For the past week, we at Halcyon have been doing a ‘retro’ on the Halcyon Alerts service which we launched last year. It works, and thousands of you use it. We also know two things about it. First, it could work much better (and it can always be working much better than whatever its present state is), and it should have an order of magnitude more users. So, we’ve been reviewing your feedback, our learnings and our roadmap in meetings this week, and taking notes as we did. Sometimes, and this is one of those times, the quick notes tell it better than high polish ever could. From our collective heart, and with a clear message to you. 

So, here are those notes, essentially untouched save for relevant links.  Happy reading. 

-Nat

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In October ‘24 we introduced Halcyon Alerts for energy professionals who needed a way to keep their finger on the pulse of high-velocity, high-volume energy information flow. We heard many variations of: we need to read dockets and filings regularly; finding and reading these dockets is painful; doing it across multiple state public utility commission (PUC) websites is even more painful; doing all of this everyday is the most painful. 

We take this feedback seriously — so, we launched Halcyon Alerts in a relatively simple state and knew that we needed to fast-follow with more granular controls. We introduced a preferences manager to help quickly create and customize multiple alerts and follow various state PUCs as well as different topics (and control things like what day of the week they received their alert). We also launched Docket profiles and the ability to follow-a-docket, all while marching towards our goal of making all 50 state PUCs available. 

All of these features and functionalities have been driven by a steady stream of feedback from all of you. Your feedback is our lifeblood (let us know how we’re doing at feedback@halcyon.io)

Today, we’re excited to share some cool updates to Halcyon Alerts that make them even more useful:

1. Halcyon Alerts aggregates and summarizes the latest filings from all 50 PUCs! Nationwide coverage was consistently the #1 request we received.
   
   
2. In addition to all 50 PUCs, we’ve also added support for all eight Independent System Operators (ISOs) and Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs), going back to 2020. In the same way you can configure alerts across different PUCs and topics, now you can add ISOs and RTOs to your coverage mix!
   
   
3. We got feedback that the emails themselves were dense and hard to read, so we launched a new, simpler template to make it more legible and comprehensible.
   
4. Email is good in some ways, but it’s necessarily backward-looking. For those who know they need new information that isn’t in an Alert, we introduced Feeds, which offers the same search and filtering capabilities from Alerts in a web view (more detail).
   
   
5. Docket profiles have been popular, but they were hard to share with people who weren’t also Halcyon users, so we removed the need to authenticate in order to view them. (Note: we still require free authentication in order to subscribe to Alerts or follow-a-docket.)
   
   
6. Many folks liked the normalized view that we applied to dockets via Docket profiles, so we used that same meta-data to build Document profiles to offer that same standardized information:
   
   
   
7. And some executives and senior leaders told us “I don’t need a full docket firehose or even summaries, I just need a TLDR of what matters most,” so we launched What’s Happening in Energy to offer a curated view of nationwide PUC insights.

We’re just getting started. Expect constant iteration and improvement. Most importantly: please keep the feedback coming (good, bad, ugly, all of it: feedback@halcyon.io)

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