BC Hydro
Supporting one of Canada’s largest utilities to become a conservation powerhouse online.
Turning one of Canada's largest utilities into a digital conservation leader
BC Hydro is one Canada’s largest power companies, serving over 2 million customers. Its unique government ownership makes it one of the most progressive utilities in North America, with a strong focus on conservation marketing, drawing nearly 90% of its power from green sources.
BC Hydro has partnered with Communicopia since 2007 on numerous digital initiatives relating to conservation, citizen engagement, and governance. We have helped grow BC Hydro from a laggard to a recognized digital communications leader - inside and outside the company, within BC and beyond.
An Embedded Mission
Our first project was to implement a bold new digital vision: turning their staid utility website - that already reached nearly every household in BC - into a "conservation gateway" that would better achieve Hydro’s mission of “creating a culture of conservation”. The new vision leveraged their Power Smart brand's two decades of conservation marketing, but made conservation content the centrepiece of the entire site.
Convening a team of editors, writers, and advisors through our relationships with environmental leaders, we led the research and design and created a new content core for their site. These "Green Guides" and related stories quickly became their most popular content, and have been integrated into their popular e-newsletters, blog, and social media channels.
In 2009, the new site was recognized as the Top Canadian Electric and Gas Company website by the largest and most detailed benchmark study in their industry, also winning numerous Lotus Awards for advertising excellence.
From Campaigns to Community
Team Power Smart, BC Hydro’s flagship advertising program, had generated great brand awareness, but its loose "feel-good" messaging wasn’t producing enough meaningful results. We helped shift Team Power Smart from a campaign into an action-oriented community. We focused their messaging on demonstrable actions, reduced barriers to participation by opening it up to all BC citizens, worked to integrate more programs around the Team concept, and secured a long term, multi-year commitment to grow it.
By the end of the 2010 Winter Olympics the Team surpassed its goal of 210,000 members, making it one of the largest constituencies in the province.
Through a different department, Hydro was interested in using digital to increase collaboration and information sharing among their Energy Managers. These specialists are located around the province and are incentivized to implement energy reduction projects within their workplaces. Seeing a natural community of practice, we helped create and grow a private online community that provides space for reporting, real-time collaboration and idea sharing, helps foster and maintain relationships, shorten project life-cycles and support a significant reduction in electrical consumption in the province.
Culture and Capacity Enable Success
Our support of Hydro’s digital team was essential to the success of the projects we and other groups created. Our strategy work helped them expand their team from 4 to 14 people and reposition their group’s role as a more strategic leadership department that both serves all departments and leads innovation in new realms of customer and community engagement.
This new positioning, content, tools, engagement campaigns, and capacity building have had an impact not only on how BC Hydro uses digital, but in shifting the organization’s culture to embrace new communications standards and integrated campaigns.
