RESIDENTIAL SOLAR
A canvassing crew or a digital campaign converts differently street to street, and most lead-generation budgets have no way to explain why until the money's already spent. Community Intelligence reads that difference at the census-tract level — which neighborhoods respond to a standard mailer or ad, and which ones need a trusted local voice instead.
No other home-improvement purchase depends this much on what the neighbors think. Solar spreads block by block, or it doesn't spread at all.
We exist to bring trust back to the places it's gone missing.
Why Solar Is a Trust Business, Not Just a Media Business
Residential solar converts on peer example more than most home-improvement categories. A household is measurably more likely to go solar once a neighbor already has panels — the industry has known this for years. That's the upside of the pattern. The downside is the same mechanism runs in reverse: one bad experience on a street — a system that underperformed, a contractor who vanished mid-install, a savings number that never materialized — can close off that entire block to every installer that knocks after, for years, regardless of how good the next offer is.
That's also why the sales motion in this category still runs on two tracks that most consumer verticals have moved past: a paid media and digital-ad layer, and a real door-knocking canvassing operation underneath it. Ad spend can put an offer in front of a household. It can't overcome a street's collective memory of getting burned. Only a trusted local voice can do that — and knowing which streets need one, before a crew is dispatched to knock on doors that were never going to open, is exactly the kind of read most lead-gen data can't do.
Why We Built For This Vertical
We're not vertical-agnostic. Solar is decentralized energy production — real economic opportunity distributed household by household instead of routed through a utility's central plant — and that's the same shape of infrastructure RFUTR exists to help land well in places that don't usually get it first. It also happens to be a category that lives or dies on hyperlocal trust. Pinpointing where that trust runs and where it's broken down is a genuine differentiator in this business, and it's the exact thing Community Intelligence (CI) was purpose-built to read.
One Read, Two Channels
CI reads public data — census, health, housing — down to the census tract, roughly a neighborhood, and produces a structural picture of where standard outreach lands and where it doesn't. That single read serves both halves of a solar lead-gen operation:
Tracts where institutional trust runs high enough that a digital ad or a mailer can do the work by itself — the households where budget spent on reach is budget that pays off.
Tracts where a cold knock from an unfamiliar rep will face resistance regardless of pitch quality — the streets where a referral, a local install crew's reputation, or a trusted neighbor has to open the door first.
Finds the tracts where institutional trust is structurally lowest — the places where both a mailer and a cold knock reliably underperform, and where a canvassing crew is better routed elsewhere first.
A structural read of walkability and transit access. It works for ad targeting, and it doubles as a literal canvassing-logistics signal: foot-accessible, walkable blocks are the ones a door-knocking crew can cover efficiently.
Reachability is also the one that surprises people. The instinct is that lower-income neighborhoods are harder to reach and higher-income ones are easier. The data doesn't agree:
Low reachability
High reachability
Higher poverty didn't mean harder to reach here — it was the opposite. A canvassing route built on income assumptions alone would have pointed the wrong direction on both, whether the crew was walking a route or a media buyer was setting a targeting radius.
What's Been Proven
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.
Same underlying read, two very different budgets: where to spend on reach, and where to send a person instead.
Coverage varies by market. Houston, DC, and New Haven are markets where the underlying data already exists. Whether it lines up tract by tract with any specific company's actual service territory is the first, fastest thing a Ground Truth Sprint confirms — not something claimed as already checked for every installer everywhere.
Step one: hand us one territory you're actively working — a canvassing zone, a digital campaign footprint, a new-market expansion.
A 30-day Ground Truth Sprint reads that territory: which tracts convert on a standard channel, which ones need a knock from someone the block already trusts, and where the current spend is landing on the wrong side of that line. No platform commitment, no long-term contract.
If it sharpens where the budget and the crews go on one territory, there's a version that scales across every market you operate in. If not, thirty days is what it costs to find out.