<aside> 💡 In 2023, Outlandish won a pot of funding from the Energy Industry Voluntary Redress Scheme to develop a new CRM for the Community Energy sector.

This funding distributes payments from energy companies “who may have breached rules” - nice! ✊

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Our pitch

<aside> 💬 This is how the project was positioned in our initial application 👇

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This project will develop and pilot the first free, entry-level case notes / client relationship management (CRM) and impact reporting tool dedicated to UK energy advisors.

Codesigned by energy advisors themselves, the tool will help advisors to speed and scale their delivery, helping a larger number of clients to reduce their domestic energy use whilst maintaining the personalised client-advisor approach.

Designed for smaller and emerging UK community energy groups, the tool will move away from the overhead-heavy practice of recording interactions and impact in spreadsheets. Instead, each group’s advisors will be able to securely store, search and update records of interactions with clients across their support and outreach activities, greatly improving their efficiency.

Additionally, with reporting to funders often occupying up to 75% of Operations Managers’ time, the tool will use aggregated data to generate impact reports, freeing these roles to better develop new relationships with community groups and to develop services to meet the changing needs of clients.

Key deliverables

<aside> 🚛 What we said we’d deliver in summer 2023.

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  1. A Theory of Change framework with energy advisors or stakeholders from community energy groups
  2. Energy advisor research: research interviews with UK energy advisors and group stakeholders, participating from both emerging and more mature community energy groups
  3. Codesign workshops with energy advisors.
  4. Production of a high-fidelity interactive prototype demonstrating at least 1 key user journey
  5. Prototype usability tests and synthesis of key findings
  6. Delivery of 4x iterations of a built product.
  7. Mid-way user tests with energy advisors and synthesis of user findings
  8. Launch of pilot CRM product
  9. User survey and interviews: 6 months post launch with users
  10. Analytics report on tool usage: 6 months post launch