American Gas - August/September 2013 - (Page 34)
b u r ner
tips
A Baltimore utility mines data to find
low-income customers
By david conn
marketing
Aiming the LifeLine
A
t Baltimore Gas and
Electric Co., we constantly look for the
best ways to reach out
to our limited-income
customers who struggle
to pay their bills. Only
31 percent of likely eligible households in
BGE’s service area access state assistance
funds, compared with approximately 43
percent statewide. In Maryland, assistance
is available if customers apply for help. But
first they have to know it’s an option.
A variety of factors can keep customers from getting the help they need: pride,
frustration with the red tape inherent in
the application process, literacy challenges,
distrust of government or a lack of knowledge about the help available. It’s that last
factor that inspired our Targeted Energy
Assistance Outreach Program. We wanted
to ensure that no BGE customer would go
without the assistance they need and may
be eligible for simply because they didn’t
know that it exists.
While we know quite a bit about our
customers, we don’t ask them how much
they earn, which is the key eligibility factor for energy assistance. That makes it
challenging to contact those who are likely
qualified for help, short of blanketing entire
ZIP codes with assistance letters.
To solve this puzzle, we reached out to
several consumer database companies that
could make well-informed guesses about
our customers’ household incomes. These
types of companies maintain enormous
databases from public sources that provide
useful information about customers’ spend-
34
AmericAn GAs august/september 2013
ing habits and other indicators of income.
For the first test of the program, we
signed agreements with three companies
to see which among them would help us
generate the best results.
In the fall of 2011, we picked 300,000
of our customers with help from ESRI, a
geographic information mapping company.
ESRI uses census data to classify American
neighborhoods into 65 market segments
based on socioeconomic and demographic
factors. This helped us limit the scope—and
the cost—of the pilot by narrowing our
residential customer base down to a group
that ESRI’s data indicated lived in neighborhoods most likely to be of lower income.
We sent 100,000 customer names each
to the three consumer database companies.
They used their more extensive information to produce a combined list of nearly
70,000 customers who likely had income
low enough to be eligible for help. In
November and December we mailed letters
informing them about energy assistance
and how to apply for it.
By April 2012, after the local energy
agencies had enough time to process new
grant applications, we found that more
than 2,250 customers who probably would
not have received assistance without our
mailing had received more than $1 million
in grants. The total project cost was approximately $75,000.
We carefully tracked the response rates
from the customers on each of the vendors’
lists to see which performed best. This
company, SourceLink, was hired as the sole
vendor for year two of the program.
In the second year, we added reply enve-
lopes and used a local vendor that tailored
the letters and envelopes to provide each
customer with the phone number and location of the closest local energy assistance
office. That seemed to be a big factor in the
increased response rate. By the end of April
2013, more than 8,200 customers received
grants of almost $3.9 million. The program
cost remained at about $75,000.
One thing we should have done in the
second year was to stagger the mailings over
several weeks. We received complaints from
local assistance agencies that became temporarily overwhelmed with the volume of
applications. While that’s arguably a good
problem to have, it’s important to maintain
good relations with the local partners that
work hard every day to help our customers.
If utilities can augment their traditional
outreach programs by using micro-targeting tools available today, they may be able
to achieve the same year-over-year improvements that BGE has seen.
More important, we made a real difference in our customers’ lives, particularly the
customers who need help the most. Here’s
what one customer wrote to me after she
received our letter and successfully applied
for help: “I am so grateful for your kindness
and effort on my behalf and will not forget
what BGE did to help me.” That kind of
impact is priceless. u
David Conn has been the Energy Assistance
program manager at BGE since August 2008.
He is the first to hold that position, which was
created to address issues and challenges facing
limited-income customers of BGE, a subsidiary of Chicago-based Exelon Corp.
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Gas - August/September 2013
American Gas - August/September 2013
Contents
President’s Message
Subject Index
Dual-Fuel CNG Beauties
Digest
Issues
Issues
Issues
Need to Know
By the Numbers
Places
In Las Vegas, Another Man-Made Wonder
State House
State House
Elm Street
Main Street
A Matter of Trust
Profile
Here Comes the Grid
Marketing
Jobs
Vendor News
Marketplace
Headway
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