Here is the text version of the webinar ZERH Marketing and Sales, presented in February 2017. Watch the presentation.
Alex Krowka:
Presentation title slide:
... everyone. Hope you're having a good Wednesday. Welcome to DOE Zero Energy Ready Home's training webinar series. We're excited that you can join us today for Marketing and Selling of Zero Energy Ready Homes. Our presenters today are Sam Bowles, marketing director for ZERH, and Chrissi Antonopolous, energy research scientist at Pacific Northwest National Labs. Today's session is one in a continuing series of training webinars to support our partners in designing, building, and selling DOE Zero Energy Ready Homes. My name is Alex Krowka, and I provide coordination support for the program. I'm just going to take a quick moment here to cover some general notes on webinar housekeeping. All attendees will be in listen-only mode, however, we invite you to ask questions throughout the session in the questions section of the GoToWebinar program. We'll monitor these throughout the webinar and after the presentation we'll have some time to go over your questions that weren't answered during the webinar. This session is being recorded, and it will be placed on the resources page of the Zero Energy Ready Home website. If you could give us a couple days to do this, it would be much appreciated, since it takes a bit to go through the process to be added online. We'll notify everywhere once everything is uploaded. So that is all the housekeeping that I have. So now I'm going to hand it over to Sam Bowles to go ahead and get us started. So take it away, Sam.
Sam Bowles:
Alright. Thanks, Alex. And good morning / afternoon to everybody. I'm glad that you all could make it. Looks like we have some pretty good attendance here. So, excited to chat with you guys a little bit today about some of the marketing materials we have here at the DOE Zero Energy Ready Home program that hopefully you can use throughout your sales and marketing. We also have Chrissi Antonopolous with us from PNNL, who is going to give us a good walk-through of the Building America Solution Center, another great tool that you guys can use.
First presentation slide:
So just a quick overview. My portion of this will be going over the Zero Energy Ready Home marketing resources. We're going to do a quick overview of some of the available materials that you guys have in your marketing toolkit. We'll show some examples of the partners effectively using those marketing materials. And then we're going to walk through quickly how you can access these through your partner profile and getting through that. And then Chrissi is going to, again, go through the Building America Solution Center, overview of the materials available through that, how to become a registered user of the Building America Solution Center, and then creating customized sales material and field kits through that resource, which should be a great tool for you guys to use in your marketing and sales.
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So getting started here with the marketing resources. This is all about translating value and being able to effectively communicate the value of the Zero Energy Ready Home to your clients, to American homebuyers.
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And I'm going to assume based on the attendance that we have here that the majority of you are already partners of the Zero Energy Ready Home program. So for our builder partners, first off, congratulations, you're already among a select group of the top 1 percent of builders in the country building to these high extraordinary levels for efficiency, but also comfort, health, safety, durability, and quality levels that are associated with our DOE Zero Energy Ready Home program. With all this, you're providing an unprecedented value to consumers. On the energy side of things, you're 40 to 50 percent more savings, which is really set up for the home to migrate at some point, if the owners choose, to a zero energy or near zero energy home. Along the way, we're able as builders of Zero Energy Ready Homes to differentiate from the competition, the vast majority of the homes in the market, which are existing home sales. These new homes, which are rolling in all the building science we get from ENERGY STAR® Homes version 3. We layer on top of that really good innovations, proven innovations coming out of the DOE's Building America R&D program. And now that we've packaged all that up in our Zero Energy Ready Homes, we're really providing a tremendous amount of value to buyers that you guys can use to truly differentiate yourself in the market.
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So let's take a look at this kind of graphically. OK. We have our minimum-code home set in the table here, with our average annual use. And what we're really doing with a Zero Energy Ready Home is we're cutting that about in half, through optimized efficiency with the enclosure, components, and solar-ready construction. On top of that, we add risk management through moisture protection, optimized comfort, and comprehensive indoor air quality. And if we do all that now, we've earned this Zero Energy Ready Home label. So that's our logo. That's our label. That's what you've earned through meeting all those robust requirements. Now we've set it up to where a builder and a homeowner, if they choose to in the future, can add some renewables, some solar or other offsets, to get that down to near zero or fully zero at some point in the future. Now that can be a little bit more than zero in some years for a number of reasons. It could be weather. It could be factors with utility or buying power. Could be homeowner use. You know, if somebody has a swimming pool and are using a lot of high-energy components. But the goal here is that we've cut all that -- we've cut at least the efficiency in half, and we have the ability in the future, should the builder or homeowner decide, that we're going to get all the way down or very close to zero. So obviously there's a lot involved here. And it's a really complicated story for us to tell a consumer, so that's where our marketing materials come into play. Our goal is to give you tools that can effectively communicate the value of a Zero Energy Ready Home to your partners.
