How People Records (Giver Profiles) Are Created

While it’s exciting to begin compiling your people records and ensuring your Giver database is complete, it’s super important to understand how people records are created in Nucleus. (This will help ensure you don’t end up with a bunch of duplicate records that you need to deal with later down the road.)

So if you don’t want to make work for yourself later on, follow along. You’ll be thankful you did 😊

Note: The following guide is specific to Nucleus Giving. But people records can be found in multiple areas in your Dashboard, including Nucleus Flows and Nucleus People. To learn specifically about people records in the context of Nucleus People, click here.

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

Digitally Created Records

The most common way people records are created is digitally.

Whenever someone submits a gift through the GivingFlow and includes their email address, not only will that donation be recorded in your Transactions Panel here, but a person record (i.e. a Giver) will automatically be created for that person as well (if it hasn’t been created already). This record will appear in your Nucleus Giving People Panel here, as well as in your Nucleus People database if you are also subscribed to that product.

Note: If no email address is provided, that gift will remain anonymous. It’s always possible for someone to later claim the anonymous gift to their account, or for an admin to assign an unclaimed gift to a person record on their behalf. Click here to learn more about reassigning gifts.

After submitting a donation and entering an email address, the GivingFlow will suggest to the person to create a password to finalize the creation of their personal My Nucleus account. For more information about congregation accounts, how they can manage their own information and records, click here.

From there, our system will send them an email to verify their email address. Once verified, any and all submissions (including donations) associated with that email address will be properly filed, connected to their person record in your database. (For this reason, verifying email addresses is a very important step for admins and congregation members alike when creating accounts. Click here to learn more about verifying emails.)

Digitally created records will always say Created under the Nucleus Login column in your People database. Additionally, while viewing a digitally created account, you will notice the Nucleus logo beside Account Created. Manually created records will showcase neither and instead, will show “Offline Record” near the top of the page, when viewing someone’s profile.

When updating/upkeeping a digitally created person record, no edits you make will be shown to the person in their My Nucleus account.

On the flipside, any changes they make to their Primary Profile Information (email address, mailing address, and phone number) will reflect in their person record in your Nucleus Dashboard. However, any additional pieces of information they add to their own profile will not translate to what you can see on their person record.

Manually Created Records

Another way to make people records is to manually create them. This is a great option for those people in your congregation who you know will never donate digitally through your church’s GivingFlow. (You know who they are 😉)

While viewing your Transactions Panel, click the + Add New button. While this is technically to add an offline donation, you can create an offline Person and add an offline donation at the same time.

Click here to learn more about manually creating offline people records in Nucleus Giving.

Click here to learn more about adding offline donations.

Note: You cannot delete records once they are created; however, you can hide them if you have the highest level of people database admin permissions. Hiding them prevents searches from showcasing their record. We have an entire walkthrough dedicated to rolling out Nucleus to your congregation, complete with a strategy to nudge people to create their own My Nucleus account, thereby creating their digital record in your people database. Click here to learn more about that.

Giving Activity & Statements In People Records

As long as you’ve either created a person record manually or someone has donated to your church via your GivingFlow at least once (and included an email address), they will appear in your Master People List in Nucleus Giving. Click here for a quick link.

You can click to view each person’s profile information as well as their giving activity and annual giving statements. (You can even add an offline donation directly to their person record instead of doing that via the Transactions Panel!)

Out of respect for each person’s privacy, we don’t showcase people’s submission activity from other products. This means, while viewing someone’s person record in Nucleus Giving, you will not be able to see their Flow submissions (if you’re subscribed to Nucleus Flows) or prayer requests (if you use Nucleus Prayer). This is because, while an admin might have access to view people records in Nucleus Giving, they might not have access to other products where a person’s submissions reside.

Admin People Database Permissions

Because people records are available in most products, there are various levels of permission every admin can be granted, regardless of what products they have access to:

  • 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: If you’re also subscribed to Nucleus People, the permissions referenced above 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 Giving 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. (Which means letting people create their own records by donating through the GivingFlow - or any other type of Flow you might have set up if you’re subscribed to other Nucleus products.)

To help populate your people database in Nucleus Giving organically (i.e. instead of creating a bunch of unnecessary manual people records), we’ve put together a guide on how to Introduce Nucleus Giving To Your Church. This includes both transitioning from one online giving platform to Nucleus, or introducing online giving for the first time.

If you’re coming from another online giving platform and you’re wondering how to manage two different platform’s annual giving statements:

  1. You can simply provide people with two giving statements next year: one from your previous online giving platform, and one from Nucleus Giving.
  2. Depending on when you transition to Nucleus Giving (or how many donations you take in throughout the year), it might be feasible to manually add donations to each person’s record as offline donations, to account for all the donations given via your old online giving platform.

From our experience, people are usually pretty understanding that, if you transition from one giving platform to another, they’ll be receiving two separate annual giving statements the following year 😊

No Merging Or Deleting Records (With Exceptions)

As mentioned above, admins do not have the ability to delete people records. This is a safety precaution put in place to avoid any possible loss of important submission data (such as giving records). Admins can, however, with the correct permissions hide unwanted people records. (Click here to learn more about admin access and permission levels.)

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 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.

Click here to learn more about the Bulk Reassign Tool.

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.

What Next?

Now that you understand how people records are created, it’s time to learn how to manage your master list of Givers, how to manage individual people records, and how to manually create offline people records.

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