Hardship support, designed with customers

Yarra Valley Water serves over 1.9 million people across Melbourne's north and east. Like all utilities, they work with customers experiencing financial hardship, and they wanted to communicate with those customers in ways that were inclusive and non-patronising, without overstepping. The question was how to talk about support so that the people who needed it would actually use it.

Rather than relying on internal assumptions about what would resonate, the project used co-design to put affected customers at the centre of the messaging development. I planned and facilitated a series of small sessions, up to two customers at a time and around 20 people in all, working alongside YVW stakeholders.

Each session used the bill itself as the exercise. Participants moved page elements around in Miro, prioritised the information that mattered to them, and worked through the language being used. The words people chose became the raw material for the messaging, so the research fed the output directly.

The sessions produced a messaging matrix for communicating with different groups of customers: people experiencing hardship for the first time, many as a result of COVID, and people in ongoing hardship whose circumstances meant paying bills had always been difficult. For each group, the matrix set out the words, the tone and the method of messaging to use.

94% of customers who accessed support services agreed that Yarra Valley Water had "helped them with their bills". A direct measure of whether the messaging was doing its job.