A new Slop University research poster surveys 1,180 households on the similar-homes comparison panel printed on their electricity bill, finding 61.8 per cent recall it and 21.1 per cent able to name the basis on which their comparison group is assembled.
A household survey of 1,180 electricity customers finds the similar-homes panel widely recalled and rarely located
Almost every billed household gets one: a small panel under the amount owing, setting the household’s usage beside similar homes. A research poster released today by the School of Emergent Priorities asked 1,180 of those households who they thought the similar homes were.
Addresses were drawn across dwelling types and tariffs and approached online with a postal reminder, over fourteen weeks. Respondents named the basis of their own comparison group in their own words, and the answers were coded against the retailer’s published rule by coders who could not see which group the household had been assigned to. Just over three in five recalled the panel. Of those who went on to answer, 21.1 per cent named the basis actually in use, a share that varied little between a detached house and a one-bedroom unit.
We can measure whether a message arrived. We are much less practised at asking whether the person who received it could locate themselves in it, and this is the first time the School has put that question to a household rather than to a programme.
— Dr Iben Chikere, Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
The programme that issues the panel reports its engagement in terms of bills carrying it, a figure the researchers note none of this disturbs. “It is a generous thing to send someone a comparison,” said Dr Ingeborg Nwachukwu, Lecturer and Convenor of Capability Sprints. “What we have found is that generosity and legibility travel separately, and that we have been in the habit of reporting only the first.”
The University regards the survey as a useful addition to its growing record of the documents institutions send to households, and welcomes the questions it raises about what a delivered message can be said to have achieved. The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.3nv6wd.