Home Energy Adventure

Touchstone Energy Cooperatives is a federation of over 750 locally owned electric cooperatives across 46 states, serving more than 30 million member-owners. As a national brand, it provides resources, communications, and programs that help its member co-ops deepen engagement with consumers and promote energy efficiency. One of their signature consumer outreach programs is Home Energy Adventure: an interactive educational experience designed to help users assess how energy efficient their homes are, and to learn how to improve their environmental footprint and cost savings.

Project scope and goals

The scope of this project centered on automating energy assessment workflows for co-op clients and administrators by allowing them to upload questionnaire data via simple CSV/Excel spreadsheets. The system was designed to automatically parse and transform this data within WordPress, structuring it into content types and Q&A logic. This structured content then powered an interactive, multi-step frontend experience that guides end users through a series of questions about their home’s energy use. The core value of the tool was to compute an energy efficiency score or rating based on these inputs, presenting users with tailored advice and serving as an educational resource for energy conservation. Notably, this project was built in 2017, where we were proud early adopters of using Redux for state management in React, demonstrating how to reliably coordinate complex multi-step user state, conditional flows, and data-driven interactions.

Technical architecture and implementation highlights

The application was built using a hybrid architecture, featuring a dedicated React + Redux frontend (implemented with TypeScript or modern JavaScript) for a compiled, multi-step user experience, backed by a custom WordPress plugin. This plugin was designed to automatically parse uploaded CSV/Excel questionnaires, interpreting the full schema (questions, scoring rules, etc.) and transforming it into structured content types and meta fields, with an Admin UI available in WordPress to edit or override the core logic. On the frontend, Redux managed the complex state logic, holding user answers, deriving results, executing conditional logic (branching/skipping questions), and computing the final energy efficiency score via integrated logic modules that weight responses and map thresholds to recommendation templates. The UI was intentionally guided and step-by-step, featuring clear progress tracking, inline help, tooltips, and visual feedback, with meticulous attention paid to edge cases like users skipping questions, going back to change answers, and ensuring the accurate recalculation of all downstream implications.

Key outcomes

This project enabled Touchstone Energy co-ops to deliver an engaging consumer education tool that flexibly adapts to different questionnaire sets without requiring engineering changes. It also served as a demonstration of advanced architecture for its time (2017), leveraging Redux for declarative state management in React to reliably support conditional, multi-step forms at scale. This architecture successfully proved how content-driven applications can be powered through a hybrid CMS + headless/plugin integration, which significantly enhances the flexibility for content updates, co-op brand customization, and future platform expansion.