Earth Day 2021 might look a little different this year, but despite Covid-19 it sure isn’t canceled. This year, you can celebrate a socially distanced Earth Day by creating an energy savings virtual challenge with MeterLeader that your employees, members, volunteers, and/or residents can participate in from the comfort of their homes.
What is an Energy Savings Virtual Challenge?
MeterLeader allows organizations and groups to easily create energy saving competitions that are integrated with real-time energy data for utility customers of Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), SoCal Edison (SCE), and San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E).
MeterLeader energy saving challenges make saving energy easy, fun, collaborative, and measurable. We are like a Fitbit challenge, but instead of steps, we measure kWh, therm, and corresponding carbon emission reductions. Our platform leverages proven social science insights that have been shown to yield up to 27% in energy savings.
Energy consumption makes up about a third of carbon emissions, and yet up to 30% of energy consumed in residential homes and commercial buildings is wasted, in part because people are unmotivated to adopt energy efficient equipment and behaviors. Given that fossil fuels are still used to generate energy, saving energy results in reduced carbon emissions, lower utility bills, and decreased air pollution – it’s a win-win for everyone!
Energy saving virtual challenges are the perfect Earth Day activity to do with your team. It’s fun, requires little time to set up and maintain, and results in REAL carbon emission reductions. Don’t waste your time with wishful pledges, unaccountable self-reported data, or inaccurate estimates. Take the lead and create a FREE energy savings challenge for your company, environmental group, neighborhood, non-profit, etc. to participate in!
How Do I Create an Energy Savings Virtual Challenge?
Creating an energy savings savings challenge takes less than 5 minutes. It’s very similar to how you would go about creating an Eventbrite or GoFundMe campaign. And you don’t need to know anything about energy – we’ve taken care of all that for you!
To create a challenge all you need to do is take the following actions:
- Name your Challenge – Come up with a fun and distinctive name.
- Choose a Banner Image – Use an image that appeals to your audience.
- Create a Challenge Description – Summarize the goals of the challenge and explain why you are putting on the challenge.
- Set the Challenge Duration – We recommend setting the challenge to be at least 2-3 months since it takes time for people to change their habits and make energy efficient home upgrades. We also recommend launching the challenge page at least 4 weeks in advance of the start date so that participants have enough time to sign up and prepare.
- Set an Individual Savings Goal – We recommend challenging individual challenge participants to achieve between a 1-7% reduction in energy use.
- Set a Collective Savings Goal – Use our recommended equation to create a realistic group kilowatt-hour energy savings goal or carbon emission reduction goal based on the expected number of participants and challenge duration.
- Put up a Challenge Prize – We recommend putting up some kind of prize to award the top energy saving participants at the end of a challenge. Prizes don’t have to have any monetary value. They can be as simple as just being recognized.
- Tell us about the Challenge Organizer – Tell us about the organization or individual sponsoring the challenge and upload an Organizer image.
How MeterLeader Provides Support Throughout The Challenge
MeterLeader will send you or the challenge organizer a ‘Challenge Organizer Guide’ that provides tips on how to run a successful challenge and marketing templates you can use throughout the challenge. That being said once a challenge page is launched and sent out to participants, the challenge essentially runs itself.
Over the duration of an energy savings challenge the MeterLeader platform automatically sends challenge participants weekly energy saving activity modules that teach participants how to save energy and reduce carbon emissions.
Energy data is updated daily and reflected on the challenge page, so challenge organizers can easily monitor the group’s progress. The challenge page has a comment section as well where participants and the challenge organizer can share updates and best practices related to saving energy.
If you have any questions, or would like more support, you can contact us at support@meterleader.com
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