Exelon Digital Sustainability Reviews

Role: Design Director, Project Lead, strategist

Responsibilities: Client management, experience & creative direction

The Background:

Exelon is America's leading competitive energy provider—doing business in 48 states, DC and Canada. Transitioning from a holding company to parent company, Exelon needed a powerful and engaging way to communicate their sustainability efforts to the people they serve. Sustainability efforts that didn’t stop with corporate environmental stewardship, but extended deep into local communities, equity work, and smart grid innovation.

The Challenge:

To reinvent a legacy CSR, positioning Exelon as a digital-first company as they transition from a holding company to a recognizable parent brand. They needed a compelling experience to communicate to the communities they serve about their sustainability efforts.

To do it, we would need to take their current 148 page PDF required by law and turn it into something inspirational and emotional, because this was neither:

Issues

• Exelon's audience was not engaging with the PDF in its current state.
  Low page views meant users weren’t finding the material engaging enough to consume. 

• A CSR report can be marketing gold, yet the PDF wasn’t user-friendly.
  Exelon does truly amazing things with and for their communities — yet there was no easy way to share the depth and breadth of their sustainability story and values.

• A need for digital-first principles.
  There was a huge opportunity to make the digital CSR more accessible, shareable and exciting than the more dense and static PDF

• Navigation structure of PDF wasn’t intuitive.
  The audience needed to pore over a large, print-based outline to find the content they needed or were interested in.

The only way to accomplish this ambitious undertaking meant putting aside traditional workflows and staffing models and collaborating as one connected team across Exelon and Rightpoint—slashing through politics, content, and red tape.

No egos. No silos. No “that’s-not-my-job.”

We worked together to establish four pillars of sustainability:

Environment, Innovation, Community, and Equality

—and them tangible through nationwide stories ranging from Exelon’s involvement in Billion Dollar Roundtable, investing more than $1B in women- and minority-owned businesses, to local Special Olympics volunteer efforts.

We brought this to life by focusing on the following design insights:

Make the audience the hero
When people see themselves in the content, they see why they should care, and overall brand affinity improves. We shifted voice and tone from inward-looking legal speak to an external, audience-friendly voice where “you” are the focus.

Hook the audience right away
We used creative storytelling techniques like brief, immersive scene setting to grab the audience’s attention, and hold it. 

Uncover what resonates
We went beyond the source content to uncover additional stories that would be meaningful to the audience. Some of the most interesting stories were found through conversations with Exelon about what excited them most.

Use data in a compelling way
We chose to animate statistics that not only show the depth of Exelon’s impact, but highlight the company’s understanding of how these sustainability issues impact the audience.

Put the audience in control
We employed intuitive way-finding, giving users a choice of ways to engage with the content for a seamless experience flow. 

How we solved it:

• Digital Strategy

• Brand Strategy

• Content Workshops

• Content Strategy & Creation

• Visual Design

Outcomes: