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In January 2023 we attended the “CRM Systems for Energy Efficiency Services Workshop” run by Community Energy England. In the session Tara from Exeter Community Energy gave a demo of how they’ve adapted Airtable as a CRM.

Our digested thoughts are below. 👇

You can also watch the full video too, here (the demo starts at 04:30)

https://youtu.be/esBw08i2P6I?si=KzEEOW7RrlxTnPt5&t=276

Why Exeter moved from spreadsheets to a CRM:

  1. With return clients it was clunky to add more and information to Google Sheets / Excel.
  2. Reporting to funders was manual and very labour intensive when working from spreadsheets
  3. Changes in reporting were hard to implement through spreadsheets
  4. Exeter wanted more than a client database - they wanted a better way of managing workflows and reporting, and helping streamline their functions
  5. Handling 800-900 clients per year? Google Sheets / Excel can’t handle this amount of data and the rows required. This year alone (2023) Exeter are working with 3,000 customers a year.

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This definitely matched what we heard in our research conversations with CRM experts. Spreadsheets are very brittle and prone to accidental breaking, and structurally they don’t allow support groups to keep an ongoing narrative on cases.

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Costs of using Airtable

CRM setup:

Ongoing costs:

  1. The Airtable licence cost Exeter £100 per user per year (they have ~7 users).
  2. There were also ongoing consultant costs to make changes

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In our opinion this is a real limitation of using Airtable, considering that community energy groups often have part time and volunteer roles.

Because of this issue we don’t believe that Nook CRM should have a per-user pricing structure.

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