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Optimizing Your Renewable Energy Website (Part 2 of 3)

April 19, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Optimizing Your Renewable Energy Website (Part 2 of 3)

This is the second in a series on strategies for optimizing your renewable energy business website.

Download the entire article, 25 Renewable Energy Website Strategies: Maximize the ROI of Your Website and Convert Readers Into Customers, at www.RenewableEnergyWriter.com.

1. What’s on the “First Screen”?

The “first screen” is the top part of your home page that’s visible to readers before they scroll down. Because readers may quickly become overwhelmed by the amount of information presented on even a well-constructed home page, you must make optimal use of this space.

Because the first screen is valuable real estate, don’t permit your website’s header to take up most or all of it.

Do make sure that a headline (see Part 1) is visible on the first screen, along with the captivating introduction of your essential sales message.

2. Are You Using AIDA?

A powerful formula for good copywriting is AIDA, or Attention, Interest, Desire, Action.

First you must capture the reader’s attention. This can be accomplished with a powerful headline as discussed in last month’s article.

You must then stimulate your reader’s interest by showing why she needs your product or service.

Next, you should excite your reader’s desire by demonstrating how your product or service will satisfy her need.

Finally, ask her to take action by doing something. For example, ask her to:

  • Download a brochure, case study, or white paper
  • Call to speak with a sales representative
  • Complete a purchase

Online AIDA copy should not read like advertising. People go online to obtain information, not to be advertised to. Write your copy to sound like advice, a case study, or an editorial. Forego advertising hype.

3. Would a “Can’t Refuse Offer” Make Sense?

Once you’ve grabbed your reader’s attention (the A in AIDA), making a “can’t refuse offer” is one way to take care of the remaining three letters of this acronym in short order.

While not relevant for every business, if you can find a way to make such an offer, you will get that much more traction from your website.

A free kit is one example of a “can’t refuse offer” that draws prospective customers closer to the sale.

 

 


 

 

 

A “can’t refuse offer” should align with your reader’s needs and desires, summarize the key benefits and advantages of what you’re selling, and leave the reader excited and motivated.

Doug Hanvey, the Renewable Energy Writer, is a freelance copywriter and marketing strategist for renewable energy and energy efficiency businesses large and small. Contact Doug at doug@renewableenergywriter.com or (812) 322-6202.

Filed Under: member post, NESEA, Renewable Energy Tagged With: , , ,

Flags at Half-Mast

March 21, 2013 By 1 Comment

(First shared to the NESEA BuildingEnergy Planning committee, 3/21/2013, 9:13AM)

RIP, William J. (Bill) Bobenhausen, FAIA, CCS, LEED AP 63, Hastings-on-Hudson, died 03-13-2013

I heard from a friend last night that one of the old workhorses of NESEA, Bill Bobenhausen, died last week.  It was quite strange to hear, because earlier in the night, I met two young kids at a GreenHomeNYC event who wanted to start a business putting solar on buildings, and I asked them who was going to do an analysis of the energy needs first, to find if solar is the best investment, and wouldn’t it be a better idea to reduce the load in the building first, so that the solar could pick up more of the load?  I then had a Bobenhausen flashback, because he told me the same thing at my first Metropolitan Solar Energy Society (MSES) meeting back in 1979; even in his first sentence to me, he was teaching.  MSES became a NESEA chapter, and that’s how I was introduced to NESEA, through Bill.

Bill was an incredibly patient educator, and taught many of us the basics and the more complex issues of sustainability and alternative energy.  Some of his books are regular reads on my shelf, in fact, I was going to suggest his HVAC book to the people who took my all-day multifamily course; many had asked for a great handbook on HVAC, and I find it to be both a great primer and in-depth book.

His out of print stuff, much of it done for the City and State of NY, included a 101 guide for steam boilers and a super’s guide to energy efficiency, but most telling, his NYS Solar Workbook which was and is the definitive guide on explaining solar to everyone.  As I look on my shelf today, I noted that I lent out my copy of Bill’s HVAC book and it is now missing, and in fact, I asked both NYS and Bill last year how I could get and scan his Solar Workbook for future generations, as it is gone.  If someone finds an extra, please mail it or scan it to me, it is a treasure.  As was Bill.

Cantankerous and blunt to the core, he once derided one of my presentations as “voodoo science” (it was, fortunately, he caught it before it went out) and told me on quite a few occasions, very politely, that I was both wrong and dead wrong, and he was right each time he told me.  He made me do my first presentation for MSES in White Plains in ’79 or ’80, and I remember splitting my pants wide open while bending down to pick up a box of MSES publications to give out, and he calmly drove to Sears with me, gave me the money and made me run in and buy jeans, get back in the car, and start the presentation on on time.  He chided my writing and research skills constantly, and asked me regularly while I wrote articles for the MSES newsletter “is that opinion, or fact?” when it was, indeed, the opinion of a really stupid kid.

Mostly, Bill taught me the detailed science of being a mentor, by mentoring one of the most difficult students ever — me.  He saw enthusiasm and some semblance of brains, but mostly, a mule he could get a lot of work out of.  As some of my kids read this, they will understand why I only help those who are helping others, and Bill really starting helping my career when I became an MSES member, newsletter article writer, typesetter (good old days), proofreader, copier, and (yes, old folks, you remember this) folder, taper, and mailer.  Ah, e-mail is so easy and 250 trifolds and stamps is so, not easy.

Cheers, Bill, you helped hundreds of us, and you trained us well. Newton was right about people like you helping people like me: “If I have seen a little further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”. 

Bill’s Official bio, from his company website, edited slightly, is below.  Yes, I know Bill, I could have edited it better, but…..

William J. (Bill) Bobenhausen, FAIA, CCS, LEED AP

Bill founded Sustainable Design Collaborative LLC in 2001. Previously (1981 to 1994), Mr. Bobenhausen was President of the predecessor firm Energy Design Collaborative, Inc.

