Welcome To Nucleus Giving!

Nucleus Giving offers the best online giving experience with our one-of-a-kind GivingFlow that helps your church see more completed gifts. And just as importantly, Nucleus Giving offers the lowest processing fees in the entire online giving industry! 😱

How did we do this? Well, we simply refused from the very beginning to participate in what’s known in the industry as rev-share. Rev-share is a common practice where church donations platforms artificially inflate processing fees, so they can pocket a bit of every gift. We know, it sounds sketchy - and it is. And more than being a bit underhanded, it costs churches tens of millions of dollars in fees every year that are completely unnecessary. You can read more about giving fees and rev-share here.

Note: To find a recap of our tiered subscription price points and transaction fees, click here.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg! Let’s dive into all that Nucleus Giving offers and some important points to note along the way.

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

A Powerful, Holistic System To Track & Manage Donations

Nucleus Giving can be divided into three primary areas:

  1. The GivingFlow - where people initiate one-time or recurring digital donations to your church. This can be installed directly on your church’s website!
  2. Your Admin Dashboard - where you can keep track of all your donations (both digital and offline!), manage funds, issue annual tax receipts for donors, and much more.
  3. Donor Accounts - where individual donors can keep track of their own donations, update their profile, and access their annual tax receipts.

With all three points of access in sync, Nucleus Giving provides an incredibly smooth and simple experience for Givers and admins alike, from donations to tax statements.

When someone goes to your church’s website, they can easily open the GivingFlow from any page. In a step-by-step Flow, they can then quickly donate to any fund your church offers, giving one-time donations or setting up recurring donations, to give immediately or on a future date.

From there, they can effortlessly keep track of all their transaction data and profile information in their personal “My Nucleus” Donor Account, including accessing their annual tax receipt once an admin releases it from their Nucleus Church Account.

For admins, you can experience a truly powerful Dashboard, able to manage all donations - including manually entered gifts to track offline/physical donations like cash or checks - and reassign transactions as needed…

…Create as many unique funds as desired…

…Reconcile bank statements using our unique Transfers Panel…

…And issue annual tax receipts for every single Giver in your church - including those who have only given physical donations.

Oh, and just in case you’re worried about needing to bring your own Stripe account (or up with a card processor elsewhere and bring that account to us so we can connect it with your Nucleus Giving, throw that worry in the trash 🚮  You can do it all within the Nucleus Dashboard, making it a seamless process for your church.

Security & PCI Compliance

Nucleus doesn’t just offer a fantastic experience with online giving; we offer an extremely secure platform, ensuring peace of mind for anyone using Nucleus Giving - both while donating in the GivingFlow, and managing your Church Account.

To explain further, anytime someone uses our platform to give or manage giving, everything is encrypted. And of course, we are PCI compliant - meaning we are scanned quarterly and attest to our setup and security policies annually. Moreover, our Tier 1 processing partners (CardConnect, FirstData/Fiserv, and BluePay) and our data hosting providers are Level 1 PCI compliant. This is the highest level of security available, and means every transaction through Nucleus Giving meets a set of security standards designed to ensure that ALL companies who accept, process, store, or transmit credit card information maintain a secure environment.

But we also go above and beyond that and have built in exclusive privacy and accountability permissions, to allow for example, Pastor-level access where they can run reports, and see giving health, without seeing the specific donor names attached to specific gift amounts.

In other words, the most modern server technology and privacy constraints were utilized in the core architecture of Nucleus Giving - from the processing, to data storage, to the way we allow access to our APIs, which are tightly locked down and don't expose data in an unencrypted way.

For example, if someone "hacked" into an account or breached our core system, they could not access the giver's credit card / banking information or account password. We don’t store any of that information in plain text or in unsecured databases. Usually when you hear about breaches in the news, they stored information in unprotected databases, where information that should have been encrypted was stored unencrypted, which is then vulnerable and accessible to hackers.

