ShelbyNext Membership vs Nucleus: Which is a better fit?

Alisha: My name is Alisha and I am a director of communications. I work for a nonprofit religious organization, and I would give ShelbyNext a five out of five. One of the things that I was looking for when I was looking at different programs for our church to move towards was user-friendliness and how our current staff, old and new, would dive into the program. And the different programs that I looked at, they may have had a few more features, but they weren't as user-friendly. So we looked at Planning Center and, again, they have some great options. It just wasn't a good fit for us. We also looked at Raiser's Edge. We looked at Text in Church. There were a lot of different pro tools out there that we could have used, but none of them met the need quite like Shelby did for us. The reason, the biggest reason that we chose ShelbyNext was because it was able to have our members and our giving all at one location. Lots of the other programs we saw, they just couldn't do that and do it well. So our members can check into Sunday school classes, they can make a gift during a service, and then, they can also see the address and things of maybe somebody else in their Sunday school class. So there was lots of different options for us to be able to get everybody under one umbrella. That was ShelbyNext. It made everything so much easier from an admin perspective, as well as for our members. They didn't have to have four different apps to be able to come to church and enjoy what was going on. And they were able to be more connected and more intentional with their relationships. Onboarding was what I was most concerned about when we got this product. It's not always easy to train a bunch of people on how to use something the right way, but the team at Shelby made it so easy for us. We purchased the package that included eight hours of in-person training, as well as eight hours of virtual training. And their online and in-person trainers are out of this world, and we still call them to this day. They were able to come on and teach our staff all together, as well as a few of us, more specific needs. And again, their customer service, any time that we've had a call or a question, if they hadn't been able to answer it right away, they call us right back that same day. So onboarding was just super, super easy. Over the past year, they've added a lot of extra options for us. We're always getting new interns or even new staff members. And so, we don't have to do that full onboarding process every time somebody comes on. There are step-by-step tutorials and videos that are available on each screen that you go to on ShelbyNext that make it really easy just to jump right in and get started with just a few bits of basic knowledge. If your organization is looking for a product like Shelby that the offers membership, scheduling, giving, all of those things, I highly recommend that you take some time and call somebody from Shelby to see how they can tailor their program to fit yours. They are always adding new things and we've even called and seen if they will add a new feature just for our church, to which they will put in their products. We have seen that happen over and over and over again. Right now during COVID, we've experienced a few growing pains and Shelby has been there to work with us and to let us know that they're also doing some development on their backend. That has already started to help us with our check-in processes and making social distancing even easier with their check-in system. I would also like to say that if you're thinking about using a program, maybe such as Pushpay, which is something that we looked at for our giving, they were able to do some different automations for us and donor recognition through their giving site that I don't have a lot of time to tell you about right now. But it is worth, again, setting up a zoom call with one of their sales reps so they can see how it can make a big difference for you. The number one thing that I can say is nobody at their organization is going to be pushy with you. That was a major turnoff for some others that we looked at, but the people at ShelbyNext, they're kind, they're considerate. And again, they just want what's best for you. They're not just worried about selling their product.

Addison R.: Hey, I'm Addison. I'm an online pastor and I would give Nucleus a five out of five. Before Nucleus, we like 13% of the internet were on WordPress through a CMS using a template, stuff like that. We looked at a lot of options when we were looking at changing over our internet. What we were looking for was a mobile responsive design. We were looking for something that was going to be easy to use for people, but visually appealing to people who cared about what your website look like. We looked at a company called The Church Co who basically is very similar to WordPress in a lot of ways. And we looked at Nucleus. When we came to Nucleus, there were a lot of reasons that drew us into it. First of all, your homepage is beautiful. It's modeled after Instagram and YouTube user interfaces, and it just looks great. You see it, it looks familiar. It looks professional. But at the same time, we wanted ease of use. As a church, we have volunteers that are changing this thing. We want people to be able to go in and edit things. So we couldn't have something where they were messing with code. And we couldn't have something where it was possible to, frankly, mess it up too badly. So we sat down and we said, "Okay, here's a product that looks great. It's always going to look great no matter what we do to it. It's really hard to mess up." Yes, you lose some customization there, but what you have is a product that looks good all the time. That anytime somebody goes on your website, it's going to look great. And then of course there was Brady and the team at Pro Church Tools. Their responsiveness kind of in our one-month free trial was incredible. There's a chat bot that's built right into your content management system. If you have questions, if you need a custom piece of code, if there's something that your website can't do, you throw it in there. And honestly, usually within three or four hours, you have an answer from somebody on their team who's helping you to have the thing that you need for your website. And they are always working. Just in the time that we've been with them, they've done several content upgrades. They've done several updates to how it works. And they've added features that we've asked for. So it really has been a great experience. So the hardest thing about church ministry has always changed, right? So when you're working with people, a lot of times, people like the sameness, they like the security of what was there before. So getting people on board was probably the most challenging part, but on our end it was incredibly easy. I think it took me about like six to eight hours of just kind of sitting in front of the computer, going through our old web page page by page and building out our new page. And then once it was done, we really didn't have to do much in the way of selling it. We sent it out to kind of a small group people. We said, "Hey, can you thumb around? Can you give us feedback?" And the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. The onboarding process was pretty simple. We just worked with Bluehost who does our URL and stuff like that. And we had to have it redirect to the right place, and all that type of stuff. That's what you do when you have to change over website stuff, we had to go into our Google side, have them do a crawl, all that type of stuff to have everything update and switch over. But as far as the things that Nucleus could control, it was incredibly easy for me as one person who doesn't have a ton of coding experience. I mean, I couldn't code a website from scratch. I've never built anything on GitHub. I don't have that type of knowledge base, but I was able to just kind of design a beautiful website right there on my computer as I sat and watched football on a Sunday afternoon. I think when you're considering Nucleus, you have to basically make kind of a front-end decision and that front-end decision is, "Do I want infinite customization or do I want something that's just going to work?" And the fact is you probably work in church ministry, the website probably isn't your only job. It probably isn't the only thing you have going on. The reality of your situation is probably a lot more like, "Man, we are ready to kind of maybe spend a little bit of money on this, but if we're going to spend money, it just needs to work." Because you had to get this approved by 14 people just to spend of that $1,200 or whatever the full year is. And you just want it to go. You want to hit go live and you want it to work out. And you want it to be able to be managed by a volunteer. So in my mind, Nucleus is kind of an open and shut case because when you sit down with it, it's like I said, the downside is it's going to look the same. Your website is largely going to look similar to every other Nucleus page. And that might be frustrating for you, but what you lose in customization, you gain back in the fact that it just works. It doesn't look a lot different from maybe another Nucleus page, but it's going to work every time you get into it and you can easily train a volunteer to get into it. And there's no concern that they're going to mess up the homepage, that they're accidentally going to hide something, that they're going to put in some type of rogue CSS that's going to mess up the way the banners look. And they are responsive in what they're going to add. There's a Facebook group full of church leaders who are asking for things and they're building them into the platform as they go. So when you're considering Nucleus, I think you have to ask yourself, "Do I want customization?" If customization is important to you, I really wouldn't recommend it. But if you're willing to kind of work within kind of their ecosystem, I think you're going to find yourself a lot happier. You're going to find yourself a lot more distressed. And you're going to find yourself not being the only person on your team who can edit the website. And instead, you can train people from various departments and even volunteers to edit the website and make minor updates.