Consumer Education Programs for Oil and Gas

A board that funds public education eventually asks one question: is anyone thinking differently? Impressions and clicks answer a smaller one: the ads ran and people saw them. A brand lift study goes further, comparing people who saw the ads with people who did not, but it asks about recall and consideration shortly after the ad ran. None of these shows whether a 35 year old paying her own gas bill in Ohio trusts the pipeline under her county road any more than she did a year ago.

We run consumer education programs for oil and gas associations and their education funds, for coalitions, and for operators whose projects need a community's acceptance. Each program starts and ends with a measurement of that larger question.

Rules we work under

• The call to action is to learn more. We never ask anyone to contact a legislator or vote a certain way, so the program fits funding that cannot pay for advocacy.
• Every piece says who paid for it.
• We do not campaign against other sources of energy.
• Your members will catch a wrong figure before the public does, so every number is checked against yours before it runs.
• No crisis communications.

Where the conversation stands now

That is the October 2026 reading of our Energy Perception Index, which puts the same everyday questions about natural gas and pipelines to ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity and scores how each answer leans, where 50 is neutral. The middle score is two camps cancelling out: 35% of answers leaned favorable and 32% unfavorable.

By topic the spread is wider. Asked whether pipelines move fuel more safely than trucks and trains, the answers scored 81.7. Asked about methane leaks, 16.7. The industry wins the practical questions and loses on climate and on living next to the infrastructure.

None of this is a poll. The index measures how answers frame the industry, not what the public believes, which is why every program also carries a survey.

The polls show where the middle sits. In Gallup's March 2026 survey, 42% of Americans wanted the country to put more emphasis on producing natural gas, down from 65% in 2013. Another 35% wanted the same emphasis as now. That 35% is the middle a program is built to move.

Where the answers come from

Six in ten American adults say they read the AI summaries at the top of search results, according to a Pew Research Center survey from February 2026. What those answers cite is not what ranks.

Social and video sites hold 36% of Google's first page for these topics and supply 3% of the sources cited in AI answers. Industry and trade groups go the other way, 19% of the first page and 26% of the citations, which is why an association's own explainers can change what an assistant says.

The explainers and the video are two jobs, not one.

A program year

A baseline first

In the first two months we score the AI answers and Google results for the questions your audience asks, and field a short opinion survey in the states you target. Nothing is published until you know where you start.

The survey asks about the beliefs the stories will target and a few they will not touch. The FDA's Real Cost youth campaign was judged the same way: agreement with the beliefs its ads targeted rose about 10% in relative terms, and the beliefs it left alone did not move (American Journal of Health Promotion, 2018). If the untouched beliefs move as much as the targeted ones, something other than the program moved them.

One story a month

A named person in a real place, explaining their own work: the technician who walks a right of way every week, the engineer who finds methane leaks with an infrared camera. Each story is shot once and cut into short video for the platforms your audience uses. The people on camera work in the industry. Lifestyle influencers read as paid, because they are.

The format has a record outside energy. A University of Massachusetts study followed 1,491 adult smokers for two years and found that ads built on personal stories or strong emotion were the ones that moved quitting: each 10 more exposures made a smoker's odds of having quit 1.14 times as high (American Journal of Public Health, 2009).

Finding people who can explain their work on camera is most of the job. Matt Bertram and Mark LaCour have done it across more than 100 episodes of Oil and Gas Sales and Marketing, the show they have co-hosted on the Oil & Gas Global Network since 2018.

Explainers on your own site

Plain language pages written so AI assistants can cite them, in the order the baseline sets. If methane is where the answers turn against you, methane comes first.

The explainers carry the numbers and the stories carry the people, because the two persuade differently. A 2015 meta-analysis in Health Communication found that statistics changed beliefs and attitudes more than stories did, and stories did more for intention.

The podcast you already have

If you run a show, we work on its distribution and its clips before anyone suggests a new one.

Policymakers, with no ask attached

The same stories, placed where state regulators and lawmakers will see them. It stays education: nobody is asked to vote or to call.

A monthly read

The same questions are scored again each month, beside the impressions and engagement you already track. When the board asks whether anyone thinks differently, you can show which answers moved and which of your own pages the assistants began to cite, instead of one more chart of how many people scrolled past an ad. At the end of the year the survey runs again in the same states.

Expect a modest number. Across published health campaigns, the average one changed behavior in its community by about 5 percentage points (Snyder, 2007). A year will not turn a hostile audience. It can move the middle, and you will know whether it did.

What the budget pays for

Every proposal prices four lines separately, and you hold what each one buys.