In July 2025, our partners from BVSC (the Birmingham Voluntary Service Council) joined the Nook pilot programme. Their arrival meant we had a full house of community energy groups across the Birmingham metropolitan area piloting Nook, as BVSC serves as a referrer to several community energy projects in the region.

BVSC has been a particularly special partner. As a coordinating network of organisations providing energy advice to healthcare patients, they brought a fresh perspective on how Nook could be used for case management. A little teaser: thanks to BVSC, we configured Nook instances so they could “talk” to each other – more on that below.

Read more about Nook CRM, funded by the Energy Savings Trust.

The Challenge

BVSC tasked us with building out their energy advice case referral system. The goal was to enable BVSC to assign new energy advice referrals from a range of healthcare providers to the right partners across their network. Each case is reviewed based on location, previous case history, or any special circumstances, before being assigned to the partner best placed to support the client.

Erin, the project manager at BVSC, wanted referrals from healthcare providers (NHS) to flow directly into the system, where she could review them and decide which partner organisation should handle each case. It was also crucial to track the status of referrals – whether they had been accepted by a partner or were still pending – so follow-ups could happen seamlessly.

At the same time, autonomy mattered. While BVSC needed a centralised system, community energy groups also needed the freedom to work in ways that suited them. We agreed that each partner would retain control over their own Nook instance, with the ability to tailor the client journey and add custom fields that reflect how they collect and manage case data.

Our technical solution

The solution was to make Nook instances communicate with each other, creating a referral ecosystem. Here’s how it works:

  • Project configuration push – Instead of manually exporting and importing project files, we used the API to push project configuration (including all connected fields) from a source Nook instance (BVSC/instance) into a target Nook instance (partners’ instances).
  • Case dispatch – When a new case is assigned, it’s automatically created on the target partner’s Nook instance with all the original case data.
  • Case ID tracking – Both the source and target sites store each other’s case IDs, allowing cases to be tracked across Nook instances.
  • Status notifications – A small “phone home” alert on the target site notifies the source site when a case is accepted or rejected. This is the only information that ever travels back.

In short, BVSC now has a system that automatically, transparently, and with minimal manual input moves referrals, while partners retain the flexibility to handle cases their way.

The impact

Since the project launched, BVSC has dispatched more than 40 cases to its partners for in-depth energy advice and support.

The benefits are clear:

  • Time saved – Centralised referral management eliminates much of the back-and-forth coordination.
  • Scalability – Adding a new partner to the network is quick and straightforward.
  • Reporting simplified – Reusable templates across partner instances enable standardised, efficient data collection and reporting.

Of course, this is just the beginning. There’s plenty more we can do to improve the referral process in Nook – and we might be digging more into that in the new year!

If you’re interested in using Nook as a case management tool for your energy advice projects, we’d love to hear from you. Drop us a line at nook@outlandish.com or take a look around the Nook website.