Manage Your Master List Of Givers

Nucleus Giving makes it super easy to manage and track all of your Givers in your church. Remember, if you’re subscribed to other Nucleus products like Flows and Prayer, only those who have interacted with your GivingFlow - or those you’ve manually created in Nucleus Giving - will show up in your master list of Givers. This makes it easy for admins to focus on people with giving records, rather than sifting through a bunch of other people. (Who are likely wonderful people! Just not the ones you’re looking to focus on 😁)

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


Note: Nucleus Giving offers several different admin access levels, some of which prevents an admin from being able to see profile information attached to a donation (or vice-versa, be unable to see donation history attached to a profile). This is particularly true of the Pastoral admin access. Additionally, if you have View Only access, you will be able to access and view people records, but will be unable to make any edits. To learn more about admin access levels, click here.

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

Finding A Person

Once people begin donating through your GivingFlow, your Giving 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 large 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 list of Givers 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 Givers 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 data 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 and financial 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 Giving (or all your Nucleus products) 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.

And if you’re looking for a specific guide on how to roll out and introduce Nucleus Giving to your church, click 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

If you’re familiar with the Nucleus People product, you’ll know you can manually create a person record directly from your overall people database found in Nucleus People. This is specifically a unique feature to the Nucleus People product. All other lists of people found in other products (such as Flows and Prayer) do not allow you to manually create people records or manually create submissions in those products.

Giving, however, is a bit different. Because we offer the ability to keep track of all your donations through our platform - both digital and offline/physical donations - we also offer the ability to manually create people records in Nucleus Giving.

To keep things uniform with Flows and Prayer, you are unable to manually create people records while viewing your list of Givers. But while manually adding an offline donation in your Transactions Panel, you have the opportunity to create an offline person record there. Afterwhich, that person will be listed in your Giving people database.

To learn more about how to manually create a person in Nucleus Giving, click here.

Update & Augment Profile Information

Primary 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. This includes their first & last name, primary email address, phone number, and postal address.

Any other types of profile information will be left blank until an admin adds that information in.

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 Giving people database and click the View Profile button beside their entry. Click here for a quick link.

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. (This links to an article under Nucleus People in our Help Center, but the concepts are the same for when viewing a profile in Nucleus Giving.)

View & Manage Giving Activity & Statements

Of course, once viewing a person’s record, you’ll also notice several other tabs available to click on pertaining to the person’s giving:

  • Digital Giving (not shown for manually created people records)
  • Offline Giving
  • Scheduled Giving (not shown for manually created people records)
  • Gift Entry
  • Unassigned (not shown for manually created people records)
  • Statements

Here, you can view and download giving history, view any scheduled donations and annual giving statements, manually add donations, and check to see if Nucleus has found unclaimed gifts that likely belong to that particular person.

To learn about the particulars of each tab pertaining to giving in a person’s record, click here.

Admin Access & 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.

Alternatively, you might also not have the correct admin access level in Nucleus Giving. There are four different admin access levels:

  • Manager - Access to view and manage everything
  • Pastoral - Access to view and manage everything but cannot see any personal Giver data
  • Assistant - Access to view and manage everything, except admins and settings
  • View Only - View only access, no access to admins/settings

If you are set to the Pastoral admin access level, you will be able to access the list of Givers in Nucleus Giving, but you won’t be able to see any donation information associated with their person records. (You will also be unable to view profile information attached to any gift throughout Nucleus Giving.)

If you are set to the View Only admin access level, you will be able to see and access the list of Givers in Nucleus Giving (as well as any personal Giver data elsewhere in Nucleus Giving), but you will be unable to manipulate or edit any information you see.

If you believe you should have greater access to view and/or edit people records, you’ll need to request additional permissions and/or admin access, 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 😊

What Next?

Now that you’re familiar with your Master List of Givers, it’s time to learn how to navigate and manage an individual person’s record: their profile, giving history, and other giving related options. Of course, you can also learn how to manually create a Giver too! So much to learn. And it’s all at your fingertips 😊

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