A Case Notes CRM for Community Energy Advisors

With funding from the Energy Savings Trust, Outlandish has been co-designing and developing an open source case notes/client relationship management system for energy advisors in the UK community energy sector*. We’ve called it Nook. You can read about the development process here.

<aside> 🛫

We are now looking for six community energy groups to pilot the CRM for a period of six months, starting in February 2025. Our goals for this pilot are to:

• Test how the CRM performs in real life.
• Collect feedback that we can integrate into future development plans.
• Make as many minor improvements as possible to the product at this stage.
• Build a community of practice around energy advice case notes management in the community energy sector. </aside>

** Please note that Nook is exclusively for organising energy advice case notes (and not a general community energy CRM), see the Nook demo.mp4 to understand its functionality.*

What you need to know about the six month pilot

Nook demo October 2024

Nook demo October 2024

• The Nook demo.mp4 (shown above) gives you a good overview of the CRM and its functionality right now (after 3 development phases). Please note there will be one more development phase before the pilot and another during the pilot, so it’s very much a work in progress.
• Using the CRM during the pilot is entirely free of cost.
• During the pilot we believe that Nook will significantly:
  • Streamline case management for your energy advisors
  • Improve the experience for your clients since all their information and engagement history will be in one place
  • We also hope to include your suggested improvements and develop the system further within the pilot itself
• In Nook’s current form, we suggest that you use the system for one particular funding source or project but we can discuss this further according to your needs.
• We will provide documentation, training, support, and meet ups (details tbc).
• We will ask you to fill out two surveys to gather your feedback.

What happens after the pilot?

We are currently investigating the post-pilot journey of Nook. We really want to build Nook into a long-term open source project that can match the needs of the sector. Ideally we’d like you early adopters to continue using Nook into the foreseeable future and expand our users!

However, at the moment we have a fixed amount of funding that will run out after the pilot. In order to host, support, maintain, and further develop Nook, we are currently trying to acquire more funding. The Energy Savings Trust has indicated that we will be eligible for another round of their funding so we feel fairly confident that the project will continue and we hope to be able to provide Nook to you for at least another year (after the pilot) free of charge.

But in the interest of full transparency, these will be the options should we not secure further funding: