Howard County Solar Farm
Art Direction • Design • Local Marketing • Print
Howard County Solar Farm is an easy way for Howard County residents to save money and lower carbon emissions at the same time. It is a showpiece of simplified digital visual communications.
Community solar benefits renters, people in shady forests, and anyone who prefers easy, fast climate solutions instead of installing solar. By offering community solar as a subscription, HoCo Solar Farm eliminates the need for home ownership.
Our landing page creates economic and environmental impact for HoCo residents who sign up. Everyone who uses this free service saves money, guaranteed. Ease and simplicity is what makes community solar an attractive offer.
Since 1 in 5 deaths globally are caused by air pollution, it makes sense for local residents to choose community solar. Not only are fossil fuels often more economically costly, they are also ecologically costly as well.
This website solves the problem of rising dirty energy costs, responding to local demand for affordable, clean energy. It’s an easy value proposition, and one of the challenges we faced was the belief that it’s too good to be true.
Our Role
Howard County Solar Farm’s website was designed as a collaborative effort between Utility Advisor, Repeater Digital, and Maxed Out Solar. We were hired by a local clean energy entrepreneur to create a landing page focusing on communicating a simple value proposition. Choosing to buy power from a local Howard County Solar Farm, instead of natural gas and fossil fuels. The key message of our solar site design was very simple: solar costs less money, and is better for the environment.
To accomplish this, we wrote a press release for the website and coordinated a direct mailer campaign alongside our digital launch strategy. The result was multiple touchpoints of positive interaction with our client’s newly created brand. Our website saves Howard County residents money with community solar, lowering carbon emissions and air pollution locally. Everyone who completes the signup within a set amount of time receives instant cashback as a time sensitive offer to complete the digital community solar enrollment.
To overcome the common objection that the offer sounds “too good to be true,” we needed to establish and hold trust. Our key messages had to communicate why community solar incentives were provided. The reasoning is the costs of continued climate inaction are higher than the costs of the government subsidizing consumer’s power bills. The decision to switch to community solar is a decision to participate in energy democracy.
Our Approach
We began by holding several meetings with all involved stakeholders. Then we mapped out a plan for success, assigned roles, and coordinated efforts between all involved parties. Utilizing a collaborative process of brand design, we thought through the key messages we wanted to communicate, and how those messages would resonate. We gathered publicly available data indicating our audiences were engaged climate voters, and we sent out mailers directing them to the HoCo Solar Farm website.
We borrowed inspiration from the brand colors of the Baltimore Orioles and University of Maryland, to set a tone of familiarity and memorability with our brand color scheme. Drawing on the use of grids, balance, and local landmarks in our photo selection, we built a landing page designed to save Howard County residents money on their electricity bills, and position our client as a local renewable energy industry expert.
We took this challenge on as a way to quickly and visually communicate the key messages of community solar. One of our goals for this project was to use as little text as possible, to communicate large amounts of information very carefully. If interested prospective residents had further questions beyond what was available on our text minimalist landing page, we had articles available.
The main purpose of each article was to communicate each main idea. Locally sourced renewable energy, the idea that solar energy is our future, and is the best option for residents who depend on each other to to take action. We wanted to motivate and inspire our audiences to spread the word organically. The idea was to create digital real estate to capture large amounts of community solar business from Howard County residents for years to come.
To accomplish this, we SEO optimized each article, using rhetoric designed to appeal to Howard County residents. Each image used in the design was carefully selected and designed to visually communicate the urgency and the locality of the climate crisis, and inspire audiences to take action to protect the environment. We combined suburban, rural, and urban imagery from around Howard County for maximum impact.
The final result was a powerful, text minimalist landing page that quickly and effectively communicates the ease and simplicity of community solar. We wanted Howard County residents to feel empowered to take action and then spread the message too. Community solar is not just a way to quickly save money, and lower carbon emissions. It’s directly tied to the land we live on, and how healthy our air and water will be in the future.
