PSE’s Rock the Bulb™ Campaign Captures Attention of Utilities Seeking to Repeat Its Success

Just months after its kick-off in 2009, Puget Sound Energy’s innovative Rock the Bulb campaign has a number of successes to its credit. The campaign to build awareness with local utility customers about energy efficiency exceeded its projected participation targets by 25 percent, won several national awards for public relations, marketing and program implementation, and is now fielding dozens of inquiries from other utilities and organizations throughout the country that want to repeat the program’s success in their own communities.

PSE’s campaign relied on an impressive mix of tactics to reach and engage customers, and other utilities with conservation programs are taking note of the results. Using multiple channels paid off for PSE: in just four months, 25,000 households in PSE’s service area exchanged 230,000 incandescent bulbs for a mix of compact fluorescent light (CFL) spiral and specialty bulbs, and PSE distributed just over 270,000 free CFL bulbs door to door and at community events. The more than 500,000 bulbs distributed during the Rock the Bulb campaign will save enough electricity on PSE customers’ bills to power nearly 2,000 homes for a year.

To engage as many customers as possible, the campaign used a variety of access points, including:

1) Retail - the Rock the Bulb Unplugged Tour brought CFL bulb exchange events to local retailers in 16 different communities,

2) Online contests - “Golden Bulbs,” a Twitter-based scavenger hunt, and “Be An Energy Rock Star,” a contest combining volunteerism and energy conservation, both culminated in prizes provided by campaign partners for winning customers, and

3) Door-to-door outreach - in partnership with nonprofit Project Porchlight, CFL bulbs were delivered employing neighborhood volunteers.

The campaign also won a bid to have the ENERGY STAR® Exhibit Home at one of its retail events, the only place it was displayed in the Pacific Northwest.

“The success of this program came from a strategic alignment of talent, expertise and timeliness,” said Cal Shirley, vice president of Energy Efficiency Services for PSE. “A tremendous amount of research on customer habits went into planning this campaign, and the strong sense of collaboration across the utility’s many departments, as well as alliances with community partners and contractors, brought the best of all teams to this project.”

Professional organizations have been impressed as well. This year, the campaign was acknowledged by the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy in PSE’s recognition as an ENERGY STAR Partner of the Year. The Association of Energy Service Professionals recognized the campaign for Program Implementation and Design and gave it an honorable mention in the Marketing Communications category.

The campaign also won at PR News’ Corporate Social Responsibility awards in the category of Corporate-Community Partnership. The local Public Relations Society of America chapter awarded the campaign its top honor, “Best in Show,” along with awards for social media and overall campaign success. And the campaign is currently a finalist for PRSA’s upcoming national Silver Anvil awards, which will be announced in June.

“Another reason this campaign has been so well received is its use of social media. Social media has changed the way we communicate with our customers forever,” said Andy Wappler, vice president of Corporate Affairs for PSE. “Rock the Bulb gave us an opportunity to test more ways to proactively use these new communications tools to engage our customers directly in a company initiative. We were all pleasantly surprised by how responsive they were to interacting with us this way.”

All this attention now has the phone ringing. Utilities and community organizations from as far away as Tennessee and Hawaii have contacted PSE and its contract public relations and marketing firm, Colehour + Cohen, to find out how to repeat the campaign’s success in their own communities.

“Our objective was always to have our consumers embrace energy efficiency,” Shirley added. “If other utilities want to model after our campaign, we think that’s great.”

To facilitate use of the Rock the Bulb campaign in other areas, PSE and Colehour + Cohen have developed a licensing agreement for utilities outside the Pacific Northwest. A toolkit is available that includes Rock the Bulb how-to documents, sample forms, plans, advertisements, tracking sheets, and timelines as well as native design files, website templates and more.

The toolkit was made available in April 2010 and has been receiving the attention of utilities and program implementers looking to kick start their residential lighting and energy efficiency directives with a turnkey program with proven results.

Return to May 2010 Western Energy News

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