Reimagining How Utilities Communicate With Their Customers
It is difficult for residents to know if their water is safe to drink.
In the past year, there’s been an ongoing conversation around updating the Consumer Confidence Report (CCR) - the annual report required by all water utilities to communicate on water quality data and information to their customers. The current CCR is a 20-year-old mandate by the US EPA under the Safe Drinking Water Act.
EPIC has been a part of a nationwide push to update and enhance these reports not only to ensure clearer communications with water consumers but ultimately to ensure more Americans know what’s in their water. The long-term goal is to build greater public trust in our water supplies.
In 2020, EPIC launched our first Water Data Prize competition aimed at improving and reimagining CCRs. More than 30 entries were submitted from consultants, water agencies, data scientists, and others, and EPIC awarded $15,000 to five stellar entries. We hosted a workshop with more than 75 participants from diverse water disciplines to solicit more ideas and input on how to turn these ideas into action.
We facilitated the creation of a free, more understandable template about water quality information.
Building on this competition and with support from AWWA, EPIC focused on creating real tools that water utilities can use to communicate annual water quality data. Thanks to the communications and design team at Raftelis who assisted with this effort, along with an esteemed committee of reviewers from utilities, nonprofits, and the regulatory community, the end result is the creation of two templates in Microsoft Word and Square Space that we hope more utilities can now more easily adopt.
Our intent is that these two templates - along with an instruction manual - can help public water systems create a CCR that’s clearer, more engaging, and more accessible to broader audiences. While there are still language requirements mandated by existing federal regulations, these templates offer water systems an easy, plug-and-play way to build a CCR that looks good and enhances consumer understanding of water quality.
But this is just the beginning. We hope that others - especially water utilities - look at these templates, review the instruction manual, and see if they achieve what we set out to do. Try them out and send us your feedback to Matt at Raftelis or Sion at EPIC. We will use all the feedback we receive to revise and improve the templates further.