representatives.

New Technologies Require a Different Approach

The customer journey also has to account for what programs are asking customers to adopt. As programs expand beyond familiar efficiency measures to include heat pumps, induction, solar, storage, and other decarbonization technologies, the need for customer education grows.

An incentive alone may not answer the questions customers have: How does this technology work? What will change in my home? What will installation involve? What happens if something goes wrong?

That makes education part of program design.

We’ve used demonstrations, in-language resources, technical education, videos, and firsthand product experiences to make unfamiliar technologies more tangible. These experiences give customers a way to evaluate the technology for themselves, something an outreach message alone cannot do.

The Benefication Lab, for example, brings energy efficiency and clean energy technologies directly into communities. For one of the Midwest’s largest electric utilities, we took the Lab to local events, giving customers and community partners a chance to see solutions such as heat pumps, EV charging, and demand response in action and ask questions. That firsthand experience can make unfamiliar technologies more tangible and, when paired with a trusted utility, help legitimize the technologies and build confidence in a way an outreach message alone cannot.

The Experience Has to Match the Promise

Trust is ultimately tested by what happens after the customer decides to participate.

Customers should understand what they are receiving, who is providing it, what information is being collected, what is expected of them, and what happens next. This becomes especially important when an offer is free or heavily subsidized. The greater the perceived value, the more important it is to make the terms and process clear.

The promise made during outreach has to hold up through delivery.

And installation is not the end of the customer relationship. With newer technologies in particular, customers may need help understanding equipment, controls, maintenance, or changes in how they use energy. Making support accessible demonstrates that the program remains accountable for the experience beyond the initial transaction.

That is where trust moves from something a program communicates to something a customer experiences.

Trust Is Program Infrastructure

What we’ve learned is that trust cannot be added to a program through better messaging alone. It is built through the way a program partners with communities, structures its processes, prepares its people, delivers its services, and responds when something goes wrong.

For utilities and program implementers, that means trust belongs in program design and performance conversations—not just communications plans.

Because ultimately, the experience a customer has with one program shapes the confidence they bring to the next one.