In collaboration with Goldstreet, LMUD chose a multifaceted approach to informing their customers of the upcoming changes. Door hangers were used to let customers know that their meter had been exchanged or that access to their meter was not possible and they needed to contact the district to set-up a time. Information cards with the FAQs were placed in their lobby and given to the field personnel to have on hand in their vehicles when needed. If a customer came in with a question, a customer service representative had cards with answers they could provide.

Lassen thought that communication and reaching each customer was going to be crucial, regardless of their customers’ feelings toward the change – they were right. The positive response they received for keeping their customers in the loop, providing them an avenue to get their questions answered as well as their concerns addressed, proved to be the driving force in customer satisfaction. One customer said, “Thank you for leaving the door hanger about our meter and thank you for the dog treats too!”

The district’s, Theresa Phillips, said, “The materials we developed, with the help of Goldstreet, made it possible for us to reach every customer that was affected. We also did newspaper, radio, web site and social media outreach, but without a doubt, the printed materials that we were able to deliver to our customers were the most effective. The quality of the material, the information presented and the fact that customers had something they could refer to helped our utility achieve our communication goal.”

After the roll out of this program the only thing Lassen Municipal Utility District said they would have done differently was to have ordered more “sorry we missed you” door hangers as they were essential to rescheduling missed installs.

In partnership with Goldstreet, Lassen Municipal Utility District was able to educate their community of upcoming changes to the meter system they were used to and create trust with their customers while they adjusted to a needed upgrade in technology.

The post Success Story: Lassen Municipal Utility District Mitigates Smart Meter Conversion Concern with Education appeared first on Goldstreet Designs.

Newsletters are one of the best ways to communicate important information with a wide audience, but first you have to get people reading what you send!

Here are six great tips for making sure your newsletter is one that customers will want to engage with:

1. Spend Plenty of Time on Your Subject or Headline.

Although it may seem like a newsletter headline or email subject doesn’t matter much, it’s usually the first thing your reader sees. It gives them an immediate impression and helps determine whether they want to find out more. Go with a subject or headline that’s short, direct, and positive. The headline of a printed newsletter should also be eye catching and prominently placed to ensure that any reader will see it. To see how yours stacks up, try this free headline analyzer from the Advanced Marketing Institute.

2. Simplify, Simplify, Simplify.

It’s crucial that you don’t overwhelm your readers with too much information. Be concise and focus on one clear message. Before you mail out your newsletter or hit send on the email, make sure you’ve cut out everything that’s not necessary. That might even mean stepping away from your content for awhile and coming back for one last pass at trimming it down.

3. Create a Hierarchy of Information.

In addition to keeping your newsletter simple, you also want it to be well organized. Since most people only spend a limited time reading a newsletter, it’s crucial that you put your most important information first. If you have a lot of information to communicate and you’re sending an email, consider linking out to your website.

4. Provide Information that Educates Your Customers.

Your newsletter should offer reliable and informative content. Send your customers information that is useful to them, and they are more likely to engage with it. Regularly sending educational content can help build your customers’ trust in you as they come to see you as an expert in your field.

5. Keep Your Layout Clean.

No matter how helpful your information is, it also needs to be visually appealing and easy for your readers to digest. In our age of social media, most people are used to reading in short bursts, so your newsletter should cater to a short attention span. Use headers to break up sections and present information in bulleted lists that are easy to read. Keep your design simple and use plenty of white space.

6. Create a Customer Feedback Loop.

Creating an engaging and educational newsletter is important. Getting customer feedback on your messaging is just as important. Customer feedback loops are extremely efficient ways to improve your services and to meet customer’s needs. Creating this customer interaction, you can gather information that is important to your audience, learn from it and tweak your messaging to make it more meaningful. Make sure you include avenues for feedback in your newsletter, invite people to participate in the conversation through surveys. Offer incentives for feedback. Some examples are: a free inspection or a giveaway of a promotional item. Make sure to include an email address, survey link and contact information.

The post 6 Tips to Get the Most Out of Your Newsletter appeared first on Goldstreet Designs.

Have a Key Message

Before you get started, be sure that you’re clear about the main point you want the public to take away. Trying to cover too many topics at once can water down your message and make it hard for people to remember. Alternatively, one key message that you support through signage, promotional materials and talking points is more likely to have lasting impact.

Think About Your Audience

Now that your clear about your message, it’s time to think about where to deliver it. Is your information targeted to adults, children, homeowners, pet owners? Think about your audience and make sure you plan your event where they might best be reached. Considering budget vs impact is also important. Because outreach resources are often tight, you want to spend more of your budget on programs that have a wider reach and less on those for a smaller audience.

