The Client
San Jose Water (SJW) is an investor-owned public utility that provides clean, reliable drinking water to more than a million people in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley. For over 150 years, SJW has dependably served the region and grown into one of the largest and most technologically sophisticated urban water systems in the United States.
For years, Sterling and SJW have partnered on just about every facet of SJW’s communications program: media relations, thought leadership, customer engagement, and even digital marketing. Along the way, we’ve seen how the best results are generated from consistent work, feedback, and refinement. What unfolded wasn’t just an award-winning PR and marketing program, but a long-term commitment to owning the story, not chasing it, while earning community trust. This retrospective pulls back the curtain on how a century-old water utility strengthened its credibility in a rapidly changing world.
The Challenge
Before enlisting Sterling Communications, SJW’s reputation was suffering. A combination of factors — severe drought conditions, a difficult economic environment, and confused or uninformed customers — created a scenario that led to persistent negative media sentiment and unhappy ratepayers. The company routinely was cast in a less than favorable light due to a public perception that it was wantonly increasing rates and not proactively communicating with its customers. Despite the fact that much of SJW’s rates are set by a state-controlled regulatory body and that it has always strived to be a customer-first organization, SJW knew it needed to turn its public reputation around.
San Jose Water’s Customer Advisory Council Meeting, October 2025
SJW partnered with Sterling Communications to embark on a campaign to shift its brand perception and recultivate trust through transparency with its customers. After an initial meeting to align on expectations and desired outcomes with the SJW team, Sterling identified three main goals that would constitute success:
- Refresh its messaging to highlight SJW’s responsible stewardship service model and prevent misunderstanding of how company decisions are made.
- Garner more balanced media coverage, highlight staff dedication and expertise, and elevate its position as a principled leader in public water utility operation and management.
- Increase proactive customer outreach, education, and engagement efforts through new channels.
The Strategy
Sterling leans on San Jose Water’s deep bench of experts to gather knowledge, pen and place bylined articles in local, trade and tech publications.
Sterling conducted a market audit to identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities as part of its onboarding process. A key objective was to identify additional marketing channels that could dramatically grow customer interaction, and do so cost effectively. From the audit, Sterling identified email marketing communications as a top opportunity, given email’s ability to reach a large audience at a minimal cost and overhead. Unfortunately, SJW did not have an existing customer marketing email list. However, SJW collected email addresses from its popular online bill payment services and ongoing customer service activities. Sterling flagged two challenges with the emails: First, since customer service didn’t need to send emails to the entire list, it wasn’t clear that the emails on its list were current. Second, customers never opted-in to marketing communications, raising concerns about compliance with the US CAN-SPAM Act. As a result, Sterling recommended an opt-in re-engagement campaign to qualify the list, remove invalid emails, and ensure compliance.
Additionally, Sterling identified an opportunity to create what is now known as the San Jose Water Customer Advisory Council (CAC). The original goal of the CAC was to seek regular community input, align communications effectively, and enhance customer understanding of the context and considerations that go into key SJW decisions. With such a large, diverse service area, it is quite difficult to gather meaningful feedback from each individual household or ensure customers are receiving the information they need about SJW’s operations, plans, and priorities. Cultivating an advisory council of volunteer customer community representatives presented a powerful outreach and communications solution. Through regular, intimate gatherings with a group of customers spanning its service area, SJW would receive frank input from its constituency and participating CAC members could become informed SJW ambassadors for their individual neighborhoods, who would share their learnings with friends, family, and neighbors.
The Work
Through quarterly, public webinars, San Jose Water connects with and educates its community on current water issues. Sign ups flood in through its engaged email list.
Email Marketing & Webinars
Sterling recommended developing and producing a monthly customer newsletter to meet SJW’s customer engagement goals. Ongoing monthly emails also ensured the list remained current, minimizing spam complaints and bounce rates. Sterling designed and created all newsletter content, including timely articles on SJW infrastructure and construction projects, drought updates, water quality science, and customer service information. The newsletter has been well-received, with an amazing average 58% open rate (more than 90,000 customer opens per month). The 90,000 monthly newsletter interactions represent an exponential increase from the 600 monthly interactions SJW had garnered from their social media channels.
