Community education programs are a mainstay for investor-owned utilities, cooperatives and municipalities. Delivering K-12 outreach through educational programming makes a real impact. You form lasting connections with your community, influence energy usage behaviors and reach parents through the “trickle up effect”: educating K-12 students through in-school events and sitting back while they take that messaging home to their parents.

With 40 years of experience in energy-related education, NTC has learned firsthand how inspiring kids spreads positive awareness. We’d like to highlight one of our many strategies in delivering innovative teaching methods. We produce a wide variety of videos in our Minneapolis studio, and have built a talented roster of writers, actors and directors who are dedicated to creating videos that are as entertaining as they are informative.

One example is our syndicated TV series M@dAbout, a sketch-comedy show that educates students on a variety of topics, including health and wellness and financial literacy along with energy efficiency, safety, renewables and other subjects that are so important to the utilities industry.

In order to give your community outreach as much impact as possible, it’s important to lend your educational content a creative edge. There are a number of reasons why video productions are so effective at teaching both kids and adults:

• • It’s familiar. People have been engaged by the moving image for more than a century.
• • Teaching through creativity and storytelling can engage all audiences, including “right-brained” viewers who respond intuitively rather than analytically.
• • In a world dominated by media and advertisements, providing an emotional connection through humor and characterization can set your message apart.
• • Entertaining students through a medium that can be directly shared with parents (“Watch this!”) is a great way to deliver your message.

So, if you want to enhance your connection to your residential customers and deliver information in a way that instructs and entertains, see what humor and creativity can do for your outreach program.

NTC is a premium provider of educational programming with operations in the U.S., Australia and New Zealand. We work directly between schools and clients to promote beneficial behaviors and life skills to students in grades K-12 on a local, regional or national level.