By Jerry Brown, pr-Impact.com
Giving away money isn’t always easy.
Case in point: The Recharge Colorado energy rebates from the Governor’s Energy Office.
It took five months of scrambling to get the Recharge Colorado website ready for its April 19 launch. And that was pushing it, said President and CEO Barrett Blank of BB2e.com, whose company was responsible for building the database and other behind-the-scenes functionality that powers the website.
The Recharge Colorado website tells homeowners what rebates are available to them based on where they live, where they can buy qualifying appliances in their area and the names of contractors in their area who can help with qualifying home improvements.
Both geography and the calendar came into play regarding the difficulties involved. For example, the city of Aurora matches energy credits from Xcel Energy. Someone living in Lakewood doesn’t qualify for the same credits; someone served by a different utility doesn’t qualify for credits from Xcel Energy. Sears had a sale on Energy Star appliances that was in full swing when Recharge Colorado went on line but has since ended. And the contractors available in Denver are different than those in Grand Junction.
That doesn’t sound especially complicated. Blank’s company and others like it build databases all the time to deliver information similar to what’s available from RechargeColorado.com. But, as it turned out, it was very complicated. “A year would have been tight for getting all the data we had to collect,” Blank said. “It was a huge, daunting task.”
While there were some technical challenges, Blank said, that wasn’t what made the project “daunting.” The challenge, Blanks said, was gathering and verifying the huge amount of information needed to build a statewide database bringing together information about three very different types of stakeholders – utilities, retail outlets and contractors — when the information didn’t exist anywhere.
“We’re a technology-driven company,” Blank said. “But people and relationships were a significant part of this project. The hallmark of this project was the collaboration of partners on a lot of different levels.”
One unexpected challenge: No one, including the power companies, could provide an accurate list by ZIP code of the service areas of the utilities in Colorado. In some areas, people living in the same neighborhood — even across the street from one another — can be served by different power companies. And in some areas several utilities serve customers within a single ZIP code.
The solution? For now, the Recharge Colorado site offers users in such areas a list from which to identify their utility. Meanwhile, Blank said his company is developing a GIS-based map that will provide the first accurate map of utility service areas in the state. “It boggles my mind that this type of data doesn’t exist,” he said.
Putting together ZIP code-specific lists of contractors qualified to do work and qualifying for rebates was similarly challenging because no one tracks that kind of information. A breakthrough to solving this problem came when the Better Business Bureau decided that gathering and providing this information was a way for it to provide added value to its member companies.
Although his company could have used more time, Blank said, “we’re amazingly happy about the results” since the Recharge Colorado website went online.
He acknowledges his happiness about the results are tempered somewhat by some “technical difficulties we had to get out from under” during the initial onslaught of users who logged onto the Recharge Colorado website on the first morning. Since then, he said, “things have performed admirably well.”
Blank will discuss his company’s experiences building the Recharge Colorado database on May 19 at a meeting of the South Metro Denver Chamber of Commerce’s Economic Development Group. For more information about BB2e.com and what they can do for you in web-based marketing, go to www.bb2e.com and for more information on the Chamber’s Economic Development Group go to www.bestchamber.com.
