Fall is just around the corner, which means it’s been over 7 months since we introduced five entirely new products to the Nucleus Universe. And while summer usually means students get a long vacation, our team has been hard at work, updating and improving all our current products – and even creating new ones. (More on that in a bit 👀)
Now, there are far too many refinements to all our products to name one by one. But let’s take a look at some of the key upgrades our team has released over the past few months.
The Launcher
If you’ve logged into your Dashboard recently, you’ll have noticed that The Launcher has been renamed to Next Steps This is to be more inclusive of the various elements pertaining to your church’s next steps engine – which means there’s more than just the Launcher that lives there now 🥳
Joining the Next Steps family is Banners, which pairs beautifully with the Launcher. Banners appear at the top of your website and help to highlight any important event, deadline, or announcement – and it matches perfectly with your Launcher’s theme.
Hot tip! You can schedule a Banner to appear and end at specific dates/times, and ensure that the right call to action button is just a click away.
Oh, and if you already have the Launcher installed on your website, there’s no additional code you need to add to activate Banners. Simply open your Nucleus Dashboard, create a Banner, and publish it.
Best of all? Banners is also 100% free! Our commitment is to provide products to the Church at large focused on next steps, and Banners is yet another incredible feature that closes the loop on where most church websites are lacking in this arena.
🚩 Read all about this release here 🚩
Prayer
Nucleus Prayer is probably more robust than you realize, with lots of hidden gems to uncover 💎
But because Prayer is such a powerful tool, it might have seemed a bit overwhelming in the past. That’s why our team redesigned and refreshed the Prayer Dashboard! Prayer is now even easier to set up and manage.
When you add Prayer to your Launcher, you open up the Prayer Hub, an entire prayer app dedicated to facilitating spiritual practice on the go, wherever your congregation finds themselves.
The Prayer Hub is made up of 3 key pieces:
- The PrayerFlow, which is a really easy way for anyone to share a prayer request.
- The PrayerWall, where your congregation accesses and views your church’s prayer requests.
- PrayerTime, which is a special view we created that helps you spend time in prayer in a more distraction-free environment.
Oh, and people can also request follow-up communication regarding their prayer requests, and be notified of any new prayer requests added to the Prayer Wall. Now everyone in your church can stay up to date with the latest prayer requests, not just admins.
All of this lives directly inside your Launcher as a next step for online spiritual practice.
And now, with the design refresh in the Nucleus Dashboard, admins can now better keep track of prayer requests in your Inbox, manage your Prayer Wall much more effectively, and find where to activate email notifications with ease.
If you haven’t taken a dive into this incredible FREE product yet, what are you waiting for?
👐 Read all about the redesign here 👐
Flows
Probably one of the most helpful updates to Flows from a security point of view is the addition to the volunteer admin access level. Now you can give any volunteer access who needs to view and update results from a specific Flow without affording them permission to delete results, edit the Flow, or invite other admins.
When providing someone with access to your Nucleus, you shouldn’t have to worry about whether they can make changes or access areas of your account they shouldn’t. Privacy and security continues to be of utmost importance to us, and this permission level hopefully provides you with more confidence in us and our platform 😊
👩💻 Read all about this release here 👨💻
One other major improvement that’s been one of the biggest requests since Quantity Limits was released is the ability for admins to see how many items are left to be selected in a Multiple Choice step. Now, you can easily see how many items have been selected and how many are left directly within the Results tab of your Flow.
(Never say your requests fall on deaf ears 😉)
This provides a much better admin experience when trying to calculate numbers and prepare for events.
🔢 Read all about this release here 🔢
Giving
Giving records and financial data should have all i’s dotted and t’s crossed, which is why we’re committed to give you all the tools necessary to make financial record keeping as accurate and easy as possible in Nucleus Giving.
We understand that sometimes there can be multiple people records with giving history that needs to be merged to a single person record. This summer, we introduced the ability for certain admins with the appropriate permissions and access levels to reassign financial records – either a single transaction or in bulk. We hope this helps in maintaining accurate records and consolidating information where it makes sense.
💸 Read all about transaction reassignment here 💸
Another improvement to point out (one that was also requested several times) is that My Giving no longer shows in a personal My Nucleus account unless someone has actually used Nucleus Giving to donate to your church. (In fact, we extended this to My Prayers and My Submissions as well, where if someone has yet to submit a prayer request or Flow, those cards don’t appear in their My Nucleus account.)
This should help minimize any confusion people were having when logging into their My Nucleus account, saw My Giving, but your church uses another giving platform. (No shame if that’s you. But now that we’re on that topic, you should switch over. You’ll almost certainly save money. No pressure though 😉)
Want to see how much you could save? Find out using our savings calculator.
People + Messages
Record keeping in Nucleus People has received major improvements, which should put a smile on your face if you’re in charge of managing those records.
With filtering options, better search functionality, and custom column views, finding the records you’re looking for should be much smoother. And perhaps more importantly, you can now download a .csv file of your master people records as well as any people lists! Gone are the days of writing with pen and paper. You can now customize and download your report with just a few clicks of a button.
And perhaps an extra hidden gem that we should point out: admins can now add notes to a person’s profile. Oh! And you can also see someone’s activity directly in their person record. So whether someone has Giving history, submitted a Flow, or a prayer request, you can see this within the Activity Tab in a person’s record.
📝 Read about all of these updates here 📝
One more thing…
I did say something about creating new products, didn’t I? While I touched on this with the introduction of Banners, Banners is more of an addition to the Next Steps platform rather than an entirely new product.
So what could I have meant?
I guess you’ll just have to stay tuned to see what else we have up our sleeves for the rest of 2022 🤯 😱 🎉
Keep your eyes peeled for more updates!
Wanting to try out any of these products now that we’ve expanded their capabilities? Reach out to our support team and we’ll get you hooked up with the right access.
Haven’t even tried out Nucleus yet? Well then right now is the perfect opportunity! Click here to get started.