Lessons Learned After 30 Years of Process Evaluation

This paper documents lessons learned from 30 years of process evaluations of energy efficiency programs. The lessons were collected from interviews with 18 evaluators, most with two decades of experience. Findings related to marketing energy efficiency fall in two categories - reaching market actors and reaching the customer.

Summary of Lessons Learned - Reaching Market Actors

• Lesson: Trade allies are key to program success, but the program needs to incorporate steps to ensure they are informed of program changes and trained in how to complete program requirements. Programs need to be as stable as possible.
• Lesson: Service providers need support to gain skills and practical knowledge, but that alone is insufficient - programs also need to encourage purchasers of their services to ask for the energy-efficient or carbon-neutral solution.
• Lesson: Seek to create a large enough market of interest to capture the attention of manufacturers and emulate the product marketplace in program delivery. Provide for on-going training of retailer staffs that interact with customers.
• Lesson: Communication remains an important tool for customer and market management - ignoring this can lead to missed opportunities and potentially negative results for the program administrator.

Summary of Lessons Learned - Reaching the Customer

• Lesson: Targeting programs to the purchase-decision points will improve the ability of residential customers to adopt energy-efficient equipment and services, and will keep the costs of the programs commensurate with the value of the savings.
• Lesson: The business of business is business, and the business of energy efficiency and climate change programs is to build relationships and know what businesses need to adopt the more energy efficient or more carbon-neutral behavior.