The CCR — Transforming a Mandate Into a Masterpiece

Everyone has to do it. Few talk about it. It's one of those things you do the same way you did it last year, the year before, and the year before. Open last year's CCR, update the figures, send to your subject matter experts for a quality check and it's off to the printer and mail house. Your job is done, and you've complied with EPA Regulations. A couple weeks later, a customer opens their mailbox to find an oftentimes visually bland and unappealing letter from their water provider. If U.S. Postal Service statistics are correct, it's competing with nearly 500 other marketing pieces and catalogs that customer will get that year. If they even open it — and that's a big if — they'll notice from the first sentence that the language is overly technical, uses confusing industry jargon, and reads like a legal document. If you're lucky, they might scan the dense tables of figures, still without absorbing a single concept, and then give up. The next stop is the recycling bin. Utilities can do better. Many years ago, Charlotte Water's Public Affairs Division recognized that their CCR provided a rare opportunity to communicate with customers, enhance their brand, build relationships, and make human connections. Their annual Water Quality Report (WQR) was born. In 2021, Charlotte Water partnered with Raftelis to create a WQR that stands out among its competitors in the mailbox. Their piece focuses on two key factors that influence whether the report gets read or quickly recycled: design and accessibility. It's these same two factors that Raftelis focused on to create the winning entry to the Environmental Policy Innovation Center's Water Data Prize Competition last year. Both Charlotte Water and the Raftelis team saw the CCR not for what it is, but for the opportunity it delivers — a rare and critical moment to connect customers to the one thing they can't go without. This session will provide participants with ideas, insights, and guidance that can be scaled for use by the smallest utility with minimal resources to the largest utilities with maximum resources. Attendees will come away with a fresh eye on the old CCR, and the inspiration to turn this mandated report into a masterpiece.