ELECTRIC

A rural electric cooperative is member-owned by charter — that doesn't close the gap between who qualifies for bill-assistance and weatherization programs and who enrolls. Community Intelligence reads, tract by tract, where a co-op's outreach lands and where it doesn't, before an enrollment period closes with eligible members never found.

The Members a Co-op's Outreach Doesn't Find — Community Intelligence for Rural Electric Cooperatives
Community Intelligence  ·  RFUTR × PathSight × Cohera

A cooperative is member-owned by charter. That doesn't mean every member who qualifies for help gets found.

A tract-level read on where bill-assistance and weatherization outreach is landing across a co-op's service territory — and where it isn't.

We exist to bring trust back to the places it's gone missing.

The Reach Gap

Rural electric cooperatives carry a structural advantage most utilities don't have: a member-ownership model built on local relationships, not a distant shareholder base. That advantage doesn't automatically close the gap between who qualifies for bill-assistance and weatherization programs (LIHEAP, WAP) and who enrolls. Even in a co-op's own service territory, a mailer or a bill insert reaches some communities cleanly and never lands in others — and most co-ops have no way to tell which is which before the outreach budget is already spent.

Community Intelligence (CI) is a trust-mapping instrument built for exactly that distinction. It reads public data — census, health, housing — down to the census tract, roughly a neighborhood, and produces a structural picture of which places respond to a standard institutional channel and which ones only move through a messenger the community already trusts.

What CI Reads

Floor Identification

Finds the tracts where institutional trust is structurally lowest — the places a standard mailer, bill insert, or call script reliably underperforms, regardless of program design.

Tested: Election Day Test, 3 of 4 sealed predictions held.
Reachability

A structural read of physical and channel access — walkability and transit — that correlates with poverty in ways that cut against assumption about which members are easy to reach.

Validated correlation against poverty.

The instinct is that lower-income territory is harder to reach and higher-income territory is easier. The data doesn't agree:

Center Street Marketplace
20.9% poverty
Low reachability
vs.
Hillside
49.4% poverty
High reachability

Higher poverty didn't mean harder to reach here — it was the opposite. An outreach plan built on income assumptions alone would have pointed the wrong direction on both.

What's Been Proven

28.5 pts
Houston, institutional gap
Institutions estimate 25% resident trust; CI reads 53.5%
3 of 4
Election Day Test
Sealed predictions, Wisconsin primary — floor identification held

The prediction that didn't hold is part of the proof, not a footnote left out: the instrument reliably finds the floor — the places standard channels won't reach — but it doesn't reliably rank places along a gradient. That's why the product is floor identification, not a ranking.

Two instruments, one underwriting question for member-assistance programs: where does the co-op's current outreach land, and where does it need a different messenger — a trusted local voice instead of a bill insert — to close the enrollment gap.

Stated plainly

Coverage varies by market. Whether the specific tracts inside a given cooperative's service territory are already read, or would need to be added, is the first, fastest thing a Ground Truth Sprint establishes — not something claimed as already done here.

The First Move

Step one: identify one member-assistance program currently under-enrolling relative to eligibility — LIHEAP, WAP, or another effort in the co-op's territory.

A 30-day Ground Truth Sprint reads that one program's territory: which tracts convert on the co-op's standard outreach, and which ones need a different messenger. No platform commitment, no long-term contract.

If it sharpens where outreach dollars go on one program, there's a version that scales across the territory. If not, thirty days is what it costs to find out.

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RESIDENTIAL SOLAR