His commitment to environmental architecture was cemented during the year of his graduation from the City College of New York School of Architecture in 1973. War in the Middle East, and the World’s First “Energy Crisis.” Perhaps related? In any case, the learning began, and the passion was still undiminished despite the considerable “greenwash” out there.

Served as President of the Metropolitan (New York) Solar Energy Society (Chapter of American Solar Energy Society), 1978 through 1982. (One of NESEA’s first subchapters).

Early member of AIA National COTE (Committee On The Environment) Committee, 1996 through 2003.

Served in key roles during the formative years of the New York Chapter of the US Green Building Council (USGBC): Treasurer in 2001 & 2002, and Chairman during 2003. A LEED AP (Accredited Professional) since 2002.

Selected as a Fellow by the American Institute of Architects (the profession’s highest individual honor), in 2001.

Information Sharing

Mr. Bobenhausen served as one of about 12 instructors for AIA in their national “Energy and Architecture Workshop” program from 1980 until 1986. He taught over 50 two-day programs throughout the nation with other key experts including the late Greg Franta, Si Daryanayi, and Ben Evans.

For over 25 years, Mr. Bobenhausen served as an adjunct faculty member at the City College of New York, Pratt Institute, and New Jersey Institute of Technology.

He was the author of three books including: Simplified Design of HVAC Systems; and the co-author with original author James Marston Fitch of the 1999 edition of the classic American Building: The Environmental Forces That Shape It (1999) including a new chapter, Toward Sustainability.

Green Design & LEED

Bill was an environmental architect with over 30 years of diverse architectural experience that included key responsibilities in the design and construction of over 400 institutional and commercial buildings including a wide range of LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) projects.

Mr. Bobenhausen selectively applied the LEED-NC (New Construction) and LEED-CI (Commercial Interiors) Green Building Rating systems to dozens of projects including: offices; commercial interiors of various types including high profile offices that carefully weigh the use the environmentally-preferable materials including C2C (Cradle-to-Cradle) products; health and hospital facilities; university buildings and schools; media centers; high-rise residential; environmental centers; botanical gardens; and others.

Filed Under: NESEA, NESEA Members Tagged With: , ,

Optimizing Your Renewable Energy Website – 3 Essential Strategies

March 14, 2013 By Leave a Comment

NESEA HQ Note: A few months back (before BE13 conference madness) we shared that we would be encouraging member posts and mentioned that we had a few already in the pipeline. Without further ado, please welcome Doug Hanvey, the Renewable Energy Writer.

Optimizing Your Renewable Energy Website – Three Essential Strategies

This is the first in a series on strategies for optimizing your renewable energy business website.

Download the entire article, 25 Renewable Energy Website Strategies: Maximize the ROI of Your Website and Convert Readers Into Customers, at www.RenewableEnergyWriter.com.

Your website is competing for attention not just against your direct competitors, but against the highest standards of design and content for businesses of its size. Let’s look at three strategies to maximize the ROI of your website and convert casual readers into paying customers.

1. Is Your Service Team Front and Center?
Are you selling products, services, or both? While products and services both require an emphasis on benefits, when you sell a service you must place additional emphasis on the personal. Who’s your team? What do they look like? Do they (hopefully) smile? What’s their communication style? The “personal” should be communicated in both images (i.e., photos of your team) and in your copy (text), the tone of which should match your company’s personality. I see too many renewable energy websites that lack photos of staff members, or even names, which makes the company behind the website seem remote and impersonal – exactly the opposite of what you should be aiming for!

2. What Tone Do You Wish to Project?
Tone consists of the words you use and the length and structure of your sentences and paragraphs. The tone of your copy reveals your company’s personality and helps to distinguish you from your (possibly lackluster) competitors. A personable and stimulating tone can make or break your copy, because the only worthwhile copy is copy that people will read.

While companies in every industry use stiff, formal language to suggest professionalism or authority, such stuffy, stale language loses out these days against rivals who employ an accessible, conversational tone. You can project expertise while still being approachable. Would you rather read this:

“We’re glad you’re here. At Gridway, we’re in the business of saving you money on your electric bill. How do we do it? By giving you a choice. Instead of paying your utility’s rates every month, we let you choose an electric plan that can save you money on the same electricity you’re using now.”

or this:

“Gridway provides advanced electrical power management platforms and strategic plans targeted at the growing global need for distributed renewable energy and energy savings for commercial and residential customers.”

I thought so.

To discover your tone, ask: What is our company’s personality? Our culture? Our values? How do we want to sound to our target audience? Should we use jargon? Humor? Should we be formal or informal?

3. Does Your Home Page Have an Attention-Grabbing Headline?
The purpose of a website headline, like a newspaper headline, is to capture the reader’s attention. If you can’t capture the reader’s attention, she’ll either skip on down to the next headline, or (even worse) skip on over to the next website. I see too many renewable energy websites with an inferior headline or no headline at all.

Readers online are notorious for skimming and scanning. This means that your headlines are the most important text on any page. This also implies that if you communicate your essential message in your headlines, you’ll stand a chance of getting it across to the most hasty of readers.

Ways to grab readers’ attention include appealing to self-interest or conveying news or information. Words that never go out of style in headlines include free, you and your, discover, introducing, how to, new, try, why, easy, proven, and results. These words may seem trite and overused, but they’re still used because they still work.

Here are several approaches for writing a home page headline, followed by real-world examples:

  • Offer a compelling promise: Install Solar on Your Business and Save Money
  • Arouse curiosity: Your Building Is an Energy Asset
  • Focus on benefits: Cost Effective Solar – Our Obsession, Your Advantage
  • Precisely explain the offer: Meet the First-of-its-Kind Energy Savings Tool That Helps You Measure Your Home’s Efficiency & Find the Right Upgrades to Lower Your Bills
Filed Under: member post, NESEA, Renewable Energy Tagged With: , , ,

Join us in celebrating Giving Tuesday!

