Introduction

One of the best ways every day people can support our fight against climate change is by making their home efficient or ditching the gasoline powered car. But, here’s the dirty secret about clean energy: it’s expensive to make that initial investment, even if people ultimately save more money over time. And here’s something that’s maybe not so secret: oil companies and investor-owned utilities and the powers that be aren’t necessarily incentivized to make big environmentally-friendly decisions easily.

The Center for Sustainable Energy came to us with two projects with both having the same ultimate goal: to ensure all communities are able to access the environmental, cost-saving and health benefits of energy efficient home upgrades and electric vehicles. That’s where Mixte came in.

We helped the Center of Sustainable Energy do two things: create a spring campaign for
their GoGreen Financing project and create cohesive messaging around their Clean Vehicle Rebate Program to better reach communities that aren’t typically reached through most current electric vehicle marketing efforts.

Our Objectives

  • GoGreen Financing: Help homeowners and contractors access programs that could help them afford energy efficient home remodels.
  • Clean Vehicle Rebate Program: Reach low-income, historically underrepresented community members who were open to purchasing an electric vehicle.

 

Here’s how we did it:

 

GoGreen Financing:

  • We partnered with a third-party video production company to create promotional videos and advertisements
  • We created social media toolkits, one-pagers, flyers and other materials that help investor-owned utilities and financing lenders spread the word about their two flagship programs: GoGreen Home and GoGreen Business

 

Clean Vehicle Rebate Program:

  • We conducted listening sessions with community partners and Clean Vehicle Rebate program staff to get a sense of their biggest communications challenges and how their existing efforts to reach low-income communities have gone over time.
  • We then built a strategic messaging framework that the CVRP team could use to discuss clean vehicle benefits with both general, low-income audiences and with dealerships.

The Outcome

Our final products for the GoGreen Home and the Clean Vehicle Rebate Program included messaging that more accurately reflected the needs of the communities they were trying to reach, including social media campaign materials and talking points.