Interview with SENDER Pilots: Insights on User Engagement, Co-Creation, and Stakeholder Roles in Energy Communities

In this article, we present interviews with pilots from the SENDER project, focusing on their insights regarding citizen involvement and co-creation activities. Read on to discover their experiences and perspectives on improving user engagement in energy communities.

In anticipation of a round table on engagement strategies in energy communities at our Joint Final Event with the HESTIA and ACCEPT sister projects, Aniol Esquerra from Ecoserveis—a key member of the SENDER project team—was invited to share insights on several critical topics. The discussion focused on user engagement, co-creation activities, and the roles of various stakeholders in shaping successful energy communities.

To gather diverse perspectives, Aniol engaged with SENDER pilots from Spain, Austria, and Finland by posing several questions to their representatives: Anni Niemi (Finnish Pilot), Gottfried Köberl (Austrian Pilot), and Gemma Llopis (Spanish Pilot). He particularly emphasized the topics highlighted by the participants. This interview aims to distill key takeaways from these discussions, offering valuable insights into the challenges, best practices, and evolving strategies for enhancing citizen involvement in energy initiatives.

What is the value of involving citizens and engaging in co-creation activities?

When you involve citizens in co-creation activities, they are more committed in the future, as they feel accounted for. All participants in the co-creation phase subsequently signed up for the project.

Different opinions and views on energy related topics helps identifying the needs and concerns of citizens.

Citizens who choose to participate in co-creation activities normally already have a good awareness and a knowledge base on the issue and want to contribute actively and that can help gain an “outside” POV.

Not much to add here – I think it’s crucial to identify both their concerns and needs but also expectations during the early phase.

What are the primary challenges encountered at each stage of the user engagement process, and how can they be effectively addressed?

In the firs engagement phase the difficulty consists in finding users who are interested, most of them think their contribution will be insignificant in relation to the Project purpose. Once users are engaged it is difficult to keep them interested, as most of them tend to have very high expectations. I agree with Gottfried (Representative of the Austrian Pilot) that is very time consuming to have users engaged, I think that possibly more resources (funds) should be allocated to this matter.

To mobilise participants in the recruitment phase at first it was difficult to find the right medium to reach potential users and inform about the project. Also, a challenging part of this is to translate technical language into a common (simple) language so potential participants without a technical background can also understand what will be done/what is required.

When users are first engaged, constant user engagement is very important but also very time and resource consuming. This is important to be considered in the planning.

Especially during our project, where the recruitment had to start during the time we didn’t have experience from a demo case yet (the process as whole: audit process, procurement, installation, monitoring). Looking back now, we promised too much for the users and thus the engagement afterwards has been  a lot of explaining to disappointed users whose expectations were not met. This is due to delays in our schedules, more difficult and exhaustive audit process, number of households’ loads included in the project, both monitored and controlled, being much lower than anticipated, long installation visits and multiple visits required, disappointment in the app features etc. – things we only knew after the recruitment had started. Engagement definitely exceeded our expectations on how time and resource consuming the engagement is throughout the whole process. Gottfried’s point abut common language is very true – and maybe something we didn’t succeed too well in, since the majority of our participants are very tech-oriented “early adaptors”.

What has worked best for each step of user engagement, and how was this different from the originally envisaged engagement approach?

For us it was very productive to approach user engagement from different angles, to reach out to different types of people, workshops, local fairs, social media, mailing…

In the end the most effective step of user engagement was during registration phase a regional newspaper article with the description of the project and the (potential) benefits for participants. A local journalist who saw an initial social media post then contacted us for an interview for the newspaper. Through our initial idea to approach users via social media, personal contacts, newspaper articles and ads we have had probably the same reach but the impact of this one newspaper article was almost the same (cannot be confirmed conclusively but the registrations in the 2-3 days after the article was published were half of the overall registrations).  

For the recruitment, did social media posts, through our company’s account, through our (researchers in the project) and local multipliers (local companies active in the energy transition), participated in a few events to tell about the project and also distributed flyers to people’s mail boxes. The best way was probably the LinkedIN posts, and especially those reposted by us, not the company accounts. After the recruitment, the engagement has been through emails, a few phone calls if needed. People in Finland are not excited to go to places or meet people in projects like these.

Follow Our Journey

Explore all the milestones we’ve achieved since the start of the project.