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In an effort to help educate and better connect to their customers, the Sacramento Suburban Water District (SSWD) employed us to develop a comprehensive community outreach program. SSWD wanted to build credibility throughout the community by making direct contact with customers to hear their concerns and answer their questions first-hand. The district also needed to increase the level of water conservation awareness in the community. Although water conservation material was available, many customers did not take advantage of the free resources.
We needed to create an outreach program that made water district personnel available to answer customer questions about their service, billing, water quality, and future water conservation projects. The community outreach program would also need to provide an opportunity to increase awareness for water conservation.
This was a tremendous opportunity for the water district to talk one-on-one with their customers. Many customers only talk to their utility provider if there is a problem and often just scan their monthly inserts for limited information. In our experience, consumers appreciate the efforts a company makes in using non-traditional and personal communication methods to understand their concerns. The outreach program allowed customers to talk freely about any concerns and more importantly, obtain useful water saving tips.
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To ensure the success of the program, we utilized the normal flow of customer traffic combined with our massive publicity campaign to bring district customers to our community outreach area. The second part of our strategy was to let customers know that the district was making a very pro-active outreach effort.
We identified two high-traffic locations in the water district. These sights were mapped carefully within shopping areas with high visibility to ensure maximum exposure to district customers. Once we identified the locations and obtained permission from the store to place our booth out front, we launched a full-scale campaign to notify district customers about the dates we would be in their area. We created bill inserts, Web site announcements, press releases, and on-hold recordings to publicize the outreach days. In addition, we created a free raffle as an added incentive for customers to visit the booth. We distributed water conservation brochures, balloons, pencils, and coloring books for the kids, while also utilizing other interesting visual displays.
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The two-day community outreach program was an overwhelming success. On the first day, hundreds of water conservation kits were given away and more had to be ordered for the subsequent community outreach day. District customers came with a host of questions about district policies, water conservation, and future water projects while personnel enjoyed the opportunity to talk one-on-one with customers. Following the community outreach days, we highlighted the event in the SSWD newsletter, featuring a photo collage and the raffle winners. Our media outreach efforts also resulted in many articles in community newspapers.
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