Jones-Onslow EMC

Our Work

What we do for Jones-Onslow EMC

Jones-Onslow EMC is a member-owned electric cooperative serving more than 85,000 meters across six counties in eastern North Carolina. Members inside the territory cannot choose another electric provider, so this was never about winning new business. It was about a better experience for the members already being served. We have built joemc.com twice.

Jones-Onslow EMC has been member-owned since 1939. It serves more than 85,000 meters across six counties in eastern North Carolina, Onslow, Jones, Pender, Duplin, Craven, and Lenoir, which makes it the fourth largest electric cooperative in the state.

The one thing marketing cannot do for a utility

Most marketing exists to bring in new business. A cooperative like this one cannot grow that way. Members inside the assigned territory cannot choose another electric provider, so no campaign anywhere moves the meter count. What is left is the part that actually matters, and it is the harder part: the experience of the members already being served.

At Jones-Onslow that is not a style preference, it is the structure of the business. Their own member handbook puts it plainly: at Jones-Onslow EMC you are not a customer, you are a member. One member, one vote. Since 2002 the cooperative has returned $41.5 million in capital credits to the people it serves. So the website’s job was never acquisition. It was service.

Reporting an outage used to mean filling out a contact form

In December 2022, a member whose power was out found the homepage, found the general Contact Us form, and typed in a street address and the time the lights went off. It landed in an inbox. That was the path.

Today an outage has its own front door. The Outage Hub puts Report an Outage, outage text alerts, the outage map, and storm resources in one place, so a member standing in the dark holding a phone is one tap from the right thing instead of hunting for a form. There is a Medical Alert page as well, for members who depend on life-sustaining electrical equipment and need the cooperative to know exactly where they are.

The second build came from the members

We launched joemc.com on August 9, 2022, and launched it again on October 21, 2025. The second build was not a rescue. The committee liked the 2022 site, and the kickoff notes say so. The cooperative simply refreshes on a three-year rhythm, which their marketing lead described about as directly as it can be described: Steve just likes to update it every 3 years just to keep things fresh.

What made 2025 different is where the direction came from. A survey went out to a list of 10,000 members, and the answers came back specific. Change the footer illustration. Make the action icons on the homepage more prominent. We did both, exactly as asked. Heat-map data pointed at the same problem from a different angle, members scrolling to find what they came for, so the new site leads with a mega menu built to cut that scrolling down.

We also took the service-address lookup out of the theme and rebuilt it as a standalone plugin. It had broken three separate times when the theme updated. Moving it out means a routine update cannot knock it over again.

Members find them however they spell it

Search data says something useful about a cooperative’s name. Members do not all type it the same way. Jomec, joe mc, joemec, and jones emc all rank on page one alongside the correct spelling, and roughly 17,000 clicks come from those five ways of searching the name. For a utility that is the whole assignment. When a member needs you, you are there, however they typed it.

None of this shows up as growth, because growth was never the goal. The cooperative already holds a 99.989% reliability record and an ACSI score of 90, against 74 for investor-owned utilities. The measure that matters here is whether the member who needs something at 7:46 in the morning can find it. That is what we built, twice.