November 21, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Join us in celebrating Giving Tuesday!
“Black Friday” is coming – the day after Thanksgiving when the masses flock to the stores in droves for holiday gift shopping. True to our roots, NESEA is embracing a more sustainable approach. This year, we are celebrating “Giving Tuesday.”

November 27, 2012 is the first ever #GivingTuesday. Launched to inspire charitable giving and conscious consumerism throughout the giving season. #GivingTuesday™ is a campaign to create a national day of giving at the start of the annual holiday season. It celebrates and encourages charitable activities that support nonprofit organizations.

Let’s bring sustainability to this holiday season
NESEA is participating in this new Thanksgiving tradition: GIVING TUESDAY. On Tuesday, November 27th, we urge you to make a small but heartfelt contribution, to give something back.

We are hoping to raise $16,000 by midnight on Giving Tuesday, which will bring us halfway to our $32,000 year end goal. We already have a great head start, thanks to a group of your peers who have pledged $13,000 in matching donations. Please help us raise an additional $3,000 on Giving Tuesday!

 

 

 

 

 

 

NESEA is the region’s leading membership organization promoting sustainable energy practices in the built environment. Our work is vital. And you are vital to our success. When you support NESEA:

you help do the future right

you support the people in the trenches

you fight greenwashing

you help raise awareness

p.s. – Your donation makes a big difference in our ability to advance the adoption of sustainable energy practices in the built environment. Please give as generously as you can. We are profoundly grateful for your investment in our community and in our mutual success!

Filed Under: Communications, Member Announcements, NESEA Members Tagged With: , ,

BuildingEnergy online is becoming a reality

November 14, 2012 By 1 Comment

I’m excited to share what’s happening with the BuildingEnergy Masters Series (BEMS).

Following a very successful “soft launch” in October, with almost 60 students registered in two courses, I’m convening a working group of 6-8 NESEA members to step back – to help me set policies for how we run the program and how we integrate it with the rest of what NESEA does. Our first meeting is scheduled for December 7th.

Helping us fulfill the promise of BuildingEnergy . . . online, year-round

I view this committee as a natural extension of the BE planning committee, or as a curriculum committee, of sorts. The committee will help advise me on issues such as:

  1. What criteria we should use for choosing the subject matter for BEMS offerings and for selecting instructors
  2. What criteria we should use to ensure that instructors’ content does not unduly overlap with that of other instructors
  3. Whether we should implement incentives, above and beyond a standard revenue share, for instructors who go above and beyond in marketing, and whose efforts bring a significant number of students into the course who would not otherwise have enrolled
  4. What criteria we should establish for manufacturers/vendors who wish to offer courses on the platform, and whether/how we might brand such offerings differently than BEMS courses
  5. What the course schedule should be and how to prioritize which instructors to approach to develop course content
  6. Who we might approach as potential partners and/or for cross promotional opportunities
  7. How can we best integrate this program into others NESEA offers – paying particular attention to integration with our crown jewel, the BuildingEnergy Conference.

Initially, the BuildingEnergy Masters Series was conceived as a way for NESEA to offer BuildingEnergy Conference-quality content year-round to practitioners within our community, irrespective of their locations – and to help NESEA diversify its revenues so that we are not relying exclusively on the success of our annual conference to float the rest of the organization. Based on the post-conference surveys we’ve done in recent years, we knew that many within our community crave the opportunity to learn from, and network with, each other year round. BEMS was conceived as one way to help fulfill that need.

We made a good start . . . now it’s time to incorporate what we’ve learned

When we launched our two courses this fall, we relied upon instructors who routinely draw large crowds at our BuildingEnergy Conference. We knew we could rely on them to deliver high quality content. And we knew that they were excellent teachers who would take the time commitment to develop top-notch educational content seriously. We had hoped to attract 8-10 students for each of the courses we offer in 2012 and 2013, but  Marc Rosenbaum’s Zero Net Energy Homes, and Paul Eldrenkamp and Mike Duclos’ Passive House:  The Future of Building in the US?, far exceeded our expectations. We attracted almost 60 students between the two courses – in large part thanks to Marc Rosenbaum’s extra marketing efforts!

We’re thrilled that the courses and the format seem to appeal to so many. And we’re looking forward to incorporating more opportunities for members to drive the direction of this program, just as they do the BuildingEnergy Conference and Trade Show. If you have feedback you’d like to share about this program or process, feel free to email me at jmarrapese@nesea.org or call me at 413.774.6051, ext. 23. Otherwise, I’ll keep you updated on the working group’s recommendations and the roll out of this new initiative.

Filed Under: NESEA Members, Whole Systems Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Member Content for the NESEA Blog

November 12, 2012 By Leave a Comment

We’re going to be doing a little experimenting with our blog…

Member-written blog posts, an open invitation

You may have noticed in some of our communications that members have a somewhat open invitation to be contributors to the blog. We haven’t been very loud in extending this invitation, in part because we have not yet figured out all the rules. What we do know is that we want our blog to be as member-driven as any of our other programs.

We have thought about treating the blog in a similar way to how we treat the magazine – the same caliber of articles, but delivered in a more interactive and informal way. What we lack right now is an editorial committee, and we as staff did not feel as though it would be an adequate expression of the membership if we tried to play that role. But we’d like something to happen here in the interim, beyond the NESEA HQ updates and news (which will continue indefinitely, but we don’t want our logistical/programmatic/promotional content to dominate, by any means). If you look back to the earliest posts on the blog (I think they started around 2009) – the posts were coming from NESEA members, so this isn’t a new idea, but we do have more staff support (me) now to help coordinate it.

So, we decided we would keep the open invitation. Already, some of you have said yes to the invitation, so we already have a few posts in the pipeline, waiting patiently for us to work out some logistics. Other upcoming posts will be articles we couldn’t run in BuildingEnergy magazine (we had a TON of excellent proposals for the spring issue, for example, so we thought why not bring them to the unlimited virtual space on our blog).