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So walking through the marketing toolkit. Couple things we have. We have our Zero Energy Ready Home logos, both partner logos and certification logos. We have a consumer brochure, which there's a generic version; there's also a branded version. Same thing with the point-of-sale fact sheet: There's a generic and a branded version of that. Drop-in messaging, that you can use quotes from DOE in your press releases, on your websites, etcetera. We have our Tour of Zero web buttons, both a "take the tour" web button and also a branded Tour of Zero web button. And then lastly, we have our consumer video, which lives on the Tour of Zero website but we also have it in our marketing toolkit for you to use on your websites. You can embed it on your website. You can copy a link to social media stuff. So a bunch of really nice tools in your marketing toolkit that are available to you.
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So let's start out with the Zero Energy Ready Home label. All partners have access to this master Zero Energy Ready logo. You can use these on your certified homes. You also have access to the partner logo, which you see here, for use on web-based materials, print materials. All these things are really great tools to show off your association with the U.S. DOE Zero Energy Ready Home program. Our logo is huge for brand awareness. The more this is out there, the more people understand it, the more people see it, the better it is for everybody in the program. And more importantly, it provides a label that people trust. Because we're the Department of Energy, people see that. They see a certification coming from the U.S. Department of Energy and they truly trust that. Again, this label is available for every partner to use, as long as you meet the guidelines associated with this, which are located in your marketing toolkit. And we'll show you where those are a little bit later in this presentation.
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And so just a couple of examples of how people have used this logo. Here we have a ribbon-cutting where kind of the Zero Energy Ready logo is all over the house. You can use it at a trade show presentation or a home show presentation like the group in the bottom right has done.
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Couple other examples on signage. A home under construction, homes coming soon. And then on the right here, we have the logo shown actually on a house with a couple other logos that you get as part of the Zero Energy Ready Home program. You're in the EPA Indoor airPLUS; you've qualified there. You've qualified for ENERGY STAR as a prerequisite. So all three of these logos are good ways to differentiate your home right there. Right there on the home for people to see.
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Next up we're going to go into the point-of-sale fact sheet and the consumer brochure. A lot of the goals with our marketing materials is to communicate contrast and clarity. So on these, places where we can use them: promotional events, home tours, sales materials. And we'll see as we go through this that a lot of people have effectively used these, kind of broken it down into different pieces and used them very effectively beyond websites and model homes.
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The point-of-sale fact sheet. You can see how this can be completely customized. If you look in the bottom left, this is customized for Addison Homes. So your logo, all your contact information, your website information, is on there. And this fact sheet really gives an understanding of what you truly get with a Zero Energy Ready Home. So as you get to know your clients, you can kind of understand things that are important to them. Maybe you've come into a situation where a family is very interested in having a healthy home because their kids suffer from asthma and have to use inhalers. So now you and your salesperson can take out this point-of-sale fact sheet. You can highlight the "Healthful Environment" bars that we show at the top here. And you can show the difference that you get between a Zero Energy Ready Home and an ENERGY STAR home and an existing home, all right there in a very easy way for somebody to understand that.
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So if we look a little bit closer here, now you're showing that every Zero Energy Ready Home we build has 100 percent of the requirements that the national authority on health in new homes says should be in every new home. And every Zero Energy Ready Home meets the EPA Indoor airPLUS requirements. So by contrast, you're getting half of that with an ENERGY STAR home, and hardly any in an existing home. So a very easy way for people to see the difference in the different qualities that we have in our homes. You can do the same for any of the other bars, as well. If you have somebody who's more concerned with saving money, being super-efficient, you can get out your highlighter and go back here, you can highlight the "Ultra-Efficient" bars, if you'd like. Or somebody who's really interested in advanced technology, you can highlight those. So getting to know your clients, understanding what's important to them, this point-of-sale fact sheet provides you a really good tool to show the contrast between the Zero Energy Ready Home and ENERGY STAR home, an existing home.
