A client relationship and case management tool (CRM) for Community Energy Advisors

With funding from the Energy Savings Trust, Outlandish has been co-designing and developing an open source client relationship and case management tool (CRM) 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 community energy groups to pilot the tool starting in February 2025 and running to March 2026. Our goals for the pilot are to:

Collect feedback that we can integrate into future product development.
Make as many minor improvements as possible to the product at this early 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 pilot

A Nook demo to Community Energy England in November 2024

Our recent Nook demo to Community Energy England (above, you can see Nook from 2:51) gives you a good overview of the CRM and its functionality after 3 development phases (there are 5 in total).
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.
We will ask you to fill out two surveys to gather your feedback.

What happens after the pilot?

We are building 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!

At the moment we are continuing to support organisations to use Nook during the course of the Pilot.

After the end of the pilot, these will be the likely options: