Manage & Update People Records

While managing a database of people’s information and keeping records up to date may not be everyone’s cup of tea, Nucleus makes it super easy to keep track of everyone in your church, visitors and members alike! 

Between manually creating records to organizing people into lists, Nucleus People allows you to maintain a well-ordered people database, perfect to pull from to create audiences for all your Message Campaigns.

Note: Before moving on, it’s important to understand how people records and profiles are created, so if you haven’t yet read our guide on that, we recommend checking that out here.

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

Finding A Person

Once people begin interacting with your church’s Launcher, (particularly with Nucleus products where they can input their email address), your people database will begin filling up automatically with digitally created records. (Again, if you haven’t yet read our guide on how people records are created, read that here and then come back.)

As more people records are created, you might need to start searching for particular people, rather than just scrolling through a seemingly endless list of records. There are various ways you can search for a particular person, or filter for a specific group of people.

Search Bar - The search bar will allow you to search by first name, last name, first & last name, email address, or phone number. Searches can be partial, so you don't need to enter full keywords. For example, if you’re looking for Jennifer, but only type in Jen, Jennifer will show up, along with any other record that has “Jen” a part of their name or email address.

Filters - These allow you to filter your People list by a selection of parameters including: person type, status, gender, age. marital status, or years married. Just click the Filters button at the top of your People list, select the first you want to use, then scroll down and click apply.

Date Filter - You can filter your people by the date the records were created or updated, or by birth dates or anniversaries. To do this, click the Dates button at the top of your People list, then choose the Date Type, and start and end date that you want to view. 

Columns - To display the information that you are wanting or needing to see, you can click on the Columns button and toggle the different columns of information on or off, and even rearrange the order the columns appear in by clicking the double line beside the column name and dragging it up or down the column list. Then scroll to the bottom of the list and click Apply. 

Once you find the person you’re looking for, simply click View Profile to the right of the person in your People list to see that person’s information.

When the need arises, you can download a report of all your people records. You can easily do this by clicking the Download button. 

You can choose between downloading all available column data, or just the ones you’re currently viewing. This report will be a .csv file, which you can open with any basic spreadsheet program, or upload to various other databases where you might need to import your people date into.

Note: While the Nucleus system protects and keeps everyone’s personal information safe and secure, the moment any record is downloaded, we have no control over where that information goes from there. So just be mindful to only download records when needed, and be sure to maintain safe privacy practices when handling people’s personal information.

Hiding A Person

From time to time, you might find yourself with duplicate records. In this case, you can easily hide a person from search results and from showing up organically in your people database.

To hide someone, simply hover over their record and click the Hide button that appears.

Note: Only admins with the permission to hide people records will be able to see the Hide button. Otherwise, all you will see is the View Profile button. To learn more about admin permissions, specifically regarding people records, click here.

Why hide and not delete? Great question!

Most times when admins desire to delete a record is because there is a manually created record alongside a digitally created record. (Click here for more details on the difference between the two types of records.)

But as long as you wait to create any manual records until after you’ve rolled out Nucleus to your church and given them some time to create their own records, this should relegate the need to create any manual records to only those few people who you know will never interact with your Nucleus products online. It should also minimize any occurrences of duplicate records being created.

We have an entire rollout guide that will help promote Nucleus to your church and prompt people to create their own records and personal My Nucleus accounts. You can check that out here.

Hiding is also a better solution in most cases because once a record is deleted, it can never be reconstructed. Hiding records allows them to not show up in search results, but always provides you with the opportunity to bring them out of hiding, since they’re not permanently destroyed.

More importantly, admins do not have the ability to delete people records as a safety precaution put in place to avoid any possible loss of important submission data (such as giving records).

Admins also do not have the ability to merge people records, regardless if one is manually created and one is digitally created; both are manually created; or both are digitally created. This is to avoid any accidental mergers that would be super tricky to untangle.

That being said, if you have any financial transaction records that need to be reassigned, you can use the Bulk Reassign Tool. This is really helpful if an offline-only person starts to give through your GivingFlow, or interacts with your other Nucleus products and creates an online/digital person record. In this case, you can easily move all giving transactions from their offline person record to their new, real digital person record. To learn more about Bulk Reassign, click here.

Should you have specific people records that, on rare occasions - emphasis on the rare 😉 - you need deleted or merged, contact us at hello@nucleus.church and we’ll see if one of our developers can carefully combine or remove person records with care to ensure the task is completed without errors.

Manually Create A Person Record

When just starting out with Nucleus, your people database will be a blank canvas. As much as it will be tempting to begin creating people records manually, we strongly advise against this.

As mentioned above, admins don’t have the ability to delete or merge people records together. To ensure that you don’t end up with a bunch of duplicate records, we recommend following our rollout guide here to help prompt people to create their own accounts digitally, which will populate your people database.