Get in there and write (with some guidelines)

If you are a current member of NESEA, you can ask us for posting rights and post as you like (after you review our guidelines for posting, including the logistics and what we’re looking for in terms of content).

A quick summary of the content guidelines: The subject matter should be related to our mission of promoting the adoption of sustainable energy practices in the built environment.

Because we are also an organization that values whole systems thinking, the posts might approach the subject through nuts and bolts building techniques, policy, research and development, economics, design philosophy, or even marketing.

For example, the first post will be coming from a new NESEA member, Doug Hanvey. His focus is not in the typical vein of NESEA conversation – he’ll be discussing how to optimize your website. We thought the blog would be a great place to share his advice, since we have heard from some of you in the past that you were interested in getting marketing advice. And, he offers his services specifically to renewable energy companies – so while much of his advice is broadly applicable – his experience is with businesses that are much like the businesses in the bulk of the NESEA membership.

We realize that there are already a number of really excellent energy and buildings blogs out there – many of you already contribute to them! So, we don’t expect that we’ll be the new GreenBuildingAdvisor.com, Environmental Building News, or Renewable Energy World anytime soon, nor do we want to duplicate efforts. We have always been a bit different from other organizations in this niche, and we don’t doubt that our blog will reflect this. Being a little bit different has always been our strength, so it’s something to look forward to.

Blogging is different from the communities of practice

It occurred to me as I wrote this that writing for the blog and hoping for ‘audience participation’ with comments, etc. is similar to what we’re building for the online communities of practice…

The difference is lecture versus seminar style. The communities of practice will be an open discussion, with no one authority standing at the lectern, while the blog is more of a first-person narrative with questions from the audience.

Anyway, the communities of practice will be awesome once they get underway, and I imagine that by necessity the blog will change, and maybe that’s when we get the expertise of an editorial committee to invite, curate and vet content, while the back and forth conversation lives in the communities of practice.

Help us curate content, even if you don’t want to write it

We are hoping that you, the membership, will collectively create the blog you would most like to read. Members can submit their own posts and anyone can comment directly on posts. We do ask that you be polite, but no holds barred as far as critique of the content is concerned. Do keep in mind that you are not just critiquing some random person on the internet – the author of the post is a fellow member. The NESEA community has never been shy about sharing their opinions and what we hope will happen is that member-writers will learn from their audience (their fellow members and greater NESEA community), and the audience will participate in shaping the conversation.

We’re at a very nebulous stage in developing the guidelines for a member-driven blog – which means your opinions and participation will shape what it becomes.

We’re learning as we go, so we hope you’ll bear with us, and more than that, help us figure out how to make the online NESEA community as exciting and engaging as the one that comes together once a year at the conference. If you are interested helping us develop this new(old) resource and member benefit, let us know! To borrow from a BE13 session’s description, “Doing something new often does not go perfectly the first time. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it.”

So, keep an eye out for some new content coming from your fellow members. And be sure to voice your opinion (as if we can stop you) so we can learn as we go.

Filed Under: Communications, Member Announcements, NESEA, NESEA Members Tagged With: , ,

Profound Gratitude: Remarks by Jennifer Marrapese, Executive Director at Annual Meeting, 9/15/12

September 17, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Welcome everybody to the 2012 annual meeting of the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association.

I am really excited that we’re here in Portland. There’s a vibrant green building and sustainable energy community here – a community that has built what they need in the form of the monthly Building Science Discussion Group, Maine Association of Building Energy Professionals, Passive House Maine, USGBC’s Maine Chapter, the Pretty Good House movement and many other formal and less formal organizations and collaborations.

The Portland area has traditionally not been as well served by NESEA as many other areas in our territory. And for as long as I’ve been at NESEA, we’ve been hoping to change that. So I was delighted when NESEA board member Phil Kaplan invited me to Portland and asked us to consider hosting our annual meeting here.

Since our first meeting with Phil and the Building Science Discussion Group in June, many of you Mainers have drunk the NESEA Kool Aid. Architect Rick Renner, a longtime NESEA member, is running for the NESEA board of directors. Sam Strickland is serving on a committee to help us create and launch online communities of practice so that geography ceases to be such a challenging barrier for NESEA members who want to learn and share year round. Steve Konstantino of Maine Green Building Supply has become a business member and opened his facility up last night for an annual meeting pre-game – a Building Science Discussion Group to welcome the whole NESEA community to town.

Profound gratitude. As I prepared my remarks for tonight, that was the mindset I started from. I feel profoundly grateful to this community and appreciative of all that we are accomplishing together.

Let me explain to whom I am grateful and why.

I am grateful to the more than 200 members who are really actively engaged with NESEA far above and beyond simply writing a check and receiving their monthly newsletter and their BuildingEnergy Magazine twice a year. It is surely unprecedented within NESEA that almost a third of our members are actively engaged in planning the conference, hosting sites in our Green Buildings Open House tour, submitting content for BuildingEnergy magazine, and serving on NESEA program and board committees.

I am grateful to Jamie Wolf for recently helping us to articulate something that we’ve known intuitively for a very long time:  that the BuildingEnergy Conference is NESEA’s crown jewel, or the center of NESEA’s universe, but that it occurs only for 3 days/year in Boston. Jamie shared with me his vision for BE365, which makes the BuildingEnergy experience available to NESEA members every day of the year through various events, gatherings, online learning and other forums throughout the year.

I am grateful to lifetime NESEA member Bernice Radle, who at the ripe old age of 26 is rallying a group of NESEA member preservationists to plan a kick-ass Green Buildings Open House tour in Buffalo on October 13th, and who is trying to bring the rest of the NESEA community into the digital age with her incredible promotional savvy using twitter, facebook, blogging and Pinterest.

