👍 This article will help you:
Learn best practices for organizing and promoting competitions
Choose the best baseline period and competition period
Competitions are used by K-12 schools, universities, and corporations alike to engage their students and employees in reducing building electricity and water consumption, and foster collaboration in meeting sustainability goals.
While competitions are fun and impactful, they can be tricky to plan and run. And although there is no way to guarantee that all buildings in a competition will reduce consumption, implementation of best practices will go a long way towards setting you up for success.
Best practices and ways to use
In order to run an electricity, gas, or water competition, you need to know how much electricity, gas, or water participants have consumed during the competition period compared to the baseline period. You also need to give participants feedback on how they are doing in comparison to other participants and/or to a percent reduction goal.
Competition best practices
Form a competition organizing team
Running a successful competition requires a significant investment of time and energy. You can do it alone, but the most successful programs have a dedicated team that collaborates to plan and execute the competition. And keep in mind that competitions can be as simple, or complex, as you want them to be. Consider starting simple and adding a new programming element each year.
Identify your goals
Crafting goals for your competition can help you to focus your efforts, and can serve as a guide for making decisions. Goals that tie your competition to a larger purpose, such as organization-wide sustainability or energy reduction goals, can be motivational for organizing team members and participants. Clearly defined goals can also help you get institutional buy-in from stakeholders and secure any needed funding. You’ll also be better able to evaluate your effort if you have goals to measure your performance against.
Start planning early
Planning ahead is the key to running a successful competition. Build a broad support network. Climate change is not just an environmental issue, it’s also an equality issue, a public health issue, a food issue, etc. Communicate this to groups whose support or assistance you’re seeking, and half the work of getting them on board will be done!
Promote, promote, promote!
Build up hype before your competition starts, and then promote during your competition. People aren’t going to participate if they don’t know it’s happening.
Tell your sustainability story
In conjunction with your competition, use public dashboards or embeddable cards to showcase real-time building performance and green features, encouraging people and teams across your organization to collaborate around shared sustainability goals.
Setting competition goals
Set realistic expectations about the reduction you're likely to see
If this is your first time hosting a competition or challenge at your organization, suggest a modest goal such as a 2% reduction for all participating buildings. If your organization has hosted competitions or challenges in the past, see if you can beat the energy savings from last year’s competition by 1 percentage point.
Consider creating both impact and implementation goals
Impact goals relate to the impact you hope your competition will have. Implementation goals relate to the implementation of your competition. Set your impact goals first, and then set implementation goals that you think you’ll need to hit in order to reach your impact goals.
Tie your goals to other company goals, commitments, and initiatives
Whenever possible, tie your goals to already established company goals, values, commitments, and initiatives. For example, maybe your organization recently released an energy reduction plan and began an initiative to increase sustainability literacy among employees. Phrase your goals in such a way that your competition’s goals align with these broader initiatives.
Sample goals
Awareness goals:
Increase energy and water use literacy among employees/staff/students.
Ensure that by the end of the competition, 50% of individuals in participating buildings can name three things that they can do to save electricity.
Make a compelling case for the importance of saving electricity and water, to persuade other employees/staff/students to join in reducing their consumption through conservation behavior.
Behavior change goals:
Foster collaboration and new relationships between departments/groups that don’t often work with each other (facilities, energy management, marketing, sustainability, human resources, etc.).
Foster a culture of conservation, and propel company sustainability initiatives.
Get 50% of individuals in participating buildings to do one thing that reduces their electricity consumption during the competition.
Get 50% of participating individuals to do things for the duration of the competition that
reduces their electricity consumption.Get participating individuals to make a commitment to continue reducing after the competition.
Energy or water reduction goals:
Reduce spending on electricity and water use.
Realize a greater reduction than we did last year (Alternatively: Realize larger savings than we realized on average over the last three years, etc.).
Realize an average reduction of at least 3% during the competition period compared to the
baseline period.Realize an average reduction of at least 2% during the 3 weeks following the competition
period compared to the baseline period.Achieve measurable reductions in electricity and water use, preventing thousands of pounds of carbon dioxide from being emitted.
Outreach/marketing/participation goals:
Publish one social media update/internal message per day during the competition period.
Hold at least 3 events during the competition.
Document successful strategies for next year’s competition leadership team.
Generate internal and external positive press and recognition for your company (and perhaps even national recognition).
Choosing a baseline
We recommend choosing a baseline that requires minimal work and makes your competition as fair as is possible given the fact that you are running it in the real world and not in a controlled lab. Here are our suggestions for doing so:
Set your baseline to a 2-, 3-, or 4-week period directly before your competition, if possible. Your baseline must be at least 2 weeks long. If you use an average rate baseline (recommended), your baseline period doesn’t have to be the same length as your competition period. This method has several benefits over the “year before” baseline methodology.
If electricity consumption typically varies substantially between weekends and weekdays, make sure your baseline period has the same weekday-to-weekend ratio as your competition period. For example, if your competition is exactly 3 weeks long (i.e., it has 2 weekends for every 5 weekdays), make sure your baseline period also has 2 weekends for every 5 weekdays. Don’t forget to take holidays into consideration—electricity and water use habits can be expected to differ if, for instance, students don’t have classes when they usually do.
