Hug Your Home
Our second pilot, Hug Your Home, is working with some of the biggest employers in Britain to make it easier, cheaper and more appealing for their employees to insulate their homes.
With £1 in every £4 spent heating homes wasted through poor insulation and around 90% of the homes lacking the adequate amount, there are significant financial and CO2 savings to be made by ‘hugging your home’ with insulation. In fact households can save around £265 every year by insulating their lofts and cavity walls.
In addition to working with energy companies and retailers to offer leading insulation deals, the Hug Your Home campaign has created open source materials which will be used in internal communications to emphasize the emotional benefits of an insulated home.
This collaborative approach helps us to target a massive audience of employees through established and trusted channels of communication and demonstrates their employers’ commitment to helping them lead more sustainable lives.
Barriers to insulation
In Spring 2009, with the help of Defra funding, we conducted qualitative research to further investigate the opportunities for increasing insulation uptake. Whilst there are many barriers to insulating (and no single bullet to overcome them), our r esearch summarised them into three over-riding issues:
- Salience: Insulation is not salient and not a priority
- Big job: Insulation is seen as expensive, a big hassle and therefore OK to put off
- Loss of interest: Too many questions remain and the job still feels too hard
Campaign results
Eleven large employers, spanning business, NGO and the public sector took part in the pilot of Hug Your Home in winter 2009.
British Gas and B&Q promoted a range of discounted insulated offers to a combined 210,000 employees. With around 10,000 hits to the Hug Your Home campaign website and hundreds of people taking up the offers, the Department of Energy and Climate Change offered to fund a second phase of the campaign.
Spring 2010, saw the return of the approach under the ‘Insulate Today’ banner. Working closely with DECC and the Energy Saving Trust, we will if you will partnered Accenture, Aviva, HSBC and Sainsbury’s with Sainsbury’s Energy (EDF) to promote a (national) price leading insulation deal to their employees.