I am grateful to Marc Rosenbaum, one of our NESEA rock stars, who has partnered with us, and who has spent more than 100 hours to develop and help us launch a 10-week online course for the BuildingEnergy Masters Series, and who recently shared with me, “I could develop and market a course like this on my own. Yet what appeals to me about this arrangement is that I get to advance my personal mission of expanding our collective capabilities, while creating an income stream, and also give back to this organization that has been such a key factor in my success. However, it’s a business partnership, not a charity -  NESEA has skin in the game just as I do.”

I am grateful to NESEA board member Kate Goldstein, who, although she is still a starving student, is digging deep for NESEA this year. Not only did she become a lifetime member – a great investment for somebody who’s still in her 20s – but she has also pledged a leadership gift in our annual fundraising appeal, because, in her words, “The diversity of NESEA’s membership is a gift for us who have not yet found our own path. NESEA is the shelter of our community.”

I am grateful to my staff – at least three of whom, despite being handed a salary freeze this year, have decided to invest some of their discretionary income into NESEA membership because they believe deeply in what we’re about here, and they consider themselves a part of this community.

I am grateful to Paul Eldrenkamp, who confided in me that one of the happiest days of his life was the day that he left his last NESEA board meeting in the mid-1990s. He went and sat in his car for a few minutes and let out a freedom cry that others may have heard even from inside the building. Paul shared that the board as a group (not its individual members) was so dysfunctional, and mired in the day to day operation of the organization, that he couldn’t wait to get out. Well, Paul is a testament to how things have changed for the better. This year, not only is he chairing the BuildingEnergy Conference, and bringing a ton of new talent into the organization through his vast network, but he’s also teaching a BuildingEnergy Masters Series class on Passive House online, and running for the NESEA board!

I am grateful to the 20 or so NESEA members – some long timers, some newbies – who are helping us experiment with and launch active online communities so that they can learn together how best to apply systems thinking in their practices and what are the elements of a generative economy. These communities will serve as a forum in which NESEA members can share with each other what’s working (and what’s not) in service of a more sustainable built environment. Based on what we learn from these communities of practice, we’ll launch others in the new year – including one on Deep Energy Retrofits, one on Zero Net Energy Buildings, and possibly even one on our topic tonight, the Pretty Good House.

These examples barely scratch the surface of all we’ve accomplished together over the past year. And all of this is happening in the worst building environment in 20 years.

In many ways, last year represented the “perfect storm.” Almost everything that could have gone wrong financially, did. NESEA’s membership numbers and Sustainable Green Pages listings continued their steady decline since the housing market crash in 2009. BuildingEnergy registration and exhibitor numbers declined, despite a whopping 97% of our attendees saying that they would recommend the conference to a colleague. We lost substantial donations from two longtime donors whose funding focus shifted and whose portfolios suffered at the hands of a lackluster economy.

We knew before the year even started that we were going to run a deficit in Fiscal Year 2012. We even budgeted for it. We invested heavily in staff, hiring a membership coordinator and a communications coordinator. We also invested in our infrastructure, launching a new website, supported by a new, more nimble database. We knew it would take time for these investments to pay off. Unfortunately, the deficit we ran was larger than anticipated.

NESEA’s reason for being is to advance the adoption of sustainable energy practices in the built environment. The rest of the industry is finally catching on as well.

Last year’s bottom line fails to tell the whole story. It doesn’t tell the story of the momentum we’re building, one practitioner at a time. It doesn’t tell the story of the quality of engagement within our membership, within the BuildingEnergy planning process, and at BE itself.

I truly believe that we’re planting the right seeds, and that if we continue to provide quality engagement experiences, the numbers will follow. I also know that we’ll continue to learn and adjust the plan as we go!

So I’m grateful. I’m invested in this organization and in this community, not just professionally, but also personally, as I complete my own deep energy retrofit and prepare to showcase my home on NESEA’s Green Building Open House tour, which will be held on October 13th throughout NESEA’s 10 states, from Maine all the way down to Delaware.

Now’s the time for you to invest as well. Invest in NESEA and in our future in a way that makes sense for you. If you’re not a member, join. If you are a member, consider donating or sponsoring above and beyond your membership contribution. Or give the gift of NESEA membership to a colleague to help grow our community.

If you’re a newcomer to our community, invest in your own professional development as you get to know us better. Enroll in one of our BuildingEnergy Masters Series courses and partake in  high quality interactive educational content from the comfort of your home or office. Learn about zero net energy homes from Marc Rosenbaum, the man who’s probably engineered more of them than anybody else in the Northeast. Learn about Passive House from Mike Duclos and Paul Eldrenkamp, a member of the inaugural group of Passive House certified consultants in the U.S. Then connect with others in your class to share what you’re learning and create a community of practice that can meet in person at next year’s BuildingEnergy Conference.

Attend the Building Energy Conference, exhibit there, sponsor. Even better, help shape our content by joining the planning committee for the BuildingEnergy Conference. Register your most recent project for our Green Buildings Open House tour in October. Enter your best work in NESEA’s Zero Net Energy Building Award to compete for our annual $10,000 prize. Submit an article for publication in BuildingEnergy Magazine, our peer-reviewed journal by and for sustainable energy professionals in the Northeast.

Invest in the community that is building your knowledge base, your practice, your career, and a more sustainable built environment.

Before I close, I’d like to thank a few people without whom this meeting would not have happened. First, thank you to our committee of locals who advised us on all of the nuts and bolts decisions we needed to make – from the beautiful location we are in to the buildings we should include on the tours earlier today to the Pretty Good House speaking program tonight. Those committee members include Matt Holden, Steve Konstantino, Dan Kolbert, and Rick Renner, among many others.

Next, I’d like to thank our sponsors for tonight – Sparhawk Group, Maine Association of Building Energy Professionals, and Thorton Tomasetti Fore Solutions. And a special thanks to sponsors Kaplan Thompson Architects and Pinnacle Windows, who are hosting a party after tonight’s meeting at Grace, a beautifully restored church and restaurant with an awesome looking menu!