Get the Word Out

Promoting your event is also crucial to its success. You can start generating interest ahead of time through social media, website posts, media outlets, community calendars, etc. A little buzz can go along way!

Don´t Be a Wallflower

When it comes to the day of the event, it´s either go big or be invisible. So make sure you brand your booth with banners, table covers and other signage that stand out and deliver your key message. There´s no such thing as being too visible!

Make Your Booth the Place to Be

Giveaways are always a great way to attract people to your booth. To make them more meaningful, develop promotional items that tie in with your key message. For example, if you want to teach kids about water conservation, you could consider a colorful activity book with teaching points around the subject. To build the excitement, invite people in for a game with the giveaways as prizes. Educating the public through games and activities brings a sense of fun to the learning process and helps them remember your message. Be sure to follow the activities with a take home handout that reinforces your point.

Put Your Best Face Forward

Preparing your staff is key to making your community event a success. After all, these are the people that will literally be the face of your company. Make sure that they are well prepared with talking points that deliver a consistent message. Just as important is being a good host. Branded refreshments and a smile will make people feel welcome and more apt to listen your message.

Need more help with your community event? Goldstreet has developed outreach programs for utilities and agencies across the country. The activities and communication pieces we create will get noticed and resonate with your customers.

The post Maximize Your Community Event appeared first on Goldstreet Designs.

TIP #1: BREAK IT DOWN

Because brochures contain more copy than many mediums, getting started can feel a little overwhelming. Writing an outline will help you clarify your thoughts and make sure you stick to the point. This means first writing down the MOST IMPORTANT POINTS you want your customers to take away. Try to sum up the major points in just one sentence. For example, a simple outline for a brochure about Fats, Oils and Grease might look something like this:

FOGS ARE FATS, OILS AND GREASE

FOGS CAN CAUSE BACKUPS IN YOUR HOME

FOGS CAN HARM THE ENVIRONMENT

BACKUPS FROM FOGS ARE PREVENTABLE

Once you have the major points, you can then go back in and fill in the supporting details you would like to include in each section. For example:

BACKUPS FROM FOG ARE PREVENTABLE

Don´t scrape food particles into the sink.

Can and recycle cooking oil.

Your outline is not necessarily the final wording you will use. But it does give you a road map to follow so you don’t get lost or bogged down while writing your brochure. Remember, if you’re not sure about what you want to say, your customers won’t be either.

TIP #2: DON’T THROW IN THE KITCHEN SINK

In today’s world of sound-bites and tweets, it can be challenging to keep your readers’ attention. Overloading your audience with unnecessary details may give them an easy excuse to tune your message out. As you write, try to ask yourself if the information you’re relaying is both vital to making your main point and pertinent to your reader. For example, utility customers need to know that throwing oil down a storm drain is illegal. However, they don’t need to know the number and section of that specific city law. Fine tuning your copy in this manner will help you cut the fluff and keep your message on point.

TIP #3: CUT THE SHOP TALK

As with all industries, the utilities sector has its own specific terms and jargon. For your average reader, however, using overly technical language can be confusing. Be sure to review each section of your brochure and ask yourself if somebody outside the utility industry would get what you’re trying to say. If not, try to re-write the section in a way that a friend or relative would easily understand. This exercise is vital to keeping your copy understandable and your readers engaged.

TIP #4: SPICE UP YOUR SUB-HEADS

One of the pitfalls of writing technical copy is that it’s easy to fall into a flat, boring tone. Incorporating personality may seem challenging, but a little can go a long way. A great place to start is with your subheads. To keep your readers attention, try making them a little unexpected or humorous. Including a benefit for your customers in a subhead is also a good way to keep them reading. Don’t be afraid to play with your copy a bit. It could make your brochure more fun to write and to read!

TIP #5: WALKING AWAY CAN BE A GOOD THING

While working on a brochure, it´s easy to get “too close” to the copy and lose your objectivity. If your schedule allows, it’s important to walk a way for an hour or even a day and then read what you wrote with a fresh eye. You may find that a message you thought you were relaying clearly is actually confusing. Or that certain details aren’t pertinent to your main point. Giving yourself a little breather can help you see things you missed and may even give you fresh insights!

Feeling mentally blocked after focusing for a long time? Sometimes a mini-break can help. Try getting up, walking around or even doing a few stretches. A little physical activity can loosen your mind up and help you get back into the flow again!