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Going a little bit further, we have our consumer brochure, kind of follows the same method as the point-of-sale fact sheet. You see the same bars here, over there on the right. That's actually the back of the brochure. But now in the brochure you have a little more room to explain the bars. There's a short description below each of the sets that's on this inside spread here that explains the benefits and the value a Zero Energy Ready Home provides in each of these categories. Now we have that kid who suffers from asthma -- we can show the clients the brochure and see every DOE Zero Energy Ready Home has a comprehensive package of measures to minimize dangerous pollutants by continuous fresh air, and effectively filter the air you and your family breathe. So now we're really hitting that emotional connection and giving them something that they can take away and look at and read and see the difference between the Zero Energy Ready Home and some of the other homes that they may be looking into.
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If you're ever asked about how we came up with this, there's a full label methodology that's located on our website, how these bars were created graphically or quantitatively. And that's located on our website.
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So a couple examples here of how it's being used. You can see that Thrive Home Builders here has taken the brochure, kind of that inside spread part of the brochure, and broken it down. And this is in a model home, so people walking through can look at each of these bars and see the effectiveness of them. I have some other examples a little bit later when we walk through some of website stuff. Just some quick examples of how you can use these brochures and the point-of-sale fact sheet.
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Another tool that we have is the drop-in messaging. We understand that a lot of builders either won't be able to be as effective as we are in crafting messages or might have concerns about what they can and can't say. So in order to kind of provide you with some powerful messages, we've developed this drop-in messaging document. As a partner, all you need to do is log into your partner profile, download this document. You can pull the messages right there. In the messages you can see where you can drop in your partner names and make it fully customizable for you. At DOE, we can't endorse any builder, but we can objectively indicate that you're part of the program. We can objectively say that you're helping, leading the industry to achieve Zero Energy Ready Home performance. And we can say the objective statements that come across still as very effective information that consumers will think is very important about that builder. So you can use these on a website. You can use these through social media, press releases, promotional materials, all different types of communication.
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We see here an example of how Mantell-Hecathorn, one of our partners, has used the drop-in messaging directly on their website, saying Zero Energy Ready Homes are the future of U.S. housing, and innovators like Mantell-Hecathorn Builders are leading the way for the entire industry. And you can kind of read through that. And we'll show you that document when we get into the partner profile.
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And then we come to our Tour of Zero. So this is obviously a national campaign that we launched about two years ago. We're starting to see a lot more homes populating the Tour, which happens through our Housing Innovation Awards. And we're starting to see a lot more traffic come to this. And to help us drive more traffic, we've created these Tour of Zero web buttons. Places that you can use these are on your website, through social media, on press releases, really anywhere that -- they're mostly used for online use so you can connect them directly to the Tour of Zero and link them directly to your homes on the Tour of Zero. Or if your homes are not there yet, you can link them directly to the Tour of Zero so people can see the difference in a Zero Energy Ready Home.
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Here are a couple of the buttons. On the left you have kind of the branded button that has a little bit more text. Here's an example of one of our innovation partners, DuPont, using it. "DuPont is partnering with the U.S. Department of Energy to bring homes of the future to families today." And this link would be directly to the Tour of Zero. Again, we also have the "Take the Tour" button off to the right. Really effectively uses the logo in that button so we have a little bit more brand awareness there. And again, we're hyperlinking this directly to the Tour of Zero. A lot of our partners have used that link directly to their homes, again. So we can drive a little bit more traffic to that Tour of Zero.
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Along with that, we now have the consumer video. And that lives on the Tour of Zero website, where people can get an idea of what is included in a Zero Energy Ready Home. This is just a quick screenshot of that. People have used this video on their websites, embedded it directly on their websites, used links on social media, to advertise the video and get people taken to the Tour.
