The cost of energy has risen rapidly in recent years and all the signs are that prices will continue to rise above inflation. A 2014 UK survey revealed that rising energy costs is the number one financial worry for households, with well over 60% believing there’s little or nothing they can do about them.
Given this level of unease over energy bills, a new partnership of leading businesses and organisations, all with an interest in building a culture of much greater energy efficiency, has been formed to radically rethink how energy saving issue is communicated to the public and convince individual households that they can take control of their energy use.
The Big Energy Vision is a coalition of some of the biggest names in retail, including B&Q, Homebase and John Lewis, heating and insulation businesses, and equally well-known civil society groups, such as the National Trust, Citizen’s Advice Bureau and the Energy Saving Trust.
Co-ordinated by Forum for the Future and Behaviour Change, this ambitious collaborative project uses the combined communications power of 14 businesses and charities to help households take control of their energy bills.
The Big Energy Vision highlights practical actions that people can take to control their energy bills through using, wasting and paying less. But the partners also want to tackle a lack of public trust and a feeling of powerless to act, by bringing credible large organisations and opinion formers together to speak consistently about the issue.
Because the challenge is too big for one organisation or sector to tackle alone, members of Big Energy Vision will together devise, coordinate and publicise messages and then transmit those to millions of people through their own individual communication channels.
So far, during the pilot phase, this has included Homebase featuring the initiative on its website, uSwitch emailing 650,00 subscribers, and Citizen’s Advice and the Energy Savings Trust using it as a lead message for the Big Energy Saving Week.
Further underlining the collaborative nature of the project, the partners are making the messaging toolkit freely available to other organisations that wish to use it.