Huge thanks also to Phil Kaplan of Kaplan Thompson Architects for advocating in favor of holding the meeting here in Portland and for connecting us with all the folks here who could help make it happen.

And finally, thank you to Kelsey Hobson, our summer intern from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center. Kelsey came in at the beginning of the summer and flat out handled all the logistics for this meeting, with almost no guidance. She herded a group of benevolent but busy cats to score us this great location, and planned all of the building tours. She did such a great job that we decided to hire her permanently – or at least as permanently as she’ll have us. This is one NESEA emerging professional with a very bright future.

And now, I’d like to welcome to the stage NESEA board chair, James Petersen. James has been a huge champion of our work to “expand the choir,” and has supported these efforts personally by being a NESEA evangelist within his own professional network. James will share with you an update on where the board would like to see NESEA head, and on what your role might be in helping to create our future success.

Filed Under: BuildingEnergy Conference & Trade Show, Communications, deep energy retrofit, Events, Green Building, Industry, NESEA, NESEA Members, Renewable Energy, Sustainable Building, Whole Systems Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

A Clean Slate

August 20, 2012 By Leave a Comment

This post first appeared on the blog of NESEA member Beyond Green Construction, at http://beyondgreen.biz/2012/08/a-clean-slate/. It describes a chapter in the deep energy retrofit my family is undertaking, and that challenges associated with the project. There will be more updates as the project progresses!

Well hello again!  Thanks for stopping by to check out our progress.  A few weeks ago we gave you a little intro to the Marrapese family and a beginning look at our latest retrofit project in Deerfield, MA.  I’ve been dropping by the site every so often and things are moving really fast.  It’s incredible how quickly things can turn around with an experienced, committed team and an approaching deadline.  This week we’re going to dive in a bit further and give you some visuals on the progress, so you can see first hand what goes into such a delicate and complicated retrofit.

As I mentioned in our first post, in order to do this job right, we have to stop the moisture problem at its source.  The source of trouble is coming from the constant moisture being funneled up into the house from the very high water table beneath.  The home was never given a moisture barrier between the slab and the house itself.  This got me to thinking, why was it that it was never given a proper moisture barrier?  Was the original builder cutting corners?…or was it just regular practice not to in 1977?  I probed Irene Winkelbauer, (that’s her over there on the left) a member of the BGC team and a certified LEED Green Associate & BPI Building Analyst and she said “Building practices change over time, so it’s probably not that unusual for a build that was done at that time.  Building code is the minimum expected best practice, so if the moisture barrier wasn’t a part in the original build, it may not have been part of code in 1977.”

To give you a quick mental picture, between the years of 1964 and 2002, the highest recorded water level was just 1.42 ft below the soil…seems like living on a houseboat isn’t far off!  With the more recent event of hurricane Irene, it may have been even higher since.  The home has been sucking up this moisture like a straw for 35 years, so as you can imagine, it’s caused quite a bit of damage.  To be frank, it’s all but destroyed the entire house.

Now, I’m going to press the rewind button for a minute and fill in a few important blanks in the story that lead us to getting started on the work.

As I mentioned briefly last week, the project had to be put on hold (for 6 weeks!) while the home went through what’s called a “Request for Determination” by the Deerfield Conservation Commission.  This included submitting a detailed report of the proposed work, along with diagrams of the area and measurements of how close the property is to the wetland. “The strictness with which you will have to build is determined by how close your home is to a stream or water source,” says Winkelbauer.  Luckily because the Marrapese home is a pre-existing structure which was already placed far enough away from the wetlands, the Conservation Commission allowed the BGC team to begin with their work as long as they took the appropriate precautions.  This means keeping the nearby water source free of any run-off from the work site, which has been accomplished with a silt fence and about 100 feet of hay bales.  The picture below gives you a visual map of the standards that have to be met in order to keep the wetlands protected.  The stream on the left needed to be protected by at least 25 feet of undisturbed vegetation and then the home has to be 50 feet from the edge of that vegetation.  After the determination was given by the Conservation Commission that we would not be disturbing any of the wetlands, it was a green light to get started on the work.

The determination was only just given on June 28th, so with a deadline of August 31st to finish the project the team is on an extremely tight schedule.

That just about brings us to the present time.

Being a green company, we are always looking to salvage as much material as possible, but with this home there is unfortunately not much to save.  After taking the house apart piece by piece, our team found that the mold not only extended through the walls, the insulation, the carpet, the tack strips, the floor boards, but even up to the roof!  And the mold on the roof is indeed from the moisture problem beneath the home, not from rain or snow on top of the roof.  See the picture to the left as Andy Jeffords first discovered the mold on the roof.

So what’s the plan of attack when a home is in such a state?  Eliminate the problem, salvage what you can and make it right…it’s as simple as that.  Well, simply written, I’d hardly categorize it as simple work.  The team has been working in 90+ degree heat with very long days to get this done on schedule.

After tackling the mold and stripping the house down to its remaining usable parts, it was onto the sun room addition.  Remember I told you in the previous post about the floor caving in?  The mold and rot were so bad the team had to take it all down and start from scratch.  After accessing the ground beneath the sun room, the team “decided on a more robust technique that we’re very confident about” said Sean Jeffords, principal of BGC, which involved bringing in 130 tons (yes TONS) of sand to fill up the previous crawl space which will be consistent with the sand filled slab on grade that the rest of home has.  (Read in the coming weeks, how we came to that conclusion) But of course, no project is without its curve balls.  On this day, that curve ball came in the form of a truck in quicksand.  Say what?  Here’s what I mean.

The truck which made 5 deliveries of 26 tons (260,000 lbs) of sand drove onto the property and quickly sunk into what they call “sugar sand,” or sand that was not properly compacted during the original build.  It’s apparently just like “sinking into quicksand,”  says Jeffords.