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So just quickly, let's walk through the consumer video and the messaging behind it. First we have our home, which is often the largest purchase of a lifetime. And not only that, it's often either cost-prohibitive or impossible to make changes once it's built. And especially the changes that can truly transform how a home functions. Now this is why it's such an overwhelming decision for buyers, and that's why they worry about lots of their outcomes after they buy the home, particularly outcomes they can't deal with when they see things, you know, moisture, energy bills, and that sort of thing. So at the end of the day, now with the DOE Zero Energy Ready Home, we can deliver a home on the performance side that reflects the best expert guidance, the home of the experts, that performance experts would choose for themselves. And this is because of the seven must-have systems that every expert would want to have in each and every home they would buy. So just quickly walking through the systems: We have our optimized thermal protection. We have our whole-house water protection, high-performance heating and cooling, high-efficiency components, complete indoor air quality, solar-ready construction, and enhanced quality assurance. So those are our seven systems. Each of these is what every expert would want in their home. And one of the reasons experts would ask for this is they know that the true cost of a home is not the sticker price. It's kind of small in the bottom right-hand corner, but you can see that the sticker price is the value and now they want a home with a higher value. But they know that the higher-value home may have a slightly higher mortgage. So you pay a little bit more per month, but when you add in that decreased utility bill we have a lower true cost of ownership with a Zero Energy Ready Home, certified home. And now, that's our label, the Zero Energy Ready Home label. All of this packaged up is what you get with that Zero Energy Ready Home. Just look for the label; for more information, go to the website. So that's kind of in a nutshell what the video kind of walks us through.
Web browser:
Quickly, I'm going to go through some examples here. I'm going to switch over to my web browser real quick. You can see some examples of how people are using it. This is Thrive Home Builders. You can see, they actually have the logo listed on all their listed homes, to provide that differentiation. You click on "Energy-efficient living," our logo is kind of pretty primary real estate there. Click on that and it takes you to a press release of how they've won the Housing Innovation Award. So different ways that you can use the logo there. Another good one is Charis Homes. They use our partner logo here, talk about DOE Zero Energy Ready Homes throughout their website. If you click on that partner logo, it takes you to a press release about their Housing Innovation Awards. They have a link to their Tour of Zero site. They have an embedded video here. And they also take that consumer brochure and break it down right there on their website for people to see. Another good example we have just using that branded Tour button: This is one of our innovation partners, Bosch, using that branded Tour button here. Click on that; it takes you directly to the Tour of Zero. And then just one or two more. Good use of drop-in messaging here by Apple Blossom Energy. They're using the branded Tour of Zero link here, and then all three of these are directly taken from the drop-in messaging document that we provide you guys in your partner profile. So those are just some good examples. There's a ton more that I could show you, but in the interest of time we're going to go straight into how we log into our partner profiles here.
So if you navigate yourself to the Zero Energy Ready Home page, you can go ahead, on the left-hand side here, there's a partner log-in. You can click on that. It's also through the Resources tab you can get there. But I'm just going to log in real quick to our partner profile and just show you really quickly how this is going to work. So if you're unfamiliar with it, the first tab here, organization contact information, I can put my name, street address, phone number, website, whatever I want to have included there. You can put your primary contact information there. You can subscribe to our newsletter if you have not already done so right there. I can upload my logo right here. All of this information that goes into this partner profile is what you'll ultimately get on the back end in the partner locator. So if someone is on the DOE website and they are looking at the partner locator and they click on your company's name, all of your logos, all your information that you've put in here in your partner profile is what they're going to see on the other side of things. You can click here to select all the places of business that you work in. All your commitments that you're doing, as part of your homes. And then we get to our marketing materials. So this is where we -- all of that stuff that we just went over lives. We have our certification logo in a couple different formats: PDF, .jpg, .eps. Partner logo, the same way. Here is where you can download that logo use guidelines document to make sure that we're in compliance with using the logo in the right ways. We have our generic point-of-sale fact sheet, customized point-of-sale fact sheet, which will hold that logo that you uploaded into your partner profile. Same thing with the brochures, both the generic version and the custom brochure. Drop-in messaging, it's just a Microsoft Word document that you can download and you can pull all those messages straight from there. And then the couple different Tour of Zero buttons. We have a smaller version; we have a larger version. And then that partner-branded one that has a little bit more information on it is available in both a horizontal and a vertical format. So you can decide what fits best in your signage or on your website. And lastly, we've got our video here. So there's an embed code here that you can use on your websites. You can also download the video and save it to your computer, and you can put that up wherever you'd like. And it's also available on YouTube, so you can just use a direct link to that video through your social media and that sort of thing. And that pretty much wraps it up for me.
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Just quickly, there's a couple examples here of some people really effectively using the social media aspect of some of the materials. You see here, TC Legend Homes over on the left is using the Tour of Zero. They're taking some of the photos from the Tour of Zero and pushing it out through their social media. Dwell Development is here on Twitter posting a link to their case studies, and then we have Bosch, one of our innovation partners, using the video through Facebook for some added awareness of what's out there and trying to drive some traffic to the Tour. So a bunch of different ways that we can use those. Social media has become a really good way to use them. And I think a lot of our materials lend itself well to use them on the different social media platforms. So with that, I am going to hand it over to Chrissi, who will then talk about the Building America Solution Center. And if you have any questions about the marketing aspects, we'll get to them at the end.
