The focus of the project was to gain a better understanding of how to set up and roll out energy communities and energy efficiency services. The project built on the knowledge and work within the EU Bridge initiative, ETIP SNET, and others. To successfully deliver this project, the consortium included a complementary group of experts in social science, policy and regulation, implementation, energy aggregation, and energy service development.

The project focused on three levels of Energy Communities:

• Those that already existed at the start of the project and were included in the work plan.
• Those that were initiated throughout the project.
• Those that were not directly partnered in the project but benefited from the exchange and expertise of DECIDE.

Together, they provided a set of complementary and geographically diverse cases, covering social housing as well as middle-class and upper-class neighborhoods in pilot projects based in Austria, Belgium, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, and the Netherlands.

The pilots delivered the necessary cases for a well-founded outreach strategy built on an extensive social science basis. The project worked on identifying which types of individuals and groups required specific communication and interaction strategies to be motivated to join—i.e., stakeholder segmentation to maximize engagement through targeted actions and prioritization within stakeholder groups. Different methods were tested and evaluated with the identified groups, including techniques such as intergenerational learning.