NP Action - Internet Advocacy: Utility Consumers Action Network (NPT Innovation Example)

Internet Advocacy: Utility Consumers Action Network (NPT Innovation Example)

Example of a private, nonprofit consumer watchdog organization that found a cost-effective way to post consumer information while engaging in community-based research gathered through citizen monitoring, collected on a website, and disseminated throughout the state to other citizens, media, and elected officials weekly via a website and through an e-mail list. This approach encourages and facilitates user awareness of energy and utility issues and engagement in campaigns around these issues.

Introduction

UCAN is a private, nonprofit consumer watchdog organization with 38,000 members located primarily in San Diego, California. Since 1983, we have represented consumer interests in electric and telephone utility issues. More recently, we have expanded the scope of our efforts to include cable television, the Internet, and gasoline pricing issues. We accept no direct corporate money, and are supported through membership dues, private grants and attorney fee awards.

UCAN demonstrates a cost-effective way to post consumer information while engaging citizens in community-based research through its Lowest Gasoline Price Website. The site relies upon citizen input to help collect data on gasoline prices throughout the San Diego area.

Background

Approximately two years ago UCAN identified a problem with gasoline pricing in the San Diego area. In a nutshell, we discovered that gasoline in San Diego County was always priced 12-15 cents per gallon higher than in Los Angeles and other nearby areas, despite the fact that there are no significant differences in the cost to supply the product to the county. We initiated a unique way to use the Internet and advanced technologies to educate consumers on the issue, provide market information to enable them to make better choices, mobilize them to action, and advocate for change.

Level of Innovation

We began by working with a local radio and television consumer reporters to publicize the pricing differences and encourage consumers to contact UCAN and report the lowest gas price in their neighborhood. UCAN collected those prices, organized them by community, and posted them on our web site.

We developed web pages that provide updated lists of the lowest gasoline prices by community in the county. Through these web pages we created unique opportunities to educate consumers on the issue, provide pricing information to enable them to make better choices, mobilize them to action, and advocate for change. We also asked visitors to send price updates and prices for additional stations in their community via email.

This information was gathered and disseminated throughout the state to other citizens, media, and elected officials weekly via a website and through an e-mail list. This approach encouraged and facilitated user awareness of energy and utility issues and engagement in campaigns around these issues.

Measures of Success

UCAN's Lowest Gasoline Price Web Site has successfully utilized the Internet and advanced technologies to achieve remarkable results in our community.

The response was tremendous. The site averages about 2500 "hits" per day, and on days in which media publicized the site, the number of visitors skyrocket. Our group of volunteer gas reporters has grown steadily, and has allowed us to expand the number of stations we report to over 300, and to update the prices on a weekly basis. We have definitely established that consumers have a strong interest in the lowest gas prices in their community!

The price information is valuable to news media, who always call to ask us about prices when they do gas-related stories. Additionally, we have used our notoriety to promote UCAN as an organization and the other work we do, through the placement of cross-links to other informational pages on our popular gas pages.

An unexpected development was that the historical data on prices we compiled over the past two years has become valuable to local elected officials, legislators and state and federal investigators, who have taken action to address the pricing disparity we have documented.

The results of this project have been diverse and often surprising. They include:

Providing valuable pricing information for gasoline consumers;
Empowering a group of volunteer gas reporters to be more active in their community;
Encouraging and organizing citizens to speak out and express their feelings about high gas prices to elected officials;
Gathering and presenting empirical evidence of unfair pricing activity, which was successfully used to convince over a dozen local governments to endorse price regulation to combat high prices locally;
Influencing the FTC to find that pricing differences existed between San Diego and Los Angeles, and therefore a merger between Shell and Texaco should be conditioned on the divestiture of stations in San Diego (See 62 Federal Register, December 30, 1997, at 67871, enclosed);
Lobbying for and assisting in investigations on the state and federal levels concerning unfair and anti-competitive pricing policies by the major oil companies in California;
Increasing the visibility and scope of the UCAN organization and the other important work that we do;
The bottom line: average prices have gone down in San Diego since we began reporting them almost two years ago.

Next Steps

We have used the high traffic to these pages to conduct additional advocacy efforts. In addition to organizing our a volunteer price reporters, we used the web site as a focal point for disseminating information on local, state, and federal gasoline pricing investigations and encouraged letter and email writing campaigns and attendance at public hearings.

We used the data as the basis of a white paper documenting pricing practices by community, and submitted this document as testimony in various investigations and hearings on gasoline pricing.

Lessons Learned

Of course, there have been challenges. Our volunteer price reporters sometimes disappear, often around holidays when interest in gas prices is highest. There are "quality control" issues--it is often difficult to maintain the accuracy and reliability of the price data, especially when prices are changing rapidly.

Although the costs to maintain the site are relatively low, the site has no regular source of support, and we remain dedicated to keeping the information on our site accessible for free. Finally, there are still large segments of our population without access to computers, and for those consumers, our price information is essentially unavailable.

However, we maintain that the benefits of our Gasoline Price Project far outweigh the costs. The project provides a working model for similar advocacy and education efforts, and could be easily replicated with any consumer product for which price information is not readily available. We believe that other groups could take our blueprint and create access to valuable consumer information via the Internet!

[This is one of six nonprofit examples recognized by OMB Watch's Nonprofits' Policy and Technology (NPT) Project for effective use of technology in their public policy activities through the 1998 Nonprofit Technology Innovation Awards.]