We’ve won further funding for Nook, the community energy CRM!

We’re super happy to announce that NookCRM, our open-source CRM for community energy groups, has secured additional funding from the Energy Industry Voluntary Redress Scheme to improve groups’ reporting processes. 🥳

A CRM for the community energy sector

We’ve been codesigning and developing NookCRM with energy advisors themselves to ensure that it solves actual problems experienced by community energy groups in managing their caseloads. In 2025 we launched the first iteration of the software and began a year-long pilot, welcoming our first community energy group users.

As of the time of writing (August 2025), 11 UK groups have joined the pilot and are using Nook to support their energy savings work for hundreds of local residents.

We’ve also begun building custom functionality for specific groups. Our custom setup for Birmingham Voluntary Service Council allows healthcare providers to refer patients to BVSC’s community energy network. The network then uses a waiting list system to redirect cases to specific local energy groups.

A view of an early design for Nook’s case overview screen, showing customers and their current case stage.

Improving reporting for community energy groups

However one of the most frequent challenges we heard from advisors during the first phase of Nook’s development was that reporting to funders is a huge time-sink. Numerous hours every week are spent by frontline staff in the manual crunching of numbers and the formatting of reports.

Coordination networks (which support member groups across a region and report on their collective impact) face added burdens: they have to pursue their busy members for data and then standardise that which they receive. They also often work with data in a range of different formats.

Faster, standardised reporting

So, the next round of development will bring efficiencies to groups’ operations and free advisors to undertake more frontline delivery. Codesigning again with community energy groups, our main focus for the next phase of Nook will be building sharable reporting templates for groups and coordinating networks:

With a few clicks, groups will be able to set up and generate reports for their funder, slashing the time they spend on reporting.
Reporting templates can be shared between groups, allowing for quicker project setup.
And updates to templates can be managed centrally – e.g. by coordinating networks – and rolled out to participating groups.