The average utility customer spends about 9 minutes per year thinking about their utility, according to Accenture. That's not a lot of time get people to drive behavior change, is it?

A few years ago, many utilities began switching to time-of-use rates, where energy is more expensive between 4 and 9 pm on weekdays. The goal was to reduce energy demand during these "peak hours," and encourage customers to use less energy at this time.

The problem was that most customers didn't know how the plan worked, and even fewer even knew that their plan changed at all.

After much trial and error, we developed a weekly email series that explained how these time-of-use rates worked and encouraged customers to shift their energy use outside of peak hours.

I led the content strategy for the emails and wrote the UX content for the entire program. The results? One Midwest utility saw 14 MW peak demand reduction in a randomized controlled trial. Another utility with more than 800,000 homes found that recipients were 16% more likely to recall their peak hours compared to control. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Read the full case study and results