Sterling also leveraged the new email list to increase customer attendance at SJW’s quarterly webinars. We designed and executed a customer registration campaign for SJW’s informative webinar on water quality. The campaign uncovered untapped interest and yielded 813 customer registrations, with 228 real-time customer attendees. The 228 customer webinar attendees represented a jump of more than 200% in customer attendance from the previous webinar.
Customer Advisory Council
On-site meetings are the tentpole of the CAC initiative. Having these meetings in-person is a critical element of the strategy — affording the ability to have more direct, intimate conversation with SJW customers. Before the first event occurred, Sterling and SJW asked the new council members what topics mattered the most to them and what they wanted to learn most about. This helped frame the initial agenda and led to meaningful conversations about water quality, billing, and conservation. Since the initial meeting, Sterling and SJW have incorporated lessons learned and council-member feedback into communication priorities and subsequent CAC meeting discussion topics — leading to even better and more relevant conversations.
An immediate takeaway from the CAC initiative was learning that members don’t want to be on the council just to discuss billing or to simply listen to presentations. They want to learn more about where their water comes from, how it’s treated, and what SJW is doing to ensure its safety. They also want to see behind the scenes. Building in time to tour various facilities has now become a mainstay of each meeting. Members have been able to speak with SJW staff and see how meters are tested and calibrated for accuracy, toured a water treatment facility to understand what goes into delivering reliable high-quality water, and taken a bus up into the mountains to see SJW’s watershed. By adding an interactive element to the day’s program, Sterling and SJW have created unique experiences few others can access. This, in turn, helps demonstrate to customers all that goes into delivering water from the source to their tap.
San Jose Water subject matter experts demonstrate leadership through interviews in-depth interviews with water industry publications.
Spotlight on Staff
Another way that Sterling has worked to close the communication gap between San Jose Water and its customers is by elevating company subject matter experts (SMEs) through earned media, webinars, and presentations at the CAC meetings. SJW is fortunate to have a deep bench of experts in their respective fields, from water quality, to environmental stewardship and even cybersecurity. Sterling worked with San Jose Water’s experts to craft and place contributed content in local newspapers, relevant trade publications, and high-profile Silicon Valley tech outlets to establish SJW as an engaged industry leader. The campaign also garnered coverage for SJW in national media and appearances on sustainability podcasts. Speaking engagements at industry events, as well as awards recognizing achievement and altruism were sought, secured, and shared.
Sterling has also managed SJW’s social media strategy and profiles on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and X for most of our time working together. A pillar of the revamped social strategy is to highlight as many different people and facets of the SJW’s business as possible. A typical post might include photos of SJW teams at local events or doing their jobs in the field. The goal is to highlight the human beings who comprise the company and the organizations’ commitment to being an active part of the broader community.
The Results
San Jose Water has established itself as a leader in the water utility space through its proactive communication and thought leadership. As a result of SJW’s transparent communication efforts with customers, media coverage is much more balanced, especially regarding topics like drought or periodic rate increases. The value of the work that San Jose Water performs is being clearly expressed, and its community, ESG, and sustainability focused initiatives are now included in the narrative surrounding the company to paint a more complete picture of who SJW is to the public.
San Jose Water’s industry experts have contributed content in VentureBeat, San Jose Mercury News, and water trade publications. They are sought by the media for explaining issues such as emergency and disaster preparedness or water system resilience infrastructure, and have also appeared on water industry podcasts like 21st Century Water Podcast. All of these opportunities help highlight San Jose Water employees’ knowledge and influence in the water industry, and further inspire customer trust and positive sentiment.
The digital re-engagement campaign has also yielded impressive customer relations results. The monthly newsletter has been well-received, with an amazing average 58% open rate (way above the 35.63% average email open rate for all industries). Additionally, a digital registration campaign for SJW’s informative webinar on water quality yielded a jump of more than 200% in customer attendance from the previous webinar.
Over the past five years, Sterling and SJW have worked together with a shared mission to shift the public perception of the SJW brand. As steadily improving SJW customer satisfaction scores indicate, together, we’ve achieved that goal. Through strategic, consistent programs that have built momentum over time, we’ve seen the fruits of our labor in media coverage, customer feedback, and improved engagement with our communications materials across multiple channels. Here’s to the next five years!