Powering Change

Background

With a current membership of 16 organisations – including Orion, Vector, and Genesis – Powering Change represents a broad cross-section of electricity and gas companies.

Together, they’ve formed a critical initiative that details the sector’s growth toward New Zealand’s climate change goals and the collective action of their members to reach net zero emissions by 2050.

At the outset of their launch in early 2023, the collective had staged objectives, with stage one all about building awareness, creating a road map, and, of course, great content.

The secretariat, ERANZ, reached out to us to get the ball rolling. We were thrilled by the opportunity to get the message out to target audiences of environmentally conscious Kiwis, media, and special-interest groups and jumped into it feeling like part of the team.

Soon, we had a clear directive to create a regular and optimised content programme for member-supplied stories, projects and innovations with subscribers and target audiences, with a tight budget and a six-month timeframe for stage one.

Challenge

Walking into a brand-new organisation with a rough, untrialled content strategy and so many senior stakeholders who are (in reality) competitors, we knew stakeholder management would be key. Organising the governance system for content production was the easy part. Here were some of the more complex challenges:

Making content fit for purpose

Every member organisation created their own articles for the Powering Change site and sent them to us for editing. We quickly found that the supplied content wasn’t always fit for purpose. For example, we’d receive press releases, material that was too ‘promotional’ (we were wary of any greenwashing), or highly technical content not suited for our wider audiences.

Balancing TOV

Each member organisation had its own tone of voice, and naturally, some of those were strongly and tightly guarded by their comms teams. So, as you can imagine, releasing branded content into the new Powering Change ecosystem required some gentle to-ing and fro-ing with senior gatekeepers. Members soon realised the value of us advocating for this to maintain a consistent overarching brand experience while simultaneously promoting individualised stories from members.

Managing competing interests

Although Powering Change comes together with a collective mindset that’s very much towards the greater good of a sustainable NZ, within the membership group, there were of course market competitors. Some articles presented points or ideas that had the potential to create contradiction or negative impact for other members of the collective. Our task: to make sure that all organisations highlighted their own innovative activities without stepping on toes or feeling divisive.

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Solution

So, how did the actual solution unfold?
 
To create a news and info platform that audiences genuinely care about engaging with (and all members were happy with) we started, with an evolving strategy for several channels, tight systems that were easy to use, and importantly, maintained trusted relationship with all 16 organisations. No mean feat when there’s that many people to please!  
 
We focused on three key areas:
 
Process and systems
We brought all the members into a self-service, cloud-based system where they could submit topic ideas and articles for review and publication. Our major tools included:
 
·       A regular content calendar that tracked monthly blogs, social content and newsletter to a growing audience of subscribers.
·       A subcommittee approval process to vet topics and high-level messaging
·       Article guidelines for the contributing members that helped them to create timely content within scope and us to manage, publish and distribute
 
Growing the content strategy
We dove hard and fast into researching our target audiences through social listening and kept on top of energy sector content in New Zealand and overseas. This helped us unpack the landscape and understand the environmental and commercial challenges NZ faces in this space so we could then identify content pillars and timely topic clusters that would resonate.  [GU1] [KF2] 
 
Our content strategy leveraged owned Powering Change channels, the website, email newsletters and organic social.
 
Basically, we did what we do best here at BOW: putting audiences at the heart of the strategy and supporting decisions with robust research / data. And then of course, listening to audiences as we’d roll things out and evolving from there.
 
Client service and writing direction
Given the diverse group of member organisations, we saw the need for a highly collaborative and structured writing process. Initially, we provided clear guidelines that allowed members to submit content drafts aligned with Powering Change's brand voice and content goals. But when that didn’t quite work, we pivoted to a more hands-on approach – flipping the script by conducting in-depth interviews with subject matter experts from each member company and writing the articles ourselves.
 
This worked out well for everyone; our writers could craft compelling content that was more fit of purpose and highlighted each member’s renewable energy initiatives clearly – all while working to mature the Powering Change brand voice.
 
And members still had a stake! They reviewed and approved the final drafts through an efficient feedback loop. This collab let us create polished content and interactive tools that achieved Powering Change's objectives: to build brand awareness and promote member achievements.
 
It was also important for us to make sure all committee members were happy – so if we had to pick up the phone to an individual stakeholder, we did. These informal discussions helped us to identify any pain points and to understand each brand’s needs.