Activating Public Support for Clean Energy in Texas – October 2025

Welcome to our second edition of the Clean Energy & IRA Hub Insights Report for 2025. Insights reports provide an in-depth look at the latest case studies and messaging and storytelling projects to educate and persuade the public on the benefits of clean and renewable energy for all.

This report is authored by: KyungSun Lee, Senior Program Manager, Climate Advocacy Lab based on an interview & input from Julia Tillmon, Senior Account Manager, Digital Advance

Background 

Texas is a state for advocates to watch: it’s leading the country’s wind, solar, and battery storage energy, but it’s also a massive field for organizing, with just over 31 million residents and 181 legislators. We recently spoke with Digital Advance, a strategic communications firm specializing in public affairs, public opinion, and digital communications, on how they led a successful, coordinated effort to activate bipartisan public support to advance clean energy in the face of opposition from the oil and gas industry.

For Texas’s 2025 legislative session, Digital Advance brought together a group of moderate industry groups and a climate group, Environment Texas. Together, they successfully shut down a crop of three bills that would have attached difficult permitting regulations and costly fees for renewables. They also successfully passed a pro-clean energy bill, SB1202, that will now speed up the permitting process for residential rooftop solar and battery storage.

Their campaign provides insights for advocates on identifying and investing in top performing messages, expanding our coalitions, and experimenting new ways to activate public support. 

Gearing Up for Legislative Battle

Digital Advance has been a committed partner in advancing clean energy in Texas, with Julia Tillmon at the helm, allowing them to iterate and strengthen their digital strategies year after year. Each year, Julia and her team use two strategies to best prepare for upcoming legislative battles:

1. Researching the online landscape to understand who’s dominating the conversation, what topics are getting the most traction, and what mis- and dis- information exists. Despite the prevalence and popularity of renewables, clean energy advocates still face pushback from some Republican lawmakers and continued attacks from the opposition. This year, their team saw an increase in coordinated attacks.
    
2. Message testing: in between legislative sessions, Julia and her team also ran message tests on emerging themes such as energy reliability or affordability to understand how they can best use their money to activate supporters and to persuade legislators at the start of this year’s legislative session.

Ingredients for their Effective Digital Organizing Program

Hyper-targeting Audiences

In a state as big as Texas, it’s important to narrow down who the best target audiences are: those who will effectively take the action you need while also being cost-effective and time-efficient. Digital Advance and Environment Texas’s task was to identify the most effective audiences who could send letters urging Democratic legislators and the Governor to stop the bad bills and to pass SB1202. They knew at the onset that the average supporter of climate and clean energy issue was burnt out having to take another action. They therefore decided to test out a newer action platform for highly engaged audiences called Civic Shout, which allowed them to narrow down their target list further, by identifying “super advocates” who are most likely to take action.  

Once they posted their petition, they generated 20,813 impressions and 3,063 petition signatures–exceeding their expectations. As legislator support piled in, Julia and her team closed petitions targeting those specific legislators, so that they could then concentrate their efforts and dollars on the remaining support they needed. In total, they spent about $4 per letter, making it a cost-effective platform for them compared to their past efforts on Facebook or Meta, which cost 4-5x this amount. 

Deploying Conservative & Progressive Messaging

Julia and her team used the information they gathered prior to the legislative session to build a messaging strategy for both conservative and progressive audiences, while also testing their messages in real-time.

Overall, they found the top messaging themes were: grid reliability and affordability, energy demand growth, Texas being a solar leader, and total economic value created from renewables.

The moderate industry groups incorporated these themes into their messages to stop the anti-renewable bills, emphasizing the total cost (affordability) for Texans and the lack of reliability by making renewables more expensive and difficult to come online.

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Environment Texas incorporated the top performing themes by underscoring the need to increase energy choices and making clean energy implementation easier for their supporters. The petition below, alone generated 48% click-through-rate, with 12,349 impressions.

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In addition to the petitions to reach progressive-leaning audiences on Civic Shout, Digital Advance targeted legislators. They used Meta and the display network (display video and connected TV) to create an echo chamber of their messages for legislators in their own districts. They also used the top performing message themes to create one pagers for every Texas district, highlighting the local economic impacts (total number of jobs, money generated, etc.) to distribute to legislators at an organized Lobby Day. 

Key Findings & Takeaways

• Collaboration is key. The value of Digital Advance, Environment Texas, and their moderate industry group partners were clear: by working together, they were able to split up the task of reaching different audiences and being the best messengers for their targeted audiences.
   
• Message testing gives you insights to experiment throughout your campaign. We at the Lab have also found this to be true: message testing to your targeted audiences gives you the initial insights to test your assumptions and strengthen your messaging. Digital Advance led the message tests for their group before and during the legislative session, allowing them to identify and invest in the top performing messages by the time the session started.
   
• Don’t rely on organic views. You have to spend to get your messages seen online. In the current social media landscape, Julia shares that even the best graphics don’t get seen online if you rely on organic views. Having even a simple graphic with ad dollars behind it will have a significantly better chance of getting seen.
   
• Experiment with different platforms to find your target audiences. Meta (Facebook) and LinkedIn may also not always give you the best bang for your buck for calls to action like petitions. Instead, Digital Advance and their partners found it was more effective to experiment on an affordable platform that had a narrowed list of highly engaged audiences to reach their goals. 

Resources 

• Read more about the bipartisan success to pass SB1202 and shut down the anti-renewable bills from Environment Texas
   
• Hear Julia talk more about her bipartisan campaign efforts at our July Clean Energy Deep Dive recording