Chrissi Antonopolous:
Great. Everyone, I'm just going to queue up my presentation here. Alright. Please let me know if you cannot see my screen. Actually, I think I need to get this ...
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My name is Chrissi Antonopolous. I'm going to be spending some time today talking about the Building America Solution Center, which is a somewhat of a sister resource to all of the Zero Energy Ready Home sites that Sam was just reviewing. So the Solution Center is an online tool to provide free building science information in the form of guides. We have about 200 guides on the Solution Center right now. The URL is basc.energy.gov. You can access a wide variety of content ranging from images, big large photo gallery, CAD files, case studies. We have rater-specific information. We have sales information. Today we are going to focus on the sales and media information, since that is the primary focus.
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So we have a large variety of stakeholders in the Solution Center. It's designed for anyone that's interested in accessing technical information about residential building science. There is over 200,000 unique visitors per year and growing rapidly. We have over 2,500 registered users that utilize the customizable pieces of the website, which we'll be reviewing today.
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You can quickly access technical guidance and information that support Zero Energy Ready Homes, ENERGY STAR Certified Homes, Indoor airPLUS, and EPA WaterSense programs. You can find codes, standards, specific climate zone information, and detailed installation guidance for all of our guides.
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Just a quick snapshot of what you can find in the Solution Center: 200-plus, I think we're about up to about 210 at this point, full guides, over 1,500 images, which are all downloadable and savable as .jpg files, and these are all free. Over 115 CAD drawings for a high-performance home. You can download the original .dwg files, if you have an auto CAD program, and integrate those seamlessly. 270-plus proven performance case studies, including all of the Zero Energy Ready Home partners, programs, and case studies that have resulted from those construction projects. Over 530 peer-reviewed references and resources, including the entire Building America library. A new feature that we've just developed are called code compliance briefs. They are kind of small pop-ups that help code officials and others interested in particular codes overcome particular barriers for specific measures. And we also have over 90 videos, mostly installation videos on how to install.
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We have a simple interface for users that allow you to access whatever information you're most interested in.
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We support the Zero Energy Ready Home program. You can walk through the entire Zero Energy Ready Home checklist and pull out the specific measures that will help you gain access and achieve certification for the checklist. Again, this is not the Zero Energy Ready Home partner site. You do have to go through that site for certification. But if you're looking for the technical guidance on how to install specific measures on the checklist, the Solution Center is where you're going to find all of that information.
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Here's a look at all of our case studies as well as our code compliance briefs. You can access this information to look at proven practices as well as code information. You can also save all of this information. And the reason for me pointing out how to access all of these different types of content is to show you how you can become a registered user of the Solution Center and start gathering the content that you find particularly useful in the database, and saving it for your own purposes.
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So we're going to go through how to log in and register on the Solution Center. I'm going to do something similar to what Sam did earlier in the webinar. I'm going to overview some of the specifics on the PowerPoint and then I will navigate with you to the actual Solution Center and go through creating some of these materials and accessing some of these materials. So the Solution Center URL is basc.energy.gov. On the upper right-hand side of the website, you will see a log-in or register feature. Registering to the Solution Center is important. If you do not register you can still access all of the content for free but you cannot create some of the more customized items that we have available, including field kits, which are bookmarks or folders that allow you to pick and choose the content that is applicable to your construction projects and save them. You can create point-of-sale fact sheets and training materials. These are all tied to the Zero Energy Ready Home program. You can access your saved content from a mobile device through our mobile application that I will show you in just a little bit. And you can provide direct feedback on content. When you're logged into the Solution Center, you will have a feedback link that pops up on all the content that you visit. And if you have questions or comments regarding the content that you're viewing, you can access us directly to provide feedback.
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So we're going to talk about the sales tool. The sales tool mirrors the Zero Energy Ready Home program. Six primary focus of construction. You can use the sales tool to browse individual sales measures. And you can also create these customized fact sheets, one for advanced technology, engineering comfort, enhanced durability, healthful environment, quality-built, and ultra-efficient. What the database will do is pull out all of the technical specifications and sales messages for each of those messages and format them into a worksheet for you. You can title the worksheet whatever you like. You can add your logo. You can add your contact information, address, website, phone number. You can also add a more specific introduction. You can add your own sales message or whatever you'd like here.
