Outreach/10 Percent Challenge/Success Stories

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Gathering and sharing success stories from Challenge participants is a key to building additional participation as well as reinforcing the commitments others have already made

Building additional participation - Seeing what others have accomplished:

  • motivates people to take the Challenge
  • enables people by giving them ideas and showing what is possible
  • creates a sense of community and builds toward the 'tipping point' where participation becomes the new norm - people feel left out if they're not participating


Reinforcing existing commitments - When we initiated the 10% Challenge, we envisioned following up with people who took the Challenge to encourage and support them, using two primary approaches:

  • Occasional communications to all participants with general encouragement featuring success stories
  • We have only sent one or two messages in 2009 to all participants, and those tended to focus on specific upcoming events
  • Targeted communications with actionable information based on specific areas participants chose
  • We ran a promotion offering five free Home Energy Audits by Next Step Living to every Challenge participant who had selected "Get an energy audit" as one of their actions
  • We got 30 responses (very quickly) from the 200 invitations we sent


Next Steps:

  • Gather content about success stories.
  • Package this raw material in multiple forms and distribute
  • Success stories are written for and published first on our blog
  • Use share/save bar on blog to post to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter
  • Send to media contacts - there is already some pick-up from the blog postings
  • We have created a Media list in Constant Contact and have it for e-mail. Should we send some sort of regular e-mail featuring our stories to them? Or just focus on getting more of them to pick them up as above?

Current Status - June 2010

  • Stephanie Mann is researching and writing success stories this summer
  • Blog posting and links are reaching more people - continue to develop this part of the strategy
  • Identify additional success story candidates


Gathering Content

  • Green Needham members
  • Michael Greis (savings from heating system replacement, electricity use reduction)
  • Eleanor Rosellini (installation of solar panels, home energy efficiency improvements)
  • Done - Bill Okerman (follow up from Next Step Living) energy audit)
  • Recipients of free energy audits awarded by Green Needham (through Next Step Living, contacts provided by Clayton Schuller at NSL). June, 2010 - Clayton agreed to identify additional candidates
  • Geraldine Sheehan - (617)970-2853
  • Mike Yeh - (781)400-1570
  • Others
  • Done - Joanne Kneeland 449-3335 (DAR member through Gloria) - saw Michael on Cable, was motivated to make energy saving changes and is really pleased with the results.


Packaging Content

  • Blog articles are the primary source
  • Share/Save bar to create links on Facebook, LinkedIn & Twitter
  • Share with Media contacts - some tuned in to blog, others not.
  • Possible packaging for other publications?
  • Cable TV show - Special Program, or as an episode of Your World (Allison Hume) or Talk of the Town (Jerry Wasserman)


Retrieved from "http://wiki.greenneedham.org/gnc/index.php/Outreach/10_Percent_Challenge/Success_Stories"