lessons from the ‘frontline’

Lessons from the ‘frontline’

Engaging building users

CREATE Centre25 September 2008

Simon RobertsChief Executive

Outline

• Centre for Sustainable Energy

• Our Big Energy Challenge – linking technical and human approaches

• 100 ideas house – communications beyond the ‘green-and-keen’

• Lessons we’ve learned (and still struggle to apply)

About us

• One of the UK’s leading energy charities

• Spent the last 30 years sharing our knowledge and practical experience to enable people to change the way they think and act on energy

• Innovation in energy advice, training & education, community and organisational engagement and policy analysis

• Now 45 people, £2.3 million turnover

Our Big Energy Challenge

• Combining improved energy metering and monitoring with ‘energy champions’ training

• Working with public sector organisations in Local Strategic Partnership of Bath & North East Somerset

• Funded by Government ‘Invest to Save’ programme over 3 years

Before

• One laboratory. £80K a year electricity bill

• Then the data…

• Data shared with trained ‘energy champion’ in lab

• Saving c £25K a year – 105 tonnes CO2

After the data & ‘champion’

The real challenge

• Decision-making structures

• At Hospital, improved monitoring shows heating and cooling systems ‘fighting’ each other

• Potential saving from modest capital improvements of £250,000 per year

• Taken nearly 18 months to secure order for works

100 ideas house

• Engage and encourage to action the people who aren’t as interested or motivated in “the issues” as we are

• ASPIRATION not WORTHY CAUSE

• STYLE not SUBSTANCE

• EMOTION and FEELING not INFORMATION and DEBATE

• The people we sometimes call ‘apathetic’ may just have different values and motivations which need a different appeal

Similar ideas

• London council who put chocolates on the desks of people who had switched their monitors off at lunch-time

• School children leading energy management in school

(children can often by-pass usual ‘objections’ from adults)

• Carbon-cutting competition between footballers fromBristol City and Bristol Rovers

Lessons

• Not everyone is as interested and motivated as we are

• Appeal to their interests and motivations (not yours!)

• See how you can make data available and train staff to understand what it might be telling us about their working situation

• Human engagement as important as technical rigour (but you need both)

• Don’t underestimate potential for managers to fail to make best decisions quickly!

www.cse.org.uk

simon.roberts@cse.org.ukwww.campaignstrategy.org

www.bigenergychallenge.org

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