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If you want to be more specific, you can create these individualized worksheets where you can pick and choose the specific applications that you use in your construction and pull them onto a PDF, which I'm showing you here, and give to your customers. Again, you can add your logo. You can add an introductory paragraph or sentence. You can have a nice title here. And then you can go through the tool itself and pick and choose all of the applicable measures that you would like to add.
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You can save all of this information in what we call field kits. Field kits are folders that you create. You title them whatever you'd like. And you go around the Solution Center and save your images, your CAD files, your customized sales messages that you create, case studies, videos, all of the content in the Solution Center, and you can bookmark and save into your field kits. Where you can then access them either through a desktop or you can download our mobile application.
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Here is the information, for an Android or an iOS. And you can access them directly out in the field. So we will go through that, as well. The Apple version of the Solutions app, it's called Building America Solutions, is available in the Apple store. The Android app is available directly through our website, which is basc.energy.gov/solutions. You can get the Apple version there, as well.
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So again, this is the Building America Solution Center. We have a widget, which is what you're looking at on the screen now. You can download the widget. You can put it on your website, as well. So now I'm going to navigate directly to the Solution Center. Give me just a moment here.
Alex Krowka:
I'm going to interrupt you real quick. We have someone on the line who is typing, so if everyone could make sure that they are muted, that would be much appreciated. Thank-you.
Chrissi Antonopolous:
Web browser:
Great. OK, I'm going to continue here. This is the home page for the Building America Solution Center. Here is the sales tool to browse all of the sales messages. You should get familiar with the sales tool before you start creating the customized sales lists. It will make a lot more sense if you know the measures that are in here. There is a PowerPoint presentation linked directly on this page, if you need guidance for how to create these. In order to create the lists, you must register to become a user of the Solution Center. It's an easy form to fill out. Once you fill that out, you can then log in to your account, and you will have access to all of the customized information. So I'm going to go ahead and sign in here. And now the thing that changes is you have new blocks over on the right-hand side here. You have sales worksheets. You have field kits. And you'll see here that I have all of my saved folders essentially here. You can create a new sales worksheet by clicking "My sales worksheet" here. You want to give it a title. You can call these anything you would like. And then you have to pick whether you would like a predetermined sales message. So one of the six predetermined lists. Or if you would like to create a customized option where you pick and choose. So in this instance, we're going to create a customized option. The body is the introduction. So any sort of text that you would like to add, you can make it really specific to a potential homeowner; you can make it very broad to your company. I'm going to put in the Building America here. And then this list represents all of the sales messages, which is kind of why I mentioned that you want to be familiar with the sales tool as you work through this, because the list is just a list. And so as long as you can kind of walk it back to the tool itself, it makes it much easier to you. So I'm going to just go through here and pick a few items. And then you click "Add." And I have the options that I selected. I have my company name. I'm going to opt to use a company logo, as well. I'm also going to opt to use my address. And I'm going to save. That creates my list here. And then I can add it to one of my field kits or I can download a PDF that I'm going to print and give to the homeowners. And here that is, right here. It prints it out really nicely. You get an image, you get the sales message for each one of the items that you chose. Again, you can save these in your field kits. Or they will automatically be saved under your My Sales Worksheets for you to use in the future.
I'm going to quickly show you a field kit. We wanted to make sure to leave enough time for questions. So I'm going to go into one of my field kits, my Zero Energy Ready Home field kit, and show you some of the content that I have saved throughout the Solution Center. These are parsed out by content type. So I have all of my guides here. I have my CAD files and my images here. If I click on any one, it will become larger. I have a save button if I want to directly save it to my computer. Or I can seamlessly go through all of my saved images. I have a video in here, and I have one of my sales messages in here. And anywhere I go throughout the Solution Center, my saved content will follow me. So I always have direct access to my field kits. I always have direct access to my sales worksheets. And again, on the sales tool home page is a PDF presentation that walks you through how to register, how to create your sales tool, and how to add all of the information that you want to add. With that, I'm going to pause and hand it back to Sam, and we can go ahead and move into the question portion.
Sam Bowles:
OK, great. Thanks, Chrissi. Did we have any questions come in, Alex?