Big picture: Data breaches or "hacks" are usually only a big deal when there are bad security policies and programming where sensitive data is stored unsecured and unencrypted. It's always so unbelievable to us what some huge companies do and get away with it (like Facebook) 💀

All that to say, we're extremely careful about security and privacy, along with limiting access because we are dealing with sensitive financial and personal data.

Payments In Flows

Nucleus Giving offers the ability to distinguish between tax and non-tax deductible funds that your congregation can give towards. This can be helpful if you have a one-off need for people to pay towards something that isn’t technically a donation. But if you find yourself often needing to process transactions and you have multiple funds that are more payment-focused rather than donation focused, Nucleus Flows might be the better option for you.

As long as you have an active Nucleus Giving subscription, you’ve unlocked the ability to take in online payments via Nucleus Flows! This allows you to create funds that are specifically designated for payments, not donations, for instances where people might need to pay for a book for a small group, or pay for an upcoming event, or even pay for church merch.

These types of payments don’t really make sense to house within Nucleus Giving. And since the Payment Step in Nucleus Flows uses the same processing account as your Nucleus Giving to take in those online payments, when you subscribe to Nucleus Giving, you gain access to the Payment Step in Flows too if you subscribe to that product!

The Payment Step is also a super familiar experience as found in the GivingFlow, while granting the ability for admins to customize dollar amounts, allowing for registrations, sign-ups, and other kinds of deductible and non-tax deductible payments.

We like to say that anything forms can do, Flows can do better. Imagine the GivingFlow, but a completely custom Flow you can create to ask whatever questions you need – that anyone in your church can fill out and submit to sign up for events, request to volunteer, ask to be baptized - you name it! And it’s all housed within your Nucleus Launcher, so people can access all the available next steps within your church - including giving! - in one location.

Note: While subscribing to Nucleus Giving unlocks the Payment Step, Nucleus Flows is a separately paid product at just $29/month.

Click here to learn more about Nucleus Flows.

Processing Account

Nucleus Giving partners with CardConnect to process all digital transactions (giving and payments alike). In order to activate your Nucleus Giving, every Church Account is required to submit a processing application (all done directly in your Nucleus Dashboard). Once submitted, our card processor reviews everything for security purposes, and after approving it, activates your processing account. It’s at this point, you can begin taking in online donations.

We have an entire guide on activating your processing account here.

Coming From RebelGive?

RebelGive is Nucleus Giving’s sister company, and in fact laid the foundation for Nucleus Giving! (She walked so Nucleus Giving could run 😌)

While RebelGive is still a viable online giving solution for churches, Nucleus offers a few significant improvements that we should note:

  • More robust giving stats available on every Transaction and Transfer List
  • More robust Transfer (payout) management (including mark-as-done when reconciling Transfers)
  • Collect more contact information from donors right in the GivingFlow with SmartContact upgrades
  • Robust fund management pages
  • Add descriptions to funds (designations)
  • Custom Flows for taking payments
  • Ability to limit GivingFlow methods (e.g. limit to just bank/ACH giving)
  • More robust donor / people database management
  • More nuanced annual tax statement options

So while there’s absolutely nothing wrong with continuing to use RebelGive, we always suggest at least taking a look at what Nucleus Giving offers 😉 You can read more details about the differences between Nucleus and RebelGive here.

Bottom line – if you’re looking to transition from RebelGive to Nucleus Giving, the great news is that it’s all very seamless. You don’t need to reapply for a new processing account, nor do you need to worry about your Givers setting up new accounts or new recurring donations. 

All your information moves over effortlessly  from RebelGive to your Nucleus Church Account: giving data, profile and people records - everything. Even your donor’s login credentials to their personal accounts remain the same!

Ready to transition from RebelGive to Nucleus Giving? Just send us a message to hello@nucleus.church and we’ll help you get started!

What Next?

Excited to learn how to set up your Nucleus Giving and become pros at managing all your giving data? We’re excited for you too! 😁 Click some of these great visual guides below:

Did this answer your question? Thanks for the feedback There was a problem submitting your feedback. Please try again later.