In other words, it’s best to only manually create people records when you have good sense of the people who will never create their own account digitally, those people who will never interact with your Launcher or Nucleus products online. (You’ve already got someone in mind for this, don’t you? 😉)

But even in the cases you might end up with a duplicate record here and there (one manually created and one digitally created), you can always hide a record from your database to help keep things nice and tidy 😌

To manually create an offline person is super easy. Under the All People tab, click the Add Offline Person button in the upper right hand corner.

Then follow the prompts to enter the person's information and assign them a Connection Type. The only information required to be able to create an offline person record is a first and last name, however, records are typically only helpful if you have at least one point of contact for them, so we recommend only creating a record if you have either an email address, phone number, or postal address.

Then remember to click Save to have that person's information officially create a person record.

Update & Augment Profile Information

Profile information is automatically updated in your database for digitally created records when the real human behind the record updates their information in their personal My Nucleus account. But that doesn’t mean they’ll add all the information you might want to showcase in their profile. Perhaps they add in their email address and phone number, but not their postal address. If you have this information for them, you can easily add that to their profile!

Admin changes are more like profile notes and will appear only to those with admin access to their church's Nucleus Dashboard. These changes will not appear in the person's online My Nucleus account. This is because Nucleus allows for the best of both worlds:

  1. People can keep their profile updated and any new info they share via a Flow, etc. is automatically copied into the church’s version of the profile, updating previously saved info by the person, or adding brand new info that wasn't previously there.
  2. Information or notes the admin adds don’t sync back to the person so admins can keep their view the way they like it without deleting or removing something from a person’s personal account without their permission, or accidentally revealing internal notes.

To update a person’s profile information, find a person in your People database and click the View Profile button beside their entry. (You can actually do this from any list of People, whether directly in Nucleus People or in another product.)

While viewing a person’s profile, you can edit and add various pieces of information. For a detailed description of each item, we’ve put together a guide for that here.

Once you’re happy with your edits, make sure to save your changes.

Admin People Database Permissions

Because people records are available in most products, admins can be granted a specific level of permission for how they are able to interact with these records across the products they have administrative access to. These levels of permission are:

  • View
  • View & Edit
  • View, Edit, & Create

On top of this, if an admin has the highest level of people database permissions (View, Edit & Create) you can also give them the permission to hide people records.

If you don’t have the ability to manipulate a person record, it’s likely because you haven’t been granted the permission to do so, and you’ll need to request permission, which a higher level admin (or account owner of your Nucleus) can do. (If you’re the account owner, you can make this change to your own account.)

Note: These permissions are different from general admin access to Nucleus People. Nucleus People is a product within your Nucleus Dashboard, but viewing and/or adjusting people database records can be done at some level in most Nucleus products. To learn how to invite people to access Nucleus People, click here.

No Need To Import Records

While other platforms may allow you to import people records, Nucleus does not for the following reasons:

  1. Importing records would leave you with a bunch of manually created records that are disconnected from a real person’s My Nucleus account or login. So even if someone were to later digitally create a record, it would be a completely separate record, leaving you with duplicates to manage in your database.
  2. Because each church system interprets information differently, usually imported people records require a bunch of manual edits afterwards, cross referencing the information in the old ChMS with what’s now populated in your Nucleus People database, to ensure the data is accurate. This often eats into time and energy admins can be using in more productive ways when setting up their Nucleus account.
  3. It’s rarely (if ever) a good experience for admins or your congregation. For example, some other church software might allow you to import your old person records. However, if you want them attached and activated with real people, it then requires your congregation to follow a set of instructions to accept invitations and create logins in order to convert those offline records into digital ones. And since not everyone will follow those instructions and will create new digital records, you’ll be in the same situation as Point #1, where you have duplicate records to manage. Or you have a lot of chasing down of people to do, which we’ve experienced personally and it’s a real headache for everyone involved - staff and congregation and causes a lot of friction.

In short, it always seems like importing records is an amazing shortcut, but the reality is rarely so smooth and often the work is just hidden. So, instead of importing a bunch of manually created records and dealing with all the issues that come along with that, it’s best to start fresh and let people records populate automatically as you need them. 

If you need to handle and transfer your communication into Nucleus Messages, you can very easily bulk import email addresses to rebuild your email lists from your previous platform, as Audiences in various Campaigns you use regularly. 

A great way to automatically get people to help you with this transition to the new people database is to setup a Nucleus Messages campaign, with instructions on how your congregation can create their own My Nucleus account - and use the bulk email list audience builder to leverage your existing email list to jumpstart things! This helps fill your database with fully functional, digitally created people records, instead of being half full of manually created records you have to maintain.

We explore this in depth in our Nucleus Rollout Guide here, complete with email copy for your Message Campaign. Click here to learn more.

What Next?

Profiles are only one important element to a person record. Adding someone to custom lists is another piece of the puzzle to ensure the best organization of your people database. It also helps power your Audiences for your Message Campaigns. Click any of the guides below to learn more:

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