E.ON | Renewable Energy Communities

In 2023, Italy's energy regulator ARERA introduced the framework for RECs (Renewable Energy Communities): a mechanism enabling citizens, businesses, and local administrations to collectively produce and share renewable energy, with the wider aim of making the national grid more resilient.

E.ON wanted to be among the first utilities to bring RECs to market. Three things made that hard. The regulatory framework was still moving. Public awareness of what a REC is, or why it might matter to anyone, was close to zero. And no two communities were alike in size, membership, infrastructure or social fabric, so a single communication playbook would never scale across them.

On top of that, the real problem, as we came to frame it, was working out how to get citizens involved at all. The people who had to be brought in, end users and local stakeholders alike, simply could not perceive value in something they could not understand. The design challenge was a communication and trust problem as much as a service design one, and solving it meant treating complexity not as an obstacle to explain away, but as something to absorb on behalf of the user.

Before designing anything, I spent significant time understanding the legal and technical architecture behind the product: the incentive mechanisms, the virtual net‑metering logic, the prosumer‑consumer configuration, the role played by the national operators, and the various actor types eligible to join a community. The depth of the regulatory immersion shaped every design decision that followed.

The first design move was stakeholder mapping: working out who was actually involved in bringing a community into existence. Utility, prosumer, consumers, local associations, municipalities, installers, national operators. With that ecosystem in hand, journey management put each of those actors in chronological order along the life of the community. Journey management was the right framework here because it holds multiple parallel layers simultaneously: the technical process layer (what happens operationally), the legal and administrative layer (what ARERA and GSE require), and the human experience layer (what people need to understand and provide at each stage).

The research phase included user interviews with community members at different levels of familiarity with the product, plus stakeholder and expert interviews to map the full actor ecosystem. Those conversations were indispensable. They let the team learn first‑hand what made people sceptical at the start, and what actually convinced the ones who joined, and that knowledge went straight back into simplifying the to‑be process.

I also ran an international benchmarking study across cross‑industry and cross‑country cases, looking for models that had made complex collective‑action products legible to general audiences. Some community projects were a direct inspiration: e.g. La Pile, whose local gatherings and workshops let people get into the subject while enjoying themselves. That idea later became the AperiCER concept.

The ideation workshop with E.ON was the pivot of the project. Two stimuli did most of the work in that room. The first was a set of consumer archetypes, built by reading E.ON's own existing customer profiles through the lens of a REC and reducing them to three behavioural models: the Progressive, the Empiricist, the Traditionalist. Each table was assigned one archetype and spent the morning as its ambassador, speaking for its needs and expectations. The second was a set of community scenario cards. These worked like personas, but for a community: a specific prosumer, a specific territory, a specific set of accelerating factors, such as whether the company had a local network or channels of its own to reach people. The point of both was to stop the room designing for an average that does not exist. Assign a table a real context and it produces a strategy that fits that context, and only afterwards do you reconcile those strategies into something that scales.

The final phase involved prototyping and user‑testing the communication touchpoints: the member newsletter, outdoor advertising, the interest manifestation form, and selected pages of the REC website. Each touchpoint went through a full concept test, with a series of mid‑fidelity variants explored in one‑to‑one sessions with prosumers and consumers. Testing with real users let us see which messages landed and which created confusion, and iterate before handoff.

The strategic logic rested on a single insight: before anyone can decide to join a REC, they need a moment of understanding, a point in the journey at which the value feels concrete and the complexity feels handled. Designing that moment, repeatably, across different people and different community contexts, was the actual design problem.

The brief asked for a journey. What we handed over was a toolkit: a set of instruments E.ON could use to build a community model and then customise it. Five components gave it structure.

The member journey laid out the full experience from discovering the opportunity to formally joining, with the community's own construction and legal timeline running underneath it, so the team could see where the experience and the operation fell out of step.

The Value Wheel provided the messaging architecture. It mapped every lever to joining (economic, social, environmental) against every barrier (organisational, cultural, contextual), then turned both into messages written for each of the three consumer archetypes. That let E.ON's internal team produce contextually relevant communication at scale, rather than generic material that addressed everyone and reached no one.

The strategy cards turned that architecture into named, executable plays. Four community scenarios, each with its own set of awareness strategies, from E.ON running the campaign alone, to the prosumer acting as ambassador among its own customers, to local associations carrying the message. Each card carried its touchpoints, its content requirements and its example messages.

The converging touchpoints defined where every scenario had to end up: a community landing page, an interest manifestation page, and a membership page, each specified down to features, content and fallback channels.

The engagement strategy handled the hardest stretch, the months between saying yes and the community going live. It moved from broadcast to super‑profiled communication, timed against the real construction and regulatory milestones, so that silence during a long wait was replaced by something worth reading.