One of the most powerful ways church and ministry leaders can care for their people is to pray for them. Churches all over the country are inviting people to send in prayer requests, but often people never hear back, and never know if their prayer requests have truly been heard or prayed for. But with Gloo, no prayer request will ever fall through the cracks again!
Gloo uses natural language processing to automatically recognize and flag when someone texts in a prayer request. You can then easily respond to your people's prayer requests and create a genuine two-way conversation between the person needing prayer and the team member that is praying for them.
As soon as you've claimed your phone number, you are ready to start capturing prayer requests. It's that simple! No additional setup is required.
Capturing prayer requests via text
All you have to do is tell someone to text your phone number something like "Pray for [prayer request]" or "I need prayer for [prayer request]" and Gloo makes the rest easy. As long as their text includes the word pray or prayer, they will trigger the Prayer feature.
Note: See additional ideas for getting people to text in their requests at the bottom of this article.
Someone texted in a prayer request, now what?
Immediately upon sending in a request, a person will get a text back saying something like "Thanks for sending in that prayer request" in order to immediately acknowledge them sharing their request. This can be customized and turned on or off using your Customizations tab.
Note: If this is someone's first text message into your phone number, Gloo will automatically amend the text message sent back to ask for their name. This gives you 3 important things in one interaction - a phone number, a vulnerable request, and a name!
2. Then, that person's request will come into your Inbox in Gloo under Prayers in your Messaging menu, flagged with the yellow "Needs