Nucleus Privacy Protection Plan
When starting to use any new platform that collects personal information, it's natural to have questions about security. When other platforms aren't forthright with their privacy practices, it can leave a sour taste in your mouth and make it harder to trust what others do with your information. Sadly, this includes many other online church software companies.
That's why we at Nucleus strive to be open and honest about our security practices and how we store personal data (yours and your congregation's).
In this guide, we'll cover the following topics. Click on any one to jump ahead.
Our Promise To Not Be Scummy
First and foremost, we promise to never sell or give away your information to other third-party platforms. This is a scummy business practice that is never acceptable to appear in the church space. Ever.
Our promise to you is to protect any and all data that's stored in our database. It's a tall order, but it's one that churches across the world have entrusted us with for several years, one we continue to deliver on every single day.
But that begs the question: who owns all that data uploaded to your Nucleus account? YOU.
You retain all the rights to the data stored in our services. While the data stored in our databases is entrusted to us for safekeeping, we own zero percent of that information. You own it all, while we provide the security to ensure it all remains safe and private from other peeping Toms.
For access to our entire Privacy Policy, click here.
Where You Can See This In Action
If you're super interested in knowing the geeky stuff about how we store our data, click here. But we think you'd be much more interested in seeing how we practice security and privacy measures in practical ways throughout your Nucleus account.
1. Connection Types
Linking the appropriate Connection Types to your people profiles helps ensure privacy across the board. Connection Types limits (or grants) access to view, submit, or receive specific information from your Nucleus account. This includes:
- Your Prayer Wall (who can see prayers shared with your church - sign in required)
- Custom Flows (who can access and submit particular Flows - sign in required)
- Nucleus Web (who can access specific web pages - sign in required)
- Messages (target a specific group with emails that shouldn't go out to everyone)
Note: If you're not familiar with Connection Types, we recommend going back a step and making sure you have yours set up. Click here to learn more.
2. Notification Emails
Speaking of emails, with every new submission comes the possibility of notification emails. Admins can subscribe to receive these emails to notify them of submissions they need to be watching out for.
Want to know when there's a new donation? You can do that in Nucleus Giving.
Want to know when there's a new "Plan a Visit" submission? You can do that in Nucleus Flows.
Want to know when a new prayer request comes in? You - and your congregation! - can do this in Nucleus Prayer.
Note: You'll learn more about notification emails in other guides for Prayer, Giving, and Flows.
We know that there can be a host of sensitive information in each of these emails. Because of this, we promise to never showcase any submission data in these emails to prevent the possibility of data mining. These emails are simply just that: notifications of a new submission. That's it. From there, you need to login to your Nucleus Dashboard to view the actual details of that submission.
This ensures privacy for both you and your congregation.
3. Admin Permissions
We know that not everyone who works at your church needs access to every area of your Nucleus. For example, your volunteer coordinator who is checking for new Flow submissions probably doesn't need access to see your church's donations in Giving. (Unless, of course, they also oversee your church's finances 😅) That's why we've established per-product admin permissions, so you can limit and grant access to admins to only the areas of Nucleus in which they need to be involved.
Beyond this, we also created different levels of permission per product. For example, you might want your pastor to see the general financial health of your church's giving, but they don't need to see the specifics of who gave how much. There's a specific admin permission for that.
Or perhaps you have a bunch of different volunteers who have their own Flows to collect information and submissions. For instance, the worship pastor who's recruiting musicians through one Flow doesn't need to know who's signing up to help with the children's ministry in another Flow. There are specific admin permissions for that.
This protects information submitted by your congregation from being seen from people who shouldn't have their eyes on it.
4. Private Inboxes For Prayer (Paid Upgrade)
While Nucleus Prayer is secure (with a mix of all three security measures in place described above), the paid version of Prayer unlocks even further privacy features, such as private inboxes. Instead of your congregation sharing their prayer requests with the entire prayer team, private inboxes opens the ability for people to select only certain people on your prayer team to view a prayer request.
Private inboxes provide an even greater sense of privacy and trust within your congregation that only those who need to see their personal information sees it.
There are other areas within Nucleus where our security measures can be practically seen:
- Verifying email addresses to establish a real person behind digitally created people profiles.
- Password reset emails.
- Never showing full payment information anywhere, ever
- And more!
Hopefully after reviewing this (and other places we explain our security and privacy measures) you feel confident that Nucleus is dedicated to ensuring your information and your congregation's information is safe in our databases.
Now that we've explored our privacy practices, let's take a look at the Nucleus People database and how that works.