The post Is Your Brochure Copy Muddled Or On Message? appeared first on Goldstreet Designs.

Good for you! You’ve made big steps toward engaging with your community on Facebook, Twitter and other popular social media channels.

Do you know if your efforts are paying off?

If you answered “no” to that question, you’re not alone. Despite all the information out there about how to determine social media “success”, few utility communicators are clear about whether their social media efforts are working.

Here are some tips that will help you figure whether your social media activities are performing effectively.

Begin with the basics.

Do a simple cost / benefit analysis.

Once you’ve determined that your posts are performing as intended, it’s a good idea to see if the promotion you’re doing is cost-efficient. Do your best to track the hours you spend preparing, tracking and managing posts. If you are boosting or advertising, look at how much you’re paying for clicks (cost-per-click or CPC). Ask yourself: Is it efficient compared with other marketing techniques, such as banner advertising, email communications and direct mail?

In most cases, the answer to this question is yes. Social media is generally the most cost-effective way to get the word out to people in the area you serve, comparable with email and other digital marketing and communication techniques.

If you’re finding your social media promotion costs are too high, consider different types of targeting or leveraging a broader mix of social channels. Many utilities start out by promoting on Facebook. However, they may be able to more efficiently reach younger customers on Twitter or Instagram, which are generally lower cost ways to reach Millennials.

Don’t stop with social media.

It’s great to know that people are clicking on, liking and sharing your social posts and that you’re paying a fair price for those actions. However, are you monitoring what happens once they come to your blog or website?

It’s important to check that the visitors who arrive from social campaigns spend a reasonable amount of time with your content and move on to explore more of your site.

Check with your IT department or use Google Analytics or other similar website monitoring tools to find this out. They allow you to track the social media traffic to your site and see how much time they’re spending on individual pages. Thirty seconds or more, on average, is a sign that they’re engaging with your content and reading a significant amount of it.

If you’re seeing a high bounce rate (people spend less than ten seconds on a page and are not clicking to check out other pages), that means they are having a bad — or unexpected — experience. You can usually fix this by double checking your posts and the content they link to see if the content pays off on the promises you made in the post.

If you see a disconnect, try using a new post or revising your headline and the opening section of your web content. This should remedy the issue and improve your time-on-page results.

Note: It’s critical to fix social campaigns and web pages with high bounce rates. Google will penalize websites with high bounce rates because it’s a sign that the site is delivering a negative user experience. A penalty will make it harder for the people you serve to find your site when doing a Google search.

Need help developing and promoting your social media posts and monitoring their success? Contact Goldstreet. We have unique experience creating successful communication campaigns for utilities across the United States and we can advise you on how to take yours to the ultimate level.

The post How Do You Know Your Social Media Campaigns are Working? appeared first on Goldstreet Designs.

1. Make a Checklist

Make a checklist of your own, including these tips and adding others as you see fit. Print it out, and check off each item as it is performed. This will help with consistency and improve the quality of your public outreach.

2. Read the Copy Out-Loud

Teacher’s tell this to their students all the time. It’s the quickest and easiest way to spot common errors with punctuation, word choice and the flow of sentences and paragraphs.

3. Get A Fresh Set of Eyes on It

Again, something you probably learned in school. When trying to communicate to an audience it’s imperative that you get perspective from outside of your own head and experience. Also, you may be too close to your writing and are unable to spot errors, that, despite several reviews, someone else will spot immediately.

4. Design

Verify that the photographs are high-resolution. When dealing with a lot of colors, ensure that the text is readable against the background. Text should also be appropriately sized. In tables, review the content for consistency and review the spacing and alignment of the text within each cell.

5. Verifying Contact or Follow-up Information

A lot of brochures have phone numbers and addresses in them. Some even include hyperlinks. Verify phone numbers for hotlines or public facing phone numbers by copy and pasting them into a search engine and looking at the results. Ditto for addresses. For links, it can be as simple as clicking it and seeing if it opens the correct page, sometimes copy and pasting the link into the browser is involved.

6. Acronyms

Internal utility industry communications are full of acronyms. To help make a consumer-friendly brochure, verify that all acronyms are defined on the page they occur on. If the page has multiple boxes of information, it may be advisable to define re-ocurring acronyms in each box; or if it is a folded or multi-page brochure, it may be advisable to define the acronym on each panel or page it is used. Also, double check to make sure that the acronym is correct.

Using these tips is a good start for proofing the final draft. Good luck with your next piece of outreach!

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