Here are a list of common terms you may encounter when using NookCRM, its documentation and its community forums.
Nook is built on top of CiviCRM, an open source case management system, so also included below are a list of common terms you may encounter relating to CiviCRM
Case
A Case refers to the individual person with whom your organisation is working. Cases in Nook are not, for example, individual properties.
Every case has a unique case ID.
Case Journey
This is the flow that cases move through as your organisation’s works with that individual. For example, a simple organisation flow might be:
Assessment -> Implementation of measures -> Follow up -> Survey -> Close
With an additional Waiting List Step to place cases which are awaiting a triage (e.g. if it’s come submitted via an online form).
A visual representation of the Case Journey is accessible in the Case Overview > Card View screen. It can also be seen when looking at an individual Case record.
The Case Journey is configurable in Settings, and Steps can be added, replaced and renamed to match your typical workflow.
Steps
The main phases / areas of work in the Case Journey, through which a case moves as you work with it.
Tasks
Tasks are a specific kind of activity/task for your team, that would usually on a Case as it moves through the Steps of their Case Journey.
For example, if you have a Step called ‘Assessment’, you may wish to include Tasks in that such as “Home Visit”.
You may wish to include further tasks too, such as “Arrange Home Visit”, “Remind resident of home visit” etc. However be mindful of information overload for your team: the more Tasks you create, the more information will be presented in the Case Journey, and the more notifications your team will receive.
Case Status
Whether a Case is Active or Archived. Cases can be filtered by Status in the Case Overview and when generating reports.
Project
A project is the strand of work associated with a case. A Project may equate to your Funder, and they may fund all your work on a Case. In this situation you may have only one Project associated with cases.
However, in the real world funders often only fund specific activities in your organisation’s delivery. E.g. a funder might only fund the work of replacing lightbulbs for local residents, but not the work of your team doing the actual home visit, nor arranging for boiler repairs.
For this reason you can assign multiple Projects to Cases.
Please note that in this situation, when you run some reports Cases may appear multiple times if they have multiple associated Projects. You should either apply Project filters when running your report, export Projects individually, or work with the outputted spreadsheets to remove or merge duplicates and avoid double counting.
Questions
The data points you collect on your cases. For example, “How many children live in the household”. These are edited within Settings > Data Collection.
Instance
An Instance is an isolated, self-contained environment where your CRM data lives. Unlike a Software-as-a-Service, which will have a central login for every user, each Nook is set up and hosted independently as a separate “instance”, on a unique URL. The databases are not connected and no case data is shared between organisations.
Contacts
In CiviCRM, a contact is the fundamental building block for storing information about any person, organization, or household your organisation interacts with. In CiviCRM, each of these would typically be a different type of contact.
Nook primarily uses the contact type of “Cases”, and each case contains details like name, address and associated property information organised into a Record.
Records
In CiviCRM, a record is a collection of related data for a single contact (in Nook, these are “Cases”), organized into fields. For example, in Nook a contact’s record contains fields for their name, address, email, and phone number, as well as tabs for other information like property, energy supplier etc.