Since 2006, German energy service provider Meistro ENERGIE has been supplying climate-neutral energy (electricity & natural gas) to more than 7,000 companies and customers. In this case study, we take a look at how Meistro ENERGIE built the first online community for energy specialists and people in the energy industry to connect and collaborate.
The Challenge
On wattislos.com, Meistro Energie presents energy projects as best cases and ensure an exchange of experience between energy customers and energy specialists. Meistro specifically didn’t set it up as a “Meistro” community. Christian Dau, Manager of Digital Business explains: “We are exclusively the operator. The content is neutral. The aim of wattislos.com is to bring together all those interested people in the energy market on an online platform. We want to inform and encourage users to help each other with energetic problems and questions.”
Finding the Right Platform
The communities that Meistro built via social media, and through membership with other well-known platforms. But, those proved to be inadequate for what Meistro needed. Christian continues: “We wanted to have closer proximity to our customers. The first aim was to have stories about our customers and exchange experience between customers.”
Customization
Deciding what was going to be their main community building platform was not an easy task. There were many factors that the Meistro team needed to consider. For instance, the team wanted “a community where we could customize it so members would feel familiar with it”.
However, a fully customized community platform would have been too expensive. As a communication tool, the platform was not likely to be generating income to be able to sustain itself. And there were also additional features that the team wanted. “We wanted a public community where you could interact a lot without sign-in at once. We also wanted to integrate a webshop and be able to add video content.”
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The Solution
The look and design features of CMNTY Platform captured the team’s interest. With a simple and easy to use UI and backend, CMNTY further stood out as the first choice. “The user interface is very user-friendly. It’s easy to find your way around.”
Support
The Meistro team were also impressed by CMNTY’s support team as, “requests are responded to quickly, holistic solutions are shown. Even technical questions that the support could not solve in the first step were dealt with quickly by CMNTY’s technical department”. CMNTY platform’s White Label and gamification systems were an added bonus for Meistro’s community building initiative.
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The Results
1. Quick to Build — The Meistro team discovered the ease with which they could build their community using CMNTY platform. “It’s really simple, easy.”
2. Customized User Experience — The white label and custom CSS features proved to be monumental in creating a customized look and feel for Meistro’s community site.
3. Increased Engagement — Meistro’s team were able to customize the content and its display based on specific user groups, and that allowed members to engage with content that was relevant to them. Furthermore, the team was able to build interactions from stories and questions posted on the main blog and forum hosted on CMNTY platform.
4. Improved Search Engine Optimization (SEO) — The forum was also proving to be beneficial in terms of SEO. User-generated questions on the site was a bolster to Meistro’s overall SEO efforts. Curious users with questions about the trends of the energy market opened up a discussion channel within the community. The community then, in turn, interacted with the user to provide the relevant information and answers. Such discussions also had the potential to branch out into further topics concerning the energy market. This gave Meistro valuable data on what piques the interest of energy market communities.
5. Making It Easier for Strategic Partners to Produce & Share Content — Partners of Meistro were not to be left out. The aim here, according to Christian was for their partners to “not have a lot of work with the community”. For this, they’d provide editing and film team support to their partners. In turn, their partners created great, relevant content which keeps the community engaged with minimal effort on their end.
Energy Community Mission Accomplished
By building a community platform Meistro was able to gain valuable insights on what engages individuals and stakeholders in the energy market. Through the exchange of experiences, stories, and discussions about the energy market, Meistro has been able to build a thriving community.
Valuable Insights
Their community continues to provide valuable insights for Meistro’s team, as well as community members. Together, they are able to collaborate and share timely updates into the workings, trends and changing needs of the energy market.