After towing the truck back out of the quicksand, it was back to work.  Two members of the BGC team, Gary Hutchins and Chris Russel worked on spreading and compacting the sand in the sun room, which will actually be the kitchen when the project is complete.

That’s about it for this week.  Next time, see just how we lift an entire house off the ground! Until then, stay happy, healthy & be green!

 

 

 

Filed Under: deep energy retrofit, Green Building, NESEA, NESEA Members Tagged With: , , , ,

From Ghastly to Green – a foreclosure purchase story (or how I spent my summer vacation)

August 15, 2012 By 1 Comment

Hi all,

This blog post was written by Shannon Tate of Beyond Green Construction (a NESEA member of course) about a deep energy retrofit my family and I are undertaking. It originally appeared on Beyond Green’ blog at http://beyondgreen.biz/2012/07/from-ghastly-to-green-a-foreclosure-purchase-story-2/.  I plan to post additional updates as they are available . . . it’s clearly still a work in progress. I’m sure the practitioners among you will be shocked . . . shocked to hear that the schedule has slipped further since the post was first written. Hoping for a September 20th move-in date at this point – fingers crossed!

 

 

Well hello and welcome to our very first blog post!  My name is Shannon Tate,
a sustainable design and green building enthusiast and newby here at Beyond Green Construction.  (That’s me over there on the left.)  Here at BGC we are passionate about doing our part to make the world a better place and healing this planet!…we feel the best way to do this is through education.  We think the best form of education that we could share would be to give you all the nitty gritty, good, bad, ugly details of our present Deep energy Retrofit projects.  It’s not easy work for us or the homeowners, but it is incredibly rewarding and life changing in the end.  Our approach is to be 100% transparent with you.  No holding back, no sugar coating.  Our blog will be presenting the real deal.  It’s especially exciting for us because we are starting our blog love with a really HUGE project that we just began work on in Deerfield.  So here we go.  Happy reading.

Meet the Marrapese family…Jennifer, Bill, their two little girls and sweet pup.  Jennifer is the Executive Director of NESEA, the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association and Bill is a nurse in Brattleboro, VT.

(This photo was taken outside their current rental in Deerfield, where they anxiously await the completion of their new home.)

Jennifer and Bill, who moved here a year ago with their family, recently purchased a 1977 ranch in foreclosure just a few blocks from their rental property in Deerfield.  The house is a fixer upper…to put it lightly.

“Sean and the inspector were with us and everyone suspected that there was going to be major work to be done”, says Bill.

“That being said…we knew it was in rough shape but it’s turned out to be in worse shape then we thought” says Jennifer.

The homes most substantial problem stems from the fact that it’s built on a high water table and “it seems that the slab was never insulated against the water coming up from underneath.  The slab was acting like a straw to suck the water up into the foundation and the walls”, says Bill.

As the reader you may be asking yourself, “why the heck didn’t they find all this out before they bought the place?”  The answer is, when purchasing a property in foreclosure, there are many things you can’t do during a home inspection.  You can’t lift up carpets, you can’t do anything that is invasive, where you’re peeling anything open or examining something from within…you can only look at the surface and take it as your eyes perceive it.  So it wasn’t until after the purchase went through that the damage could truly be assessed.  Carpets ripped up, beams exposed, and mold in clear view, everywhere.  Mold was found in the insulation, roofing, walls, carpet, tack strips, everywhere.  ”I think the homeowners believed at the time of purchase that they could do a lot of the demo work themselves, but once they started removing carpet, they realized how dangerous that would be,” says Jeffords.

A secondary problem of the home is that it has a sunroom addition on the back which was done extremely poorly.  Bill calling it a “Ham and egg job….or I’ll give you a pizza, you give me an addition.”  That explains it pretty perfectly.  After the purchase went through, the BGC team came in and realized that adding to the already lengthy list of problems, the floor in the addition was about to cave in as well. 

Even with all of its problems, this home does have its charms.  The homeowners had their hearts set on this neighborhood and this particular street when their search began.  They were serendipitously invited to a barbecue on an earlier visit, which happened to be on the very street they purchased on.  ”We met a lot of people on the street who we ended up clicking with” says Jennifer.  ”It’s a dead end street, it’s sunny so immediately we both looked at each other and said this is the street we want to live on.  So when the house came up in foreclosure, we thought it was the perfect opportunity, especially since we knew we wanted to do energy work and we didn’t want to pay extra for a house that we were going to have to rip up anyway.”  There were also many other plus’s on Jennifer and Bill’s list.  ”We have some land, it’s perfectly suited for solar and we paid probably $45K less than if we had purchased it from an owner, ” Bill says of the house.  Jennifer adds “and there’s farmland behind the property and it’s protected”  ”It’s still a little bit of a scary investment”, she admits.

The couple says that although they wouldn’t call themselves “sustainability experts”, that for a very long time, sustainability has been a part of their daily practice and a part of their values.  ”We’re really excited to take this project as an opportunity to explore and live into that”, says Jennifer.

Even with all of the lists of “green building experts” at her disposal through NESEA, Jennifer says that they really “didn’t do a lot of interviews for the job” and that she chose the BGC team “largely on reputation within the community” and that Jeffords was very familiar with how to go about finding monetary incentives through the energy companies, theirs being Western Mass Electric…which the couple will be receiving $19K in incentive money from.  (If you’re interested in looking into incentives for your green project, go to www.masssave.com to learn more.)

The couple closed on the house in April with hopes to acquire a building permit quickly and start work with the BGC team.  But, like many projects, things didn’t move along as quickly as hoped.  The couple, along with the BGC team lost 6 weeks of time after the building inspector thought they needed to bring the project plans to the conservation committee for additional approval.  He came to this conclusion because the home has an intermittent stream on the property and they needed to be sure wasn’t a part of the wetlands.  They eventually were given a negative determination and could move forward without any additional approvals, but that was 6 weeks lost.  The Marrapese’s found this difficult as they were already paying the mortgage and had to add on two additional months in their rental…not to mention that Jeffords had his team ready to go.  It was a set back, but they put that time to good use, making sure all their plans were in place and were sure of exactly how they would proceed with the project.

