Around the globe governments, businesses and citizens are actively involved in voluntary programmes that seek an improved uptake of retrofits of the existing building stock. A fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) is used to understand the opportunities, performance and constraints of such programmes. Building on a series of 20 voluntary programmes in Australia, the Netherlands and the United States (including a series of 101 original interviews), the analysis finds that the majority of these have not succeeded in incentivizing their participants to take meaningful action. Insights are presented into why the majority of these programmes have underperformed, and what binds together the small number of programmes that have achieved positive results.