If you have metering issues during your baseline, don’t fret! You can always create a custom baseline (which will be an average kW value) and simply exclude days in which point data are incorrect.
If you’re using a custom baseline for all of your buildings, then you can enter any dates into the baseline period field when setting up your competition (what you enter doesn’t matter since it will be overwritten by the custom baselines). After you add each of your buildings to your competition, specify the custom baseline—either a time period or an average kW value—for each building.
If you're using a custom baseline for some of your buildings, from the Participants tab, go to the dropdown menu on the participant row, then select 'Enter custom baseline'.
Calculating average kW baselines
One helpful feature of Atrius is that you can create a custom kW baseline for buildings in competitions. This can be useful in the following circumstances, among others:
You want your baseline to include data from two separate time periods. For example, you want the first week of your baseline period to be before spring break, and the second week to be after spring break.
You had metering issues during your baseline period, and so some of your baseline period data are incorrect or missing.
To create an average kW baseline, you simply calculate the average kW over the entire time period that you’d like to use as your baseline. Once you understand the relationship between kW and kWh, this is straightforward.
📘 Example
Let’s say you wanted your baseline period to be the average of the week before Spring Break and the week after Spring Break. To get started, you’ll need to collect point data for both of these periods for each building, and also calculate the total number of hours in each period:
Baseline period part 1 (week before spring break):
Period start: 8 am on Saturday 3/7
Period end: 11:59 pm on Friday, 3/13
Total kWh: 18,144
Total hours in period: 160
Baseline period part 2 (week after spring break):
Period start: 8 am on Monday 3/23
Period end: 11:59 pm on Sunday, 3/29
Total kWh: 19,433
Total hours in period: 160
To calculate the average kW (rate of consumption) for the full baseline, simply divide the total kWh for both periods by the total number of hours in both periods:
= (18,144 kWh + 19,433 kWh) / (160 hours + 160 hours)
= 37,577 kWh / 320 hours
= 117.43 kW
Careful: You do NOT want to do the following: (18,144 kWH / 160 hours) + (19,433 kWh / 160 hours).
"The Great Baseline Debate"
Although it will not affect competition results, a baseline period is required even if you are using custom baseline values for all of your buildings.
There are three main camps in the baseline period debate:
The "two weeks before baseline" camp, in which a baseline period is roughly two weeks (or three or four weeks) immediately before the competition period.
The "year before baseline" camp, in which the same period the year before is used as the baseline.
The "average of previous years" camp, in which average consumption during the same period for the preceding 2, 3, 4, etc. years is used as the baseline.
We recommend "two weeks before baseline" because the pros of this method outweigh the cons for most organizations:
Pros | Cons |
Building renovations don’t impact the baseline. | Unless the electricity consumption of all of your buildings is weather-neutral (totally not affected by the weather), there is a slightly higher chance of weather affecting your competition results. |
Individuals in participating buildings are competing against themselves, instead of against the individuals that lived in that building in previous years. | If you have buildings that are influenced (not weather-neutral), holding a competition directly after a break is not advisable since your baseline will then have to be further away from your competition period, thus increasing the probability that the weather during the competition will be different from the weather during the baseline period. |
Don’t have to deal with “we had a competition during this time period last year” problem that you run into starting with your second competition if you’re using the “year before” baseline method. |
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Choosing a competition period
Picking the date and length of your competition is part art, part science. Here are some things to think about as you try to pin down the right time period:
Choose a period long enough to affect behavior but short enough to maintain high energy. Short-term energy reduction competitions should be high-involvement, but competition organizers and participants can only be expected to maintain that energy for so long. For shorter competitions, we've found a 3-week competition period to be the sweet spot. It is long enough to teach participants about effective actions to take, but short enough so they won't get burnt out. Longer term energy competitions have more flexibility and will likely depend on the metrics you want to evaluate, such as resource reduction over a full calendar year or over an academic year or semester.
Whenever your competition takes place, be sure you leave enough time for planning. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Leaving yourself sufficient time to plan your competition is one of the single biggest things you can do to make your competition successful and keep yourself sane.
Start your competition on a day of the week with typically low consumption. Set your organization up for success by starting your competition on a day of the week during which consumption is typically lower compared to other days of the week. This way, your building will most likely show a reduction during the first few days of the competition in comparison to your baseline consumption, which will be a value somewhere between typical weekend and weekday consumption. In academic buildings of schools, for example, this will obviously be on weekends. In residence halls, it might be either a weekday or a weekend depending on your school’s culture. If your organization has real-time data in Atrius, create a comparisons graph to look for trends across buildings and choose your start day accordingly.
Leave space for your baseline. If you use the period immediately preceding your competition for your baseline (recommended), you’ll need to hold your competition at least two weeks after any breaks (winter break, spring break, etc.) and you’ll want to make sure that both your baseline period and competition period are during either standard time or Daylight Saving Time. Although you could choose a baseline period before the break, this increases the chances that the competition period and the baseline period will be in different seasons.