Can Nucleus Replace My Current ChMS (Church Management Software)?

It depends! If you're a small church with no longterm history of relying on another ChMS, then Nucleus as a sole ChMS software will serve you well. However, if you're a medium - large sized church, you might benefit from a two-system solution; utilizing the powerful features offered in Nucleus, like Web, Sermons, Flows and the Launcher, in tandem with a more robust people features with your current ChMS, or a different one.

In this guide, we'll cover the following topics. Click on any one to jump ahead.

Unified People Database (And Profiles) For Your Church

First, it’s important to note that your Nucleus works off of a centralized people database, specific to your church, where your people records are stored. This means that whatever changes or updates happen (either from an admin editing something, a person updating their primary contact info, or them completing a Flow with contact information), everything gets added and updated in one place, making it nice and easy to keep records up to date.

There are many areas of Nucleus where you can see segments of your main people database. Anytime someone interacts with a specific product - whether it be Prayer, Giving, or a custom Flow - a person record is displayed in that product in your Nucleus Dashboard. So if someone submits a prayer request, but has yet to interact with your GivingFlow, their person record will appear in Prayer, but not Giving, in your Dashboard.

But if you want to see, sort, and filter everything together in your people database, a master list of all your people and profiles is available in Nucleus People + Messages. It also has the significant added benefit of starting email campaigns and sending messages to people in your church.

Overview Of Profile Management

Instead of re-hashing out what the People database and profile management looks like, we’ve created an entire guide that provides an excellent overview of how the People database functions, how easy it is to manually create profiles, and how to keep track of records all in one centralized location.

Click here to see what that looks like.

Compiling Your Database

Whenever leaving a platform with an established people database, it can seem daunting to start a new one. Without getting too overwhelmed, think of it as an opportunity to clean house and declutter records you might not need to hold onto.

A common question we receive is if you can import people records from another platform into your Nucleus database. While you can export people data from Nucleus, importing data is not currently supported. This is because:

  • It’s best for your people records to come from your actual people (via people creating accounts + profiles with your church in Nucleus).
  • Creating disconnected (offline) records as a primary approach is less helpful. (i.e. If you were to import people records, they would all be considered "offline" records since none of them would have been created via a real person, nor would they have any login credentials associated with them.)
  • You can easily message everyone in your church using Nucleus Messages (which is one of the primary reasons people typically want to dump their people records in from another system all at once: to message people within your church).

So how can you compile your database, making sure everyone ends up with a profile in your database without duplicates or missing anyone?

Simple! If you're also using Nucleus Flows, you can promote a Flow where people enter their personal information into a Smart Contact step and help them create a personal My Nucleus account. This will help introduce your church to enter the Nucleus ecosystem, while also ensuring they are listed in your People database.

Note: We've put together an entire guide on how to roll out Nucleus to your church. Specifically, you can view some instructions on what this Flow would look like to promote people to create My Nucleus accounts. You can view that here.

And if you're not using Flows and are only interested in using our free products, another great way to bring about the same outcome is to point people to your Prayer Wall. If they don't have an account, but try to access the Prayer Wall, they'll need to create an account to do so.

Two options. Same result: a happy and full people database, where everyone has their own personal My Nucleus account to keep track of their past submissions, giving history, and profile information.

Note: When using Nucleus People + Messages, you can always manually create people records; however, these cannot be linked with accounts that real people create themselves through the Launcher, Flows, Giving, or Prayer. We recommend before manually creating people, to encourage your congregation to create their own personal accounts.

Note: As mentioned above, we have an entire rollout guide that provides you with a guide on how to introduce Nucleus to your congregation. You can check that out here. Feel free to adapt it to your specific context to help ensure the best adoption rate for your church.

Groups & Messages

If you’re coming from another platform that offers a form of group messaging, you can accomplish a similar function with Nucleus People + Messages. Utilizing custom Lists, you can add people to one (or more!) List, and then using Messages, you can create an Audience in a Campaign based on all those profiles linked to a specific List.

Note: If you’re utilizing Nucleus Flows, you can also create an Audience based on the people who complete a specific Flow.

Audiences can be set to fixed or dynamic, giving you the option to choose whether an Audience remains static, or if an Audience can grow/reduce automatically based on the Audience criteria. And don’t worry - whether your Audience is fixed or dynamic, you can always manually add subscribers to it.

Speaking of manually adding subscribers, you can import a list of email addresses, along with first and last names, to create your very first Audience. This is a great way to introduce Nucleus to your church and provide instructions on how to create their My Nucleus accounts (via one of the two options described above in the Compiling your database section.)

Further, when setting up a Campaign, you can manually schedule specific messages to send on specific dates, send emails immediately, or create an automated sequence of messages that someone receives over a certain period of time, based on when they join the Audience.

Now, that’s just a brief overview of the power of Nucleus Messages. To learn more about all the features and how it all works, click here.

What Next?

Here are some other questions that people have when first starting to investigate what Nucleus is all about:

Or if you're ready to try out our amazing products 30 days for free, click the guide below for instructions:

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