CRA | Energy

Energy & Manufacturing

Branding | Public Education & Outreach | Coalition Building | Paid Advertising | Website Creation | Traditional & Digital Media | Video | Social Monitoring & Engagement

Experienced Communications Professionals

Since 1974, CRA has successfully led communications campaigns for some of the most complex energy, transportation, infrastructure, industry, utility and funding issues facing our region. Specifically, our Energy and Manufacturing Practice Group has extensive experience in helping clients move projects forward even in times of intense public and regulatory pressures.

Brand/Creative Strategy

Strategy is at the core of what we do. Our creative team builds on that strategy with eye-catching, consistent and engaging materials. From simple handouts to email templates, social graphics or community displays, we know how to use our creative tactics to meet your project goals.

Public Issues

Our Energy and Manufacturing Practice Group can create and implement a public issues plan to effectively keep the public informed and effect change. This includes identifying and targeting audiences through digital as well as traditional communications.

Messaging/Content Development

Audiences have to be able to quickly understand how a project will benefit them, so we create clear, concise and compelling content to be used consistently through all aspects of a campaign, inspiring action and producing results.

Website Development

From full websites to project- or issue-specific landing pages, our designers and developers work to provide effective digital solutions. In addition, we can integrate tools to build and effectively communicate with a database of project audiences.

Media/Stakeholder Relations

To keep the general public informed, you must communicate effectively with the media and project stakeholders. From media tours to stakeholder groups and public meetings, we can help manage these key relationships and keep all audiences engaged.

Spokesperson Training

To ensure your team is prepared to talk with the media, elected officials, community leaders and the public at large, we can host spokesperson and/or public meeting trainings. These sessions ensure your team is ready to take on any type of project conversation or communication.

Media Buying

We know how to reach each of your target audiences through paid media—digital, print, radio and television. Our plans are smart and will efficiently utilize your project budget. We also have great experience targeting audiences by specific behaviors, geographies and more.

Social Media Management

With social media, every audience member has a platform to discuss your project. You must be involved in that conversation. We help connect with your audiences by developing social strategies, writing content, and engaging and responding to the conversation effectively.

Video Production

Video is one of the best ways to engage with audiences. Our in-house CRA Film team produces authentic, compelling videos to tell our clients’ stories. From interview-based and/or animated short vignettes to longer form instructional or documentary-style videos, we have you covered.

Energy is part of our DNA

The energy industry has been at the core of CRA's business since our beginning. Our second client ever was an oil and natural gas company, and we've managed the communications for dozens of energy projects and campaigns for more than four decades.

Decades of working with energy clients has given us a unique perspective on the industry. While technology continues to change the way the industry communicates with audiences - the need for brands to tell their stories remains consistent. Whether we are communicating about a new and much-needed infrastructure project or the ways in which consumers can save energy and lower their utility bills, we know how to reach the right audiences with the right messages to get them to act.

CRA's unique skills

Strategy shaped by experience to confidently confront challenging or controversial issues
In-house video production to tell your story in the way that engages audiences most
Media and digital optimization to reach the right audiences to produce results
Experience in and understanding of the many aspects of the energy industry, from infrastructure and need, to efficiency, to safety and environmental protection

Industry challenges

The energy industry faces a rapidly changing landscape. New regulations and new public interests are changing the ways we generate, manage and transmit power. Concerns over climate change have resulted in a desire to explore more renewable sources. And continually changing technology creates new opportunities, but also new challenges. Even with all of this evolution and upheaval, the industry must stay focused on one unchanging goal—meeting the energy demands of customers each and every day.

Likewise, the way energy brands communicate with their customers has changed significantly over the years we’ve been in business. Companies can no longer have a one-way presentation of their stories through traditional media. With digital communications as the great equalizer, brands have to engage in public conversation with their customers in a way unlike anything they’ve been accustomed to in the past. With social media, opponents now have an equal opportunity to amplify their voices to a local, regional or even national audience.

But CRA has taken new channels provided by the internet and social media and applied our decades of industry experience to meet the challenges of telling the stories of energy brands today.

Industry projects

Our team members have worked closely with utility, manufacturing and other energy-based companies and representatives on a wide variety of projects.

New infrastructure

Transparency is key. CRA has helped clients engage the public surrounding some of the most scrutinized infrastructure projects in our region—and emerged with positive results. These campaigns encompass everything from brand creation to full communications campaigns.

Energy efficiency programs

Customers are motivated by their bottom line. We’ve managed the communications for utility energy efficiency programs including creating and implementing education and outreach plans focused on helping residential and business customers save.

Digital communications

You have to tell your story or someone else will. By reaching and engaging the appropriate audiences through social and email campaigns and digital advertising, we have steered the conversation for mergers, infrastructure projects, and more. We are also adept at reputation management and improvement, using initial messaging as well as monitoring and responding to social comments.

New market/product introduction

Communities must see the benefit. We’re familiar with educating the public about those benefits across many platforms, often answering their questions before they ask them.