Alex Krowka:
We had one from Donna. She asked if there are any Realtors on this webinar, can they talk about what tools they found most effective when talking / showing a Zero Energy Ready Home to a prospective homebuyer. So I don't know if we have any Realtors on the line, but can you, do you have any insight into that, Sam?
Sam Bowles:
That's a good question. I don't know that -- we probably don't have any Realtors on the line, but I think the brochure and the point-of-sale fact sheet would be two really good resources to use for a Realtor. And if we want to chat offline a little bit about that, we can, about how we can use those two materials to kind of convey the value of the Zero Energy Ready Home to potential homebuyers.
Jamie Lyons:
Alex, this is Jamie Lyons, also with the Zero Energy Ready Home program, just listening in. I guess I would have the observation from working with a lot of builders and the raters that they're not quite sure what to say about a healthy home environment. They don't want to over-reach in stating what the benefits might be from some of the features that are in the home. So I think the sales tool that Chrissi was just showing, when it's populated with the measures and the benefits associated with healthy indoor air quality, I think that's been well-received by a number of our partners, as well, because it is sort of boilerplate information. It's very measured in what it says. It's from the DOE program. So I think that's helped put them on sure footing, as far as marketing the indoor environment aspects of their houses.
Alex Krowka:
Alright, I -- we have a kind of question / comment regarding developers. And, you know, it's hard to convince developers to join there when their whole development, when they don't see representation in material for and about them. I guess, how can a developer best use our resources?
Sam Bowles:
I think a developer can best use our resources kind of the same way that anybody else, a builder, could use them. You know, a lot of our developers that we've been working with lately, it's a big deal for them to say, this is a Zero Energy Ready Home development. And using the different materials that we have included in this can kind of convey that message about what is a Zero Energy Ready Home, what all is included in that, and being able to kind of brand a development as a whole, as a Zero Energy Ready Home development, whether it's 100 percent of the homes, or 10 percent of the homes, or whatever it is, is a big difference maker in the market.
Jamie Lyons:
Yea, and as far as the actual materials and resources which are available, I have to agree with Sam that we have some Zero Energy Ready Home developments 100 percent that are under construction, and they're able to use the logo, the signage, the point-of-sale fact sheets, and so on, on the signage within the development, within the media and marketing materials, within model homes. That being said, if any of our partners, raters, builders, developers have specific ideas of something that would really boost the effectiveness of marketing a Zero Energy Ready Home development, we're all ears. Let us know what that might look like or be.
Sam Bowles:
Any other questions coming through, Alex?
Alex Krowka:
Nah, let's see here ... We just have one: Do we anticipate having the ZERH tool available for full residential retrofits?
Jamie Lyons:
I can tackle that one. Yes, we've had a few gut rehabs which have been able to qualify for Zero Energy Ready Home. Similar to the ENERGY STAR Homes program, it gets a little difficult to assure that some of the, like the foundation-related measures have been built in. So assuming that the project can be certified as an ENERGY STAR Homes kind of gut rehab project, and ENERGY STAR does have a few allowances made for gut rehabs, and we would embed those same allowances. So if you can get through those challenges, projects that are gut rehabs can be certified under Zero Energy Ready Home. And we've had a few of them. At least one which comes to mind was in the mid-Atlantic or I think New York, and it was one that was a Housing Innovation Award project winner in the last couple years. So yea, the door's open for those projects that are able to meet the requirements of the program.
Alex Krowka:
Perfect. And it looks like we don't have any more questions at the moment. We'll give everyone about 30 more seconds if they want to type anything else into the question box.
Jamie Lyons:
Just in the quick void here, Alex, I'll just mention the website for the program, buildings.energy.gov/zero. That's available with all the resources that you were able to see from Sam's presentation. And if any raters, builders, or even manufacturers, are on the line, they can all sign up as different types of partners at that site, through the link called "Become a Partner." You need to follow through -- there's an online agreement which can be signed. So it takes just a few minutes, doesn't cost anything, and then you have access to the marketing materials. You have an online partner profile, etcetera. That's all available through the main program website.
Alex Krowka:
Great; thanks, Jamie. Yea, it looks like we don't have any more questions, so I'm going to go ahead and cut -- yep, I'm going to go ahead and cut the webinar. So thank-you, Sam; thank-you, Chrissi. This was a great webinar, very informational for everyone. And I hope everyone enjoys the rest of their day and the rest of their week.
Sam Bowles:
Alright. Thanks, everybody.