January 2019
Member Spotlight
In 2019, SECC will be recognizing a member each month, providing an organizational profile and highlighting the member's accomplishments and output in the smart energy space.
About Gridmates
Gridmates is the leading cloud-based platform for smart energy donations and community engagement that empowers modern utilities to fulfill the promise of social responsibility to their customers. Gridmates built a unique platform that combines social engagement and community building through technology that helps utilities engage, retain and cultivate a community of energy donors, delivering valuable energy resources to those in need. Gridmates’ mission is to provide digital innovation in bill assistance programs and help utilities end energy poverty.
Building Community Engagement
The Gridmates digital platform is helping utilities with:
- Marketing efforts: Gridmates strengthens brand awareness by elevating customers’ social consciousness. It gives a purpose to marketing campaigns and creates a competitive edge by making social responsibility the driver for customer engagement.
- Community affairs and customer care: Gridmates enhances the existing utility assistance programs and raises funds for low-income customers – increasing donor engagement and strengthening brand community.
- Analytics: Gridmates offers the necessary tools to create, manage and track the impact of the purposeful campaigns. This helps provide a clearer understanding of customers’ needs and what are the motivating drivers other than price/kWh. It enables marketing teams to better understand behavioral drivers and nurture better customer relationships.
Gridmates Products
Gridmates is a white-labelled, cloud-based platform (SaaS) that combines smart grid technologies, analytics, social media and crowdfunding technologies to help utilities improve community engagement, enhance the performance of existing bill assistance programs and reduce cost of collection. The platform is scalable and can be easily integrated with existing programs, APIs and features.
The product offerings for utilities includes the following:
- Grid Connect offers a plug-and-play engagement platform that utilities can use to create new campaigns or energize existing campaigns. Grid Connect easily integrates into the utility’s current infrastructure for event-based campaigns to acquire new donors and inspire them to join their mission. Having a nimble platform that can be embedded throughout the marketing efforts allows social programs to be more agile.
- Grid Mobile offers community engagement as part of the utility’s existing web and mobile platform through state-of-the-art APIs and cloud technologies. It helps utilities target their customers and donors where they are, leverage their existing platform and increase online and mobile donations.
- Grid Suite helps the utility build a multi-channel strategy that supports their goals and integrates with current marketing and energy-giving initiatives. It provides reports with real-time visibility and builds actionable data for future marketing efforts. This product supports all benefits and features of Grid Connect and Grid Mobile plus a wide range of gamification features.
Sample Success Story: Direct Energy’s Neighbor-to-Neighbor Program
Based in Houston, Texas, Direct Energy is one of largest residential energy retailers in North America with nearly 3.8 million residential customers across its energy and home services businesses in all 50 U.S. states and one province in Canada.
To help customers in need with their monthly electric bills, Direct Energy established its Neighbor-to-Neighbor (N2N) bill assistance program in 2003. They partnered with Gridmates to develop a personalized digital destination for the N2N Program, where users can be more engaged in the energy donation process.
The redesigned N2N Program experienced one of its first real tests when the catastrophic Hurricane Harvey hit South Texas in August 2017. Within the first 24 hours of the campaign going live, Direct Energy was able to raise over $25,000 for relief, and by the time the campaign closed, they had raised $50,000 – which Direct Energy then matched for a total contribution of $100,000. The unexpected experience with Hurricane Harvey proved how nimble and engaging the Gridmates platform could be with community assistance.
“We lead the industry through energy innovation and connected experiences that make a difference in people’s lives. Our Neighbor-to-Neighbor program is just one example of how we are doing just that. Gridmates’ simple platform provides a Kickstarter-like experience in helping bring together our customers to help those in need quickly,” said Manu Asthana, president, Direct Energy.
