What I’ve Done

January 2023 through September 2024

The principal charge of the JEA digital communications team has been to make it easier for customers to do business with the utility, Florida’s largest municipal provider of electric and water services. This has led to a laser focus on promoting digital self-service channels to simplify critical customer functions such as viewing and paying bills, reporting outages, and configuring account-related smartphone alerts.

Based on research from J.D. Power indicating utility customers’ strong preference for mobile apps as the point of engagement with their utilities, I led a collaboration, as the product and business owner, between the digital communications team, our in-house technology services development peers, and longtime payment processing and outage management vendor KUBRA to develop and market JEA’s first-ever smartphone app, My JEA.

The mobile app would join jea.com as a durable digital platform for customers to engage with the utility in standard transactions that did not require direct human intervention, such as through the contact center. It leveraged existing web services so customer logins would remain the same as for the website, ensuring a frictionless onboarding approach.

This capital project focused on technical development and precise UX wireframe development and review, applying JEA’s UI branding and brand voice in copy to the white-label solution, a rigorous refinement period, UAT and small-group beta testing, and a soft rollout in September 2024. Tens of thousands of customers enrolled by the end of 2024 as part of this controlled rollout, which expanded in scope and frequency of mention via digital media and brand advertising platforms beginning in spring 2025.

Today, My JEA has garnered an average 4.9 rating from a combined 7,960 reviewers via Apple App Store and Google Play. The app, as part of JEA’s digital communication channels, helped the utility garner a No. 2 ranking among South Region U.S. peer utilities in the J.D. Power Utility Digital Engagement Survey for 2025.

More than these numbers suggest, My JEA also provided customers with a streamlined interface to do business their way, increasing digital self-service options and improving operational efficiencies related to customer revenue and outage reporting. My JEA is available today for Apple and Android smartphones. Learn more at jea.com/app.

October 2020 through January 2021

After weathering significant reputational storms in 2019 and 2020 that saw the departure of JEA’s CEO, senior leadership team and board of directors following a corporate scandal, the utility focused brand marketing efforts on restoring trust among customers and humanizing the JEA brand to make it more approachable and aligned with customers’ needs and interests.

As part of our 2021 brand marketing and customer educational campaign, my digital communications team collaborated with the content and brand team and the Jacksonville-based St. John creative agency to develop an engaging microsite that would highlight significant customer programs and tips on how to do business with JEA, and how customers could benefit from these activities.

The graphically rich experience featured contextual environments – home, business, and community – with Easter eggs featuring information on ways to save, specialized programs, and multimedia content.

After its rollout in January 2021, the team added a “gray sky” toggle that automatically presented a secondary overlay during hurricane season, focused solely on storm preparation and power restoration guidance.

The microsite proved to be an innovative, interactive tool to help customers learn more about their utility and how to save money, save time, and prepare for severe weather with confidence. Its launch began a multiyear effort to restore trust in JEA, as proven through biannual brand tracking surveys that gauged significant increases in brand affinity following these leadership challenges. Visit the site at DoMoreWithJEA.com.