Sample Scripts and Discussion Questions to Guide Customer Engagement
Across the U.S., an increasing number of cities, counties, and states are examining building performance benchmarking and transparency as a critical step in addressing building energy and water use. Energy benchmarking allows for the comparison of a building’s performance to its own historical energy and water consumption, as well as to the performance of similar buildings in its peer group. In addition, many local jurisdictions pair data collection with a transparency component, whereby portions of a building’s benchmarking data are made publicly available.
Local jurisdictions are increasingly focusing on how to communicate this information back to building owners in a way that is actionable—resulting in retrofits that achieve energy savings. To aid this process, this tool is designed to be used by energy efficiency program implementers as a script and step-by-step guidance for contacting and engaging customers to undertake energy efficiency projects.
This tool is part of IMT’s Putting Data to Work toolkit. This comprehensive toolkit is the result of a three-year pilot project that aimed to use building performance data and asset information to help city government sustainability leaders, utilities, and efficiency program administrators and implementers make more informed business decisions and increase building efficiency. The project examined energy efficiency program design and delivery in the District of Columbia and New York City to produce a toolkit of best practices, actionable tools, and case studies to enable other local governments, utilities, and efficiency program implementers to replicate successes. The full toolkit, as well as details on upcoming blogs and webinars associate with the project, is available at imt.org/PuttingDatatoWork.
