Proving Community Engagement Is Key to Unlocking Justice40 Grants

The Biden administration is prioritizing disadvantaged communities in more than 500 federal grants under the Justice40 executive order, which means local and state governments looking to win those grants need to highlight their compliance strategies in applications. One key way to demonstrate a commitment to those parts of the community is through better engagement and using data-driven communication to drive action, meet federal reporting requirements, and ensure historically disadvantaged communities have a significant voice in program outcomes and implementation.

The Justice40 initiative “is a whole-government effort to ensure federal agencies work with state and local communities … to deliver at least 40% of the overall benefits from federal investments in climate and clean energy to disadvantaged communities.” In November 2023, the White House released a list of 518 covered programs subject to this initiative across the federal government, with the largest set belonging to the Department of Energy (DOE) with 167. DOE’s outsized representation in the covered program illustrates how the Justice40 initiative is impacting program design, influencing the grant recipients who are awarded funding, and, ultimately, program outcomes.

Due to Justice40, the DOE now requires that all grant recipients for the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (estimated funding $1.2 trillion) and the Inflation Reduction Act (roughly $500 billion) must complete a Community Benefit Plan (CBP) that counts for 20% over their overall score. This CBP has the following policy priorities:

• Engaging communities and labor
• Investing in America’s workforce
• Advancing diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility
• Implementing the Justice40 initiative

Granicus has a long history of helping public agencies at all levels of government with human-centered community engagement. In the rest of this article, we will walk through a user journey, highlighting best practices for incorporating DOE core policy priorities of Justice40 into agency communication strategies.

Understanding Your Audience

First, it is critical to determine what successful community engagement looks like for your project.

With the DOE Justice40 grants requiring 40% of the benefit go to disadvantaged communities, an important goal of community engagement begins with understanding the different audiences.

Identifying Your Audience

Are you working with embedded community groups, disadvantaged or tribal communities, small businesses, job trainees, or a combination? If you are working with many different types of groups, it’s going to be important to segment and tailor your messaging for each group depending on your goal.

For example, if the goal is to increase use of solar power in low-income communities, a good place to start could be through surveys to understand people’s current attitude toward solar panels and heat pumps. If it’s small businesses, they may be more concerned about reliability during peak hours or adding electric vehicle chargers.

Connecting with Audiences

Another area to consider is how you are going to connect with these audiences. Community events and organizations can be a great way to grow your audience and build trust. One thing to keep in mind is how you are capturing people’s information at these events so that you can follow up with a digital campaign.

Our customers have found success using QR codes or text-to-subscribe to quickly gather someone’s information so they can then segment and follow up with them after the event.

Effective Communication

When it comes to written communication — whether that’s social media, email, or mailers — it’s important to write plainly and use the reader’s language of choice. On project websites, visuals and storytelling can make technical information more compelling and easier to understand.

Learn more about effective strategies for building and fostering equitable experiences in disadvantaged communities in our webinar, “How to Foster Engagement with Underserved Communities.”

Measuring Success

A final thing to consider when planning is what types of metrics you’re using to judge the success of public engagement. Popular metrics like open and click-through rates are easy to measure, although they don’t necessarily tell you if the engagement is moving people toward the desired outcomes. We find these methods useful for testing and refining your messaging. For evaluating engagement success, we focus more on outcome-based metrics like higher solar adoption rates or reduced utility bills.

Drive Action

Educating the public is often a goal of community engagement. However, the DOE core priorities from Justice40 involve getting people to take action.

Using the example of solar power adoption in the previous section, there are multiple actions that need to occur: Completing income verification forms, selecting a payment subscription, scheduling the installation, and referring friends to the program after receiving the benefits.

Workforce development combines multiple core priorities. It is well understood that utilities face a labor shortage, and there are many resources available, such as labor unions, community colleges, and government agencies such as the Department of Labor. The key challenge is getting people to take action and sign up for these programs.

A multiprong approach for attracting previously underutilized communities — such as educating students in high school or challenging stereotypes that women or veterans with disabilities are not welcome — begins with reaching these audiences where they spend time. For Gen Z, that might be social media; for veterans, it can be through numerous government programs.

Attracting women has been challenging due to their low representation in the field. However, nonprofits like Moore Community House have successfully linked their apprenticeships to economic security and affordable childcare, allowing participants to earn while they learn.

Once potential candidates are identified, it’s important to to communicate with them in their preferred method. Granicus has helped several agencies improve program adoption through text messaging. Two-way texting is particularly effective as it allows an agency to guide potential applicants through a series of steps.

For instance, first raising awareness about the opportunities and benefits available to women, asking them a survey question to gauge interest, and then directing them to a project page with video demonstrations or providing contact information for a workforce development representative.

This is just one example of how a multi-pronged approach of in-person and digital engagement can drive people to act and help the grant recipient meet the Justice40 and DOE policy priorities.

Evaluate and Iterate

A best practice is to gather data throughout the community engagement process so that you can evaluate the effectiveness of the outreach and then nurture those relationships.

Deciding to join an apprenticeship might be one of the biggest decisions a person makes in their life; and given the costs to the agency, it’s not something they would want people to take lightly. Moving from an in-person event to a digital communication strategy allows you to nurture the applicant as they consider committing to this career without letting them get distracted or overwhelmed with the decision.

There are several ways agencies have been effective in these nurturing campaigns, but they all begin with analyzing the data. In this example, data could be used in a couple of ways.

First, you can use the data to establish different audiences — disabled veterans in one group or women in another — and then through an analysis of the data evaluate which means of communication — texts, email, community events, or social media — is each group engaging with the most.

Next, consider where they are going with that information: Videos of people like them in the job, or FAQ pages or forms where they begin submitting their application. A/B testing will help dial in on the messaging that is most effective, as well.

Lastly, by evaluating how they are engaging on the applicant side, an agency can slot those candidates into the best nurturing campaign, all the while monitoring the effectiveness of those campaigns to see which ones are driving toward the right program outcomes.

Reporting

Receiving a federal grant entails significant reporting requirements, including detailed accounts of community engagement activities; diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) distributions; and interactions with labor organizations. These tasks can be cumbersome, especially when conducting in-person engagement. However, leveraging digital tools can significantly streamline this process.

For instance, implementing QR codes at events allows participants to quickly and easily access surveys or sign-up forms. Text-to-subscribe services enable stakeholders to opt-in for updates or provide feedback via SMS, ensuring high participation rates. Digital sticky notes or interactive boards can facilitate real-time collaboration and idea collection during meetings and workshops.

You can ensure accuracy and efficiency by capturing engagement data digitally through these methods. Once the data is collected, utilizing robust reporting tools can transform this information into highly visual and detailed analytics that not only meet your semiannual reporting requirements, but also provide valuable insights to drive your project forward.

The ability to generate comprehensive reports with minimal manual effort ensures compliance, enhances transparency, and ultimately contributes to the overall success of your federally funded initiatives.

Learn More

Discover how Granicus can help you leverage data-driven communication and digital tools to meet federal requirements and amplify your impact. Contact us to learn more about our solutions and see how we can support your mission.