Bentley University
EN-5: Outreach Campaign

This is a month-long competition among all residence halls to reduce energy consumption compared to their building's own baseline. The baseline is calculated as a weekly average based on each building's electricity usage in the month prior to the Challenge. For instance, the baseline for October's Blackout Challenge is calculated as an average of two weeks of September's usage. While efficiency upgrades reduce energy consumption in one building without any effort on the students' part, we control for these differences in infrastructure by comparing the reductions to the building's own baseline in the same year. The baseline calculation also allows us to control for the number of occupants or the percentage occupancy in each building, since electricity is not compared on a per-capita basis or as a percentage of the campus's total usage.

The main goal of the Blackout Challenge is to create behavioral change once students appreciate how their activities are affecting their building's energy consumption. For example, leaving your TV on, your laptop and cell phone chargers plugged in, and your A/C on with moderate weather all waste energy unnecessarily. Our hope is that the Blackout Challenge gets students thinking about reasonable usage by getting into the habit of turning lights & electronics off when they are not in use, opening windows instead of turning on HVAC units, etc. Additionally, the savings from reducing energy consumption go back to students through annual building renovations and improvements.

The Office of Sustainability partnered with an outside consultant to create a PR campaign for Sustainability entitled "Sustainability is Everyone's business". This campaign launched in the fall of 2016 with the goals of (1) raising general awareness of Bentley's sustainability efforts (2) engaging the campus population in Bentley's 2020 sustainability goals, and (3) communicating that sustainability is a part of everyone's lives, education and career every day.

The campaign used posters, social media, email communication and events to educate the campus community on the triple-bottom line and present sustainable living/working/careers as a social norm. Focus groups were used before the campaign was launched to measure sustainability understanding in the campus population and will be used at the conclusion of the campaign to measure effectiveness.