How do you present energy performance indicators to different audiences?

1 Know your audience

Prior to designing your EPI presentation, it's essential to understand your audience and what they wish to learn. Consider questions such as their background and familiarity with energy management and EPIs, their goals and motivations for improving energy performance, their main challenges and concerns regarding energy efficiency, as well as how they prefer to receive and process information. Answering these questions will help you decide on the tone, style, and content of your EPI presentation. For instance, if the audience is a technical team responsible for implementing energy-saving measures, you may opt for more detailed and specific EPIs such as energy intensity, energy consumption, or energy savings. On the other hand, if the audience is a senior management interested in the strategic and financial benefits of energy efficiency, you may want to use more aggregated and simplified EPIs like energy performance index, energy cost index, or energy return on investment.

2 Choose the right EPIs

Once you know your audience, you need to choose the right EPIs to present. There are many types of EPIs, such as absolute, relative, normalized, or benchmarked. You should select the EPIs that best suit your purpose and message. For example, if your purpose is to compare the energy performance of different buildings, systems, or processes, you may want to use relative or normalized EPIs, such as energy use per unit of output, area, or occupancy. If your purpose is to evaluate the energy performance against a target or a standard, you may want to use benchmarked EPIs, such as energy star rating, energy efficiency ratio, or energy performance certificate.

You should also consider the number and variety of EPIs to present. You don't want to overwhelm your audience with too many or too complex EPIs that may confuse or distract them from your main message. You should focus on the most relevant and meaningful EPIs that can demonstrate the value and impact of energy efficiency. You should also use different types of EPIs to provide a balanced and comprehensive view of energy performance. For example, you can use absolute EPIs to show the total amount of energy used or saved, relative EPIs to show the efficiency or improvement of energy use, and benchmarked EPIs to show the ranking or rating of energy performance.

3 Use effective visuals

Presenting EPIs with visuals, such as charts, graphs, tables, or dashboards, can help you convey complex and abstract data in a clear and engaging way. You can also highlight trends, patterns, relationships, or anomalies in your EPIs. However, it’s important to choose the right type of visual for your EPIs and audience; for instance, a line chart or bar chart to show the change or variation of EPIs over time. Additionally, when designing visuals, you should follow some basic principles of data visualization such as clear and consistent labels, titles, legends and units; appropriate and contrasting colors, shapes and sizes; simple and minimal elements; and annotations to emphasize key points or insights.

4 Tell a story

Finally, you need to tell a story with your EPIs. A story is a narrative that connects your EPIs with your audience and your purpose – it can help capture attention, interest, and emotion, as well as explain the context, meaning, and implications of your EPIs. To do this, you should define the problem or opportunity that your EPIs address or create, describe the solution or action they support or suggest, show the results or outcomes they measure or indicate, and provide recommendations or next steps they inspire or require. Additionally, use a clear and logical structure for your EPI presentation, a catchy and relevant headline and introduction, a compelling and memorable conclusion and call to action, anecdotes, examples, or testimonials to illustrate or validate them, and humor, emotion, or surprise to engage or persuade your audience.

5 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?