hello everyone as jason said we are team bpw and we're so happy that you're here quick question for you guys how many of you here by show of hands have heard of the lower my bill program okay so most of you like us had never heard of it until we were assigned to the bpw so what is the bpw exactly they provide utilities to the city of holland including water electricity and sewage our job at the holland bpw was to solve the question of how can we make our homes suck less focusing on the lower my bill program and how to get more people to use this service and we were also given a budget of zero to make this happen when we started this program we knew absolutely nothing about the holland bpw so we toured all the facilities there the first day we toured the water treatment plant and we learned how the water is sucked in from lake michigan purified and sent to your homes for you to drink take a shower et cetera then we toured the wastewater treatment plant and we learned how the water flows into the plant it's purified using primary and secondary treatment and then it's sent out into lake macatawa so it can be reused in the ecosystem and then finally we toured the power plant and here we learned how the energy of holland is created and then shipped to your houses and we also learned about a new power plant that they're making in the near future from all these tours we learned just how important public works is in holland and how important it is for the community so why us we came up with an idea that's crazy enough that it just might work so mr tanis here obviously has not used the lower my bill program as you can see graciously given back to us by his wife best known to him as you can see here mr tanis bills are quite high especially in the month of january you must take a lot of showers sharon i'm gonna get you mr tanis could have had the inspection done by a qualified inspector who would come into his home and show him exactly where he's wasting money on water and energy mr tanis also could have danced oh this hurts hurry up my job mr tanis also could have gotten specific recommendations on how he could fix these things mr tannis also save ten a month with just the free items the inspector would have given him if mr tannis was willing to invest he could have saved hundreds more per year so let me talk a little bit more about the program about a thousand dollars is spent advertising this program annually through magazine ads and bill stuffers so it's not mr tanis's fault that he didn't use this program since obviously it's hit its maximum capacity of two hundred and thirty households per year right well the numbers don't lie in red here are the number of households that have taken advantage of this program each year on the black or the number of evaluations that are available but that go unused each year wow that's really sad because this program could help a lot of people people like mr tanis so our driving question that the bpw gave us was how do we make our homes suck less and coming in last week monday we wanted to try out this lower my bill program so first we had to go onto the bpw website and navigate our way to actually find the program and when we found it and the phone number that went with it we called it and that connected us to the community action agency who is partnering with the bpw to perform these audits but some of the questions that the receptionist asked could feel intimidating to some people such as age race marital status and income she also said it was probably going to be six to eight weeks before we would even get a call back luckily that did not happen and we received a call from peter the inspector the next day and he was able to perform for us on wednesday this free audit so i'd like you to meet peter peter the bpi certified inspector who had contracted through the community action agency and then to the bpw but we figured that some people may feel uncomfortable even having peter come into your household so we created a website and on this website it has a short bio bio peter just explains kind of what this program is we also created a short video that allows people to lose some of the fears of it oh the service can save you up to one hundred and twenty and if you're willing to invest you can save even more like hundreds of dollars now that's new good afternoon hi come on in so do you have any questions before we get started yes what will you be doing while we can walk through to see where you would be also with my experience i will give you a few tips on where you can save energy in your home you just got one hundred and twenty five a lot for free all these cool free gifts so how did you end up inspecting that so cheap and easy changes you can make are changing the cfl and led light balls call better windows and using the smart power strip to plug all your devices into some longterm suggestions could be adding more insulation in your walls and buying energy star products as you're getting feedback from the bpw they told us a little bit more about the georgetown university energy pipes and our solution could fit into it and how how and when the five million prize to them that goes to the winner of this competition how cool would that be it's hung on five million well you might be asking well what is the georgetown university energy price well it's a competition between days all over to see who can be the most energy efficient the objectives for this is to see who can foster innovative approaches towards energy efficiency to educate the public and students about energy issues and also to increase the usage of energy efficient products and services we presented our idea to bpw last wednesday afternoon they loved our idea so much that they asked us to present it again the next morning at the georgetown energy prize breakfast and hollands days what this is the breakfast with major businesses and how leaders from all over as you can see it's dave coaster the gen the general manager bpw ryan cotton the city manager of holland and kurt dykstra the mayor of holland they also loved our idea so much that they wanted to use our campaign suck less lend more as a way to get hot and excited about this energy prize and want to win and also if you look in the paper this sunday front page you'll also see this picture wait wait wait so some plants live more isn't even our solution it is the slogan to our campaign let me tell you where suck less live more came from we loved our driving questions so much how can we make our homes suck less two simple words that had so much meaning suck less energy suck less from new environment suck less from my dad's wallet and so on we loved it so much we put it on we wanted to put it on a tshirt but we wanted