Public Awareness and Communication Plan (Draft) for Municipal Heating Reform Project

The project's central goal is to promote energy conservation and behavior change among consumers, with a focus on condominium owners and the general public. The project's public awareness and communication plan is a cross-cutting tool to support all its major activities. The plan identifies two core messages to be communicated to stakeholders: the opportunity and responsibility to control their own energy costs and comfort in their dwellings, and the potential threat to that opportunity due to Ukraine's dependence on foreign energy imports. The National Campaign will consist of three stages: education, preparation for heat controls, and promoting replication. The education stage will create awareness of the need for energy conservation and demonstrate international experience in this field. The preparation stage will provide practical information on the cost-benefits of energy conservation practices and individual heat control installations. The promoting replication stage will evaluate results and share success stories to promote the replication of these practices throughout Ukraine. To better ground the information campaign, the project will conduct focus groups in five pilot cities, design heating reform questions to be attached to the standard national survey, continue media monitoring throughout the project, and publish before-and-after success stories. The project's communications objectives include behavior change that supports energy conservation, significantly increasing the numbers of condominium owners who embrace responsibility for heat conservation, promoting condominiums as agents of change for municipal heating reform, establishing energy-efficient schools as vehicles for conservation education, and promoting the benefits of proposed legislative changes and measures being implemented to provide a social safety net. The target audiences in this Communication Plan fall into two major categories: internal USAID communications and external stakeholders, including condominium owners, the general public, public authorities, and private sector leaders. The project will use a range of communication tools and strategies to engage stakeholders, enhance knowledge, identify solutions, raise awareness, and enlist civic, government, and other influential figures as advocates to achieve project goals. The launch of the MHR Information Campaign is scheduled to take place in the fall, prior to the beginning of the heating season in Ukraine.