Council & community programs getting us to Net Zero

In Australia, councils are still the driving force behind the climate emergency response. As the level of government closest to community, councils are well placed to work in partnership with community. However, they are not equipped with strong legislative powers to mandate changes to our homes.

Because of this, councils continue to seek creative ways to engage, inspire and collaborate with community to drive home retrofits – thank goodness someone is doing this work! We counted six current campaigns and programs without even trying. Including the Electrify Everything program from Merri-bek, Banyule, Yarra and Darebin councils, Electrify Boroondara, and Sandringham's Village Zero. Councils are also working on campaigns in partnership with Climate Council and Rewiring Australia, with private providers such as Evitat and Goodbye Gas contributing momentum.

More than ever, councils are sharing information with each other to strengthen campaign outcomes.

Here at Let Me Be Frank our team – Kate Nicolazzo, Amy Brand and Lucy Best – have decades of experience driving sustainability programs. We’ve worked across the Moreland Energy Foundation, Yarra Energy Foundation, Australian Energy Foundation, Victorian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and the City of Melbourne. More recently, we’ve had the privilege of collaborating on materials and campaign design with several councils. Across the decades, we’ve had big successes, slow burns, and a few failures to learn from.

In the spirit of collaboration, and getting more goals kicked faster, we offer our campaign insights:

1. A well-designed communications campaign should accompany any new program and/or suite of services. The campaign needs to be aspirational and embed the feel-good factor, painting a positive vision that gives community members an actionable way that they can make a positive difference.
2. Build open, transparent, and diverse partnerships. Set the goal and communicate the vision with your community through a cohesive campaign (e.g., for Net Zero Emissions by 2030/2040/2050). However, there won’t be one common pathway that meets the needs of all your communities at the same time. Developing a mix of transparent partnerships (evaluated regularly for effectiveness) allows a multitude of pathways to match the needs of different sectors. For example, homeowners, retirees, new builds, low income, renters, strata, renovators, social housing will all have different needs and touch points.
3. Invest time and money where it makes sense. The time and money spent on procurement processes that meet local government requirements, for example, just aren’t necessary for household level procurement (unless it can be delivered at scale through a bulk buy or similar). We recommend you explore establishing a process for peer-led local reviews and referrals. For example, hosting a heat pump information session in a particular street, where people visit a neighbour’s house, hear how loud a heat pump is and chat about their installation experience. This could also be delivered online, or as a hybrid event. “Soft” referrals through inclusion of supplier names in case studies and stories can also be effective.
4. Capture and share local stories of people making change in their homes or businesses. Demonstrating the change, and the challenges that were overcome, is one of the best ways to scale up action. Capturing and sharing these stories regularly is a lot of work but should be prioritised as it is a proven effective engagement tool.
5. Make a longer-term commitment. Rather than rolling out programs in consecutive order, we believe a carousel model, with an ongoing program, will ensure community members can get on board when they are engaged and ready. Leverage the growing number of campaigns and services that already exist, to deliver the messages from as many trusted sources as possible (e.g., Climate Council, Rewiring Australia, Victorian Energy Upgrades, Solar Victoria etc).
6. Build in action research and co-design. Consider A/B testing and getting feedback from the community through smaller pilots, then scale up. Ensure the program design allows for change over time, to respond to emerging community needs, technologies, and related campaigns by other levels of government without losing the core of the campaign. Communities are full of diversity in needs and capacity to act, so facilitating the change is not easy. But it is so important.

We humans are tricky. There’s no magic bullet that can speed up retrofitting but well-designed campaigns can take us a long way. And, the more insights we share, the better our campaigns will be.

What are your campaign insights?