Adding contacts into Gloo for texting and emailing is easy! A Gloo profile in the People page is created for every person you add. Contacts can be created via Church Management System integration, manual creation, and/or any time someone texts in for the first time. If someone texts in and they don't already have a profile created, Gloo will automatically ask for their name and add that to their profile for easy use later.
How do I add a new person?
There are 3 easy ways for people to get profiles created in your Gloo account- manually adding people one at a time, bulk additions via integration or csv upload, and people texting in themselves.
Manually adding people
First, you can manually add people one by one via the People page. Note: Manual addition is only available on the web version of Gloo and not on the mobile app.
Click on the People menu on the left and click Add New Person or Add your first person if you have not yet added any contacts.
A first and last name are required, and you can enter either a phone number or an email address, or both. Note Groups are optional. If you have entered a phone number, make sure to check the box showing you have permission to text this number. Then click Create and add another if you are putting in multiple people, or click Create Person to complete a single new entry.
Note: After you create a new contact, if you want to start an individual conversation directly with them, you can navigate to People, search for that person, click on the contact's name and then on the message icon on the top left corner of the profile card. You will be then redirected to the Communication's tab and you will be able to start a new conversation with that contact.
Bulk additions
Second, if you have a large number of contacts to add in, you can bulk add people via a Planning Center integration, Church Community Builder Integration, Rock RMS integration, Hubspot integration, MinistryPlatform integration, or a CSV upload. Check out these articles for more information on how to use each!
People texting in for the first time
Third, if someone texts in for the first time and the Gloo system doesn't already recognize their phone number, the system will ask for their name and automatically create a profile for them on the People page. For more information on how you can customize this process, go check out our System Workflows Guide.
Note: If you see this error message, that means the phone number is assigned to a person already in your account. Search for the phone number under People to update the contact name.
What information do people's profiles show?
When you click on a person you will see their name, phone number, email, address, groups, their subscription statuses to text and email, and what date/time their profile was created. If you chose to do a Church Management Software integration, the other items can be pulled from there.
Lastly, you'll see each person's current Contact Status - Active, Inactive, Unsubscribed, Blocked, or Archived.
If this person was created in Gloo through a ChMS integration, you will also see their integration ID from that system.
How do I edit a person's profile?
Editing a person's profile in Gloo is different based on whether the person was created directly in your Gloo account, or was brought over from a ChMS integration.
If the contact was created directly in Gloo, you can completely control and edit their information in Gloo, since that information lives fully inside of your Gloo account. If the contact was created from a ChMS integration, you'll have less control in Gloo and will need to do most of the work directly in your ChMS.
Editing people created in Gloo
Click Edit Profile.
Edit any of the information you'd like. Any piece of information can be changed except for the date of profile creation. You can also add secondary phone numbers and email addresses here, and mark which of those is the primary address that all communication will be sent to by clicking the checkmark next to that number or email. When you're done click Save Profile.
Note: You can also update profiles for a large group of people using a CSV upload. Simply add the phone numbers of the people you’d like to edit, along with any relevant details that are changing. Gloo will update all of those contacts once the CSV is uploaded.
Editing people created from a ChMS integration
People who are created from a ChMS integration like Planning Center or CCB are not directly editable in Gloo. If you need to make changes to those profiles, you will have to do so on your ChMS and then re-sync the Integration in Gloo in order to have the changes applied to the respective profiles in Gloo.
The only piece of their profile that can be edited is their Status, which can be selected from Active, Inactive, Blocked, Archived, or Deleted.
Note: It is also not possible to add these contacts into a Gloo Group from their Profile. However, they can still be added to a Group directly on that Group's page.
How do I export people?
Click the Export Data icon in the top right corner of your People tab.
Choose the timeframe you'd like to export people from. This way you can export just the people added from a recent event, or everyone in your account.
If you select Include Unsubscribed, the report will also include people who have texted back STOP and opted out of your communication. If you select Include People's Groups, the report will include a column listing the Gloo groups each person is part of.
When you're finished, just click Download Now to download your csv file.
