About Nook
Nook is an open-source client relationship and case management tool for community energy groups.
Thanks to funding from the Energy Saving Trust, we’ve been working with community energy organisations to understand the intricacies of managing cases throughout the energy advice journey.
We’ve co-designed the platform with energy advisors, collaborating with them to understand their needs and gather invaluable insights to help create a fantastic free open-source tool for the community energy sector.
We’re now seeking community energy groups to participate in our pilot study. Read on to discover more.
Recent work
In 2025, we’ve been doing additional development work to ensure the product is stable and scalable as we embark on the pilot study with several willing organisations from the community energy sector.
The work has gone well to date. We consistently receive positive feedback and many organisations show keen interest, thanks to the fully customisable client journey. Groups we’ve worked with often comment on the practicality and effectiveness of the:
- time-saving automated tasks
- custom fields, specifically designed to meet diverse data collection needs
- customisable case journey
Community energy groups appreciate that Nook CRM can be tailored to fit their existing internal processes, rather than requiring them to adapt to a rigid system.
They also appreciate the clean design and intuitive UX. Because we designed Nook specifically for community energy organisations we’ve cut out a lot of CRM functionality that you would see in a standard package and never use.
Join the Pilot Study
We are looking for additional community energy groups to pilot the tool for up to six months.
The following projects have signed up for the project:
- SE1
- BHESCo
- Acocks Greener
- Croydon Community Energy
- Green Heat Coop
Our goals for this pilot are to:
- Test how the tool performs in real life
- Collect feedback that we can integrate into future development plans
- Collaborate in the co-design of the new advanced reporting functionality
- 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
Onboarding new groups
We’ve made the onboarding as bespoke, lightweight and accessible as possible for each organisation.
We discuss the data structure, the migration process, and more technical aspects, but we also utilise role-play exercises and highly interactive sessions to cater to all learner types.
Our onboarding process includes the following steps:
● Introductory call – A demo of Nook CRM for the community energy group, followed by a Q&A session.
● Data collection – Guiding the group’s ‘Nook Champion’ through the required data for
configuring their custom Nook instance.
● Training – A dedicated 1.5 to 2-hour training session for each group.
● Custom setup – Configuring the organisation’s setup of Nook to match their workflows, needs and context.
During joint introduction and check-in meetings, groups naturally share valuable insights on grant availability and best practices for energy advice, fostering collaboration and peer learning. One example is a new community energy group that learned about available funding and discovered that a regional community energy network is ready to support them in securing this.
Thanks to Community Energy South, our trusted partners on the project, who have helped to develop our onboarding process.
The benefits of using Nook
The CRM is available for free use during the pilot study. During the pilot, we believe that Nook will significantly streamline case management for your energy advisors and enhance the client experience, as all their information and engagement history will be consolidated in one place. We also hope to incorporate suggested improvements and further develop the system during the pilot itself.
We will provide documentation, training, support, and meet-ups, and solicit feedback from participants.
What happens after the pilot?
We aim to develop Nook into a long-term, open-source project that meets the sector’s needs. Ideally, we’d like early adopters to continue using Nook.
We hope to provide Nook for another six months (after the pilot) free of charge, with follow-on Funding from the Energy Saving Trust.
There are an additional three options after this period:
- Host Nook yourself. Since Nook is open source, you will be welcome to organise your own hosting and set up an instance of Nook independently. You will be able to transfer your data.
- Pay us to host, maintain, and support Nook. You can pay us monthly to manage your instance of Nook. We hope to be able to provide this from £50/month (depending on the number of users and cases).
- Stop using Nook and export all your data. You can export the raw data you have collected in Nook into a spreadsheet (or similar). We can work with you to make sure this export will work with your previous case management system.
Get in touch to sign up for the pilot study >