Case Study: Clean Energy Works Oregon

Executive Summary

At the conclusion of a successful home retrofit pilot in the City of Portland, the program administrators for Clean Energy Works Oregon knew they needed a strong software partner to help them bring the Clean Energy Works model - integrated energy upgrade financing, geographic-specific rebates, high-touch homeowner support and a savings-based whole-home approach - to scale at the statewide level. They chose EnergySavvy Program Optix because of its focus on homeowner and trade ally engagement, its technical innovation and flexibility, and its dedication to driving transparent and trackable results.

A Single Platform for Tracking and Reporting

Clean Energy Works Portland (CEWP) was a 500 home pilot study jointly administered by multiple partners: City of Portland (sponsor/funder), Enterprise Cascadia (financing partner), Energy Trust of Oregon (funder) and Conservation Services Group (technical).

Each partner had at least one individual database; as a result, every participating homeowner was entered manually into all four databases - leading to extra data entry cost and errors. Slight data differences between systems meant that program managers were often flying blind for weeks at a time while waiting for manually compiled reports.

While the pilot was highly successful, leading to a statewide Better Buildings-financed program, the largely ad hoc IT solution for it was not scalable.

Clean Energy Works Oregon (CEWO) launched in March 2011, with EnergySavvy Program Optix as its production software for program management. The program is now handling over 1500 simultaneous projects. Project, customer and lender data are all integrated into Program Optix, accessible to contractors, customers, program managers and lenders. An immense amount of data is now easily accessible all in one place. Program administrators and stakeholders can count on data integrity and availability - always knowing exactly where homeowners are in the process, and where to focus to optimize the program.

Enabling Trade Allies through Technology

A key program design feature of Clean Energy Works Oregon is the Instant Rebate Code. While it serves a psychological marketing need (creating perceived scarcity among homeowners applying for the program), its main purpose is to allow tracking by applicant source, impact program workflow and enable optimization by channel. The Instant Rebate Code has been particularly effective in enabling the CEWO Trade Ally network as a program marketing channel.

In Program Optix, every participating trade ally gets a unique Instant Rebate Code that they can distribute to potential customers for the program, through online and offline means. Incoming program applicants are tagged with the Code that they've received from the Trade Ally that brought them in for the program.

• Contractors that bring in a homeowner to the program get to "keep" them as their customer unless the homeowner requests otherwise - Program Optix automatically handles this workflow logic.

• Knowing that the system tags the homeowner for them, contractors are willing to be aggressive in marketing on the program's behalf. They know it's not a waste of their marketing budget. (Over 40% of the program's leads are from trade ally marketing.)

• With this system, CEWO program managers are also able to track and optimize for conversion to retrofit by applicant source. So rather than encouraging vast numbers of low quality leads that don't convert from in-home audit to retrofit, the program can reward trade allies that bring in smaller numbers of high quality applicants that complete their projects.

Flexibility and Innovation

As a new program in an industry still searching for best practices, Clean Energy Works valued EnergySavvy's modular and flexible architecture, and customer-centric rapid approach to technological improvement.

Program Optix models a program in a set of modular building blocks, each of which contains logic for project workflows, automated homeowner communications and flexible integration points for external systems. This approach has been critically important to Clean Energy Works in meeting its needs for integration with lenders, in-home audit software systems, client-specific geographic information systems (GIS) and other databases. And the system modularity also allows workflow changes to support evolving business needs - without the need for major software re-development.

Most importantly, as Clean Energy Works continues to scale and identify new business needs for its technology platform, EnergySavvy is recognized as a critical partner in helping to meet those needs. Working collaboratively to prioritize and add enhancements to the platform - with new features and changes shipping every two weeks - EnergySavvy and Clean Energy Works Oregon have established a close partnership and laid the groundwork for continued program success.