The plans are a pretty huge undertaking in and of themselves.  After determining how extensive the moisture problems were and that the source was the foundation, BGC’s engineer, Chris Vreeland from Precision Decisions Inc. devised a plan to actually lift the house off of the foundation with a series of jacks that will be attached to the foundation wall and a piece of “4x”6 angle iron bolted into each and every wall stud.  The house will be lifted 8 inches off the slab and then a moisture and thermal barrier will be created with high-density foam topped with 4 inches of concrete that has radiant floor tubing imbedded into it.  This will stop the mold and moisture problems at their source, so that when they re-insulate the house and tighten it all up, the indoor air quality will be healthy for the family.  Also included in the plans are the installation of a Solar Thermal System with electric back-up and a wood stove for an alternative heat source on the off chance that they would lose electricity because of a storm or power outage.

As you can imagine, this is not a cheap project.  We have a budget to work with of $100 per square foot (brand new builds on average are $150 + per square foot) and with the home at nearly two thousand square-feet, we’re nearing $200K.  That being said the couple says they’re just “makin’ it happen”, doing what they have to do with  their own saved money, a line of credit, borrowing from family…they are determined to make it happen within their budget.

Their budget is being helped greatly with the resource of the Eco Building Bargains in Springfield, where they bought used solid oak kitchen cabinets and laminate countertops for only $1400.  They plan on getting their bathroom fixtures from there as well and found a great deal on flooring through Hampton Carpet.

In the end the Marrapese’s will have a super energy efficient, healthy house for their family.

With the August 31st move in date quickly approaching the BGC team needs to work smart and fast.  We’ll give you more of the details next week!  Until then, have a good one.

 

 

 

Filed Under: deep energy retrofit, NESEA Members Tagged With: , , ,

Building an Infrastructure for Collaboration – How are we doing?

June 21, 2012 By Leave a Comment

How do NESEA members propose new programs they’d like to be involved in launching?
How does NESEA engage members in projects that align both with their passions and their skill sets?
How do we build the capacity of our members to be effective leaders and collaborators for the projects we take on?
Who decides which NESEA programs get launched and which ones don’t?
How do we reinvent legacy programs so that they align with NESEA’s mission and its brand?
What’s the mechanism for welcoming new members into our community?

These are just a few of the questions we’re attempting to answer in our “Infrastructure for Collaboration” (IFC) working group. The IFC group launched in May 2012, after NESEA held two charrettes during which the members present requested that we develop better processes for engaging current and new members and for deciding which programs and initiatives to undertake.

The underlying premise of these two charrettes was that NESEA is at its best when its programs are primarily member-driven and staff supported. (The BuildingEnergy Planning Committee’s process, although by no means perfect, is the best current example of this.) Thus, the IFC group has been attempting to take what’s good about the BE planning process and adapt it for re-use in other areas.

We’ve made some progress, and IFC group chair Jamie Wolf and I thought it would be a great time to bring you all up to date.

What we’ve done so far

So far, the IFC group has developed a workgroup template. This template is intended to walk a NESEA member, step-by-step, through the process of proposing a new program/initiative. In the template, the member is asked to:

  • Give a brief description of the project/program/initiative
  • Articulate the purpose of the program (and how it fits in with NESEA’s mission)
  • Specify the objectives of the program
  • Articulate the process by which the group/program will accomplish these objectives
  • Propose a timeline for the program
  • Specify what type of support is needed to launch the program (including staffing resources, equipment, money, etc.) and what plans are in place to secure that support
  • Address how the group will communicate, both internally and externally
  • Specify who will lead the group and who will be members (or how members will be selected, what their roles will be and how they will be held accountable
  • Articulate what the end product will be, if any, from the project/program (how will success be measured)

Once this template is completed, the appropriate NESEA staff representative (typically me in my role as executive director) completes a companion template to provide feedback/a reality check on the proposal. In this template, staff answers questions about:

  • Whether we support the proposed initiative
  • Whether we believe the project can be accomplished with the resources projected, and what other resources might be available
  • Whether/how the project will likely fit in with other, potentially competing priorities, and the conditions that must be met in order for staff to support the project optimally
  • Who on staff will be the primary staff person on the project
  • What authority the group will have to act on its own

We’ve also developed a member survey that will help us start to catalog our members’ skill sets and their interests, so we can do a better job of filling the gaps in various NESEA projects and committees.

What we’re learning

Developing these templates felt a bit abstract to many of us in the IFC group. So we decided to try them out – first to apply the process to the Communities of Practice that Robert Leaver is heading up, and then to our own work within the IFC group.

What we’re learning is that it takes discipline to remember to follow the process. As a staff person who focuses primarily on member support, my inclination is often to jump into projects when they are proposed – and especially when they are proposed by members I have worked with, and those I know have the horsepower and the follow through to get the projects done. But I’m recognizing that this process may have value in encouraging those who are new to the community or inclined to be less vocal to propose ideas that otherwise might never reach the surface.

We’re also learning that it’s hard to foresee every possible variable that we should ask for in a proposal. We want the bar to be set sufficiently high so that we’re not getting new requests for new, big, resource-intensive programs every day. But we don’t want to set the bar so high that somebody with a fantastic idea can’t figure out how to get it to us, or gives up trying.

What’s next?

We’ll continue to experiment with these templates just a bit longer, and try to vet them sufficiently so they’re ready for you to use. We’ll keep you updated on our progress!

– Jennifer Marrapese, Executive Director, NESEA, and Jamie Wolf, IFC group chair

Filed Under: Communications, NESEA, NESEA Members Tagged With: , , , , ,
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