S3C Toolkit

Understanding target groups

Knowing your target groups is of key importance for successful end user engagement. This is not only a matter of socio-demographics: it is just as important to gain insight in what end users want, need, and expect in a smart energy project. 

Collection of survey questions for smart grid evaluation - This set of pre-formulated and elaborated questions can be used by researchers and/or marketing employees to design a survey for smart grid evaluations in a resource efficient manner.

ENact 2020 - exchanging know-how in a multi-stakeholder workshop - ENact 2020 is a workshop format tool that aims to bring together stakeholders to gather views and ideas from different perspectives. It can be applied before implementation, or it can support the (re)design of a project.

Engaging people through telling stories - Narratives or stories can be a powerful tool for customer engagement. This guideline offers an insight into different forms and uses of narratives as well as best practice examples from the field.

Gamification - making energy fun - Gaming can be used to inform users about (smart) energy topics and to motivate them to reach energy efficiency or demand response objectives in a playful manner. This guideline provides theoretical and practical insights into the topic of gamification.

How to gather community support for your smart grid - This guideline examines how smart grid development can intersect with the dynamics of energy community initiatives. How can your smart grid project facilitate the formation of an energy community? And how can community dynamics influence consumer engagement in a project?

Learning about target groups - This guideline provides an overview of methods that can be applied to better understand the socio-demographic profile of target groups and their attitudes, values and behaviour.

Monitoring and evaluation through stories – Most Significant Change - In this method that derives from social programmes, stories are applied for project monitoring and evaluation purposes. This tool is written for project managers looking for innovative participatory methods for impact monitoring and evaluation.

Postcard from the future workshop method - A tool for project staff members, workshop organisers and product developers to gather out-of-the-box ideas. The postcard method provides a window into the mind of consumers that is minimally constrained by socially desirable answers.

Questionnaire for engaging SMEs - This tool comprises a standardized questionnaire for service providers to identify potential small and medium enterprises (SMEs) for participation in demand response programs. It requires background knowledge from the field of energy.

User-centred KPIs for the evaluation of smart grids - Evaluation of smart grid initiatives from the user perspective helps you in understanding how they have experienced the smart grid products and services. In this guideline evaluation is looked at from the perspective of the three S3C user types: the Smart Consumer, Smart Customer, and Smart Citizen.

Using segmentation to better target user groups - To better understand customer diversity, consumers can be divided into into subsets of users with common lifestyles, preferences or needs. The guideline sketches an overview of the different application areas of segmentation and it provides a birds-eye view of the steps to be taken. The accompanying tool User group segmentation (light) can help you to get acquainted with the approach. It is a simple and highly accessible tool to gain hands-on experience with segmentation, consisting of a short survey implemented in the associated MS Excel spreadsheet.