something catchy that everyone wanted to see less is more is what we've been thinking less is more suck less live more that was it we decided when we put it on a tshirt and we posted it on twitter and what was crazy is that people from the community started to respond to our twitter posts i love that shirt where can i get one i got one where can i buy one and this leads us to our program how can we get lower my bill to be attracted and cause a buzz in our community we caused this we did this by changing the perception instead of offering it as a program that is free to everyone we decided to change it into a prize a highly coveted prize that could be won in the form of a raffle this raffle consists of the two blobs that come with signs in english and spanish that would be in locations in local businesses around the town in holland once i kind of we had to prove that this would work we did experiment this weekend nicole okay so this past weekend we put out the two globes one of them manzo's and one on la providencia at a hispanic grocery store and we got five people to sign up that's five people interested in winning this prize five times at fifty two weeks in a year that's over the two hundred and thirty audits that peter can provide here's a list of local businesses we suggested to bpw to contact that they could cycle through the through the year so our proposal for a raffle will suck less money on advertising as i mentioned before about a thousand dollars is spent advertising this program through various ways it will suck less on the bpw employees time which i'm sure they would love to hear they will if the city of holland commits to sucking less they have a chance at winning an energy price five million prize which would be awesome and then the city of holland convinced is sucking less they can save the environment for future generations but ultimately it comes down to the consumer if they suck less there'll be able to live more but don't just take our word for it excited audience cheering suck less live more one question for bpw did you violate something i mean we were doing information from your wife so is there any way to like increase the number of audits that could be done to be successful we were thinking about asking the bpw it only costs about one thousand five hundred to two thousand to go through the certification process for the bpi certification which is what they need so we're thinking maybe if people like love the service so much there's a more expensive version of the service that you can actually buy for about four hundred so if people buy that enough then there'll be able to train someone and then based on how important it is to them like put them on staff so they'll be able to do it are you entered into the holland entered into this competition already and what's the timetable for that is it entered was it entered how long ago was an entry the competition actually starts on january 1st two thousand and fifteen and it'll go through two thousand and seventeen and they'll have a quarter finalists after the first year and they will move on to the final which is the last year and based on that there were findings from that they'll determine the winner great so there's time to get this word out is that right is that the breakfast that we've also presented this to was like kind of to get together like the local businesses and city leaders said kind of get on board about being more energy efficient and want to help out with this we'd ask the question always on likelihood of implementation you want to ask it i think they already started even with a zero budget so with the zero budget how did we get bribed with these so no seriously though i'm as you are developing marketing pieces without much of a budget what what what did you do to come up with the marketing was here as you come up with we were given a one hundred gift card for this program which we used on the glows and stuff at dollar tree also the tshirts were i believe jason then placed an order with ambrose but then it got canceled so there was extra money there that we could use for yeah so using existing resources to get this rolling do you anticipate if people are saying i want these tshirts what do you anticipate how do you anticipate that this is going to take off what do you think you'll need to invest in order to to get these homes audited can can you explain that question well it sounds like one of the people seem pretty darn geeked about getting tshirts and some of these sorts of things i'm wondering i guess a better question would be are you anticipating continuing on marketing with like tshirts and these sorts of things for the stock and if so how much do you think it's gonna cost to put this initiative forward the dpw has already told us that they will be using this campaign and they can sell the shirts on their website and they said they were planning on doing that so that would raise money for further implementation great thank you as well holland city also would like their logo back kicks they would also like to use these shirts to help kick off the georgetown energy price okay cool very cool what would you going to charge it that's pretty expensive real estate what you got on the front that's kind of a it's kind of a funny thing but you know when you when you go down to let's say performance you know performance kinds of things and so when you see all the tshirts and every pa he just looking at the back of all the tshirts and everything else and they've got twenty different logos on the back but you know there's a real value the same to be in the back of it have you thought about that and how you can raise money through the bpw could get sponsors to be put on the back of their tshirt and then you would have to pay the bpw to be sponsored on the tshirt the surplus is you were mostly trying to tackle the lower my bill but the surplus is pretty broad you could almost even use it as like a political statement i know i'm not from home but i know the whole powerpoint is something we even hear about outside of the city what other initiatives do you think this will be connected to and is the bpw on board with kind of that kind of direction of kind of fulfilling this more than just saying got an audit program well the bar driving question was how can you make our homes suck less and with that they didn't want us to look at more of like a broad thing they wanted us to look at more of the lower my bill program that they have and try to get more people use it but they could if they were interested in doing so they could use the subclass live more slogan as pretty much an advertisement for any other program as well to just bring awareness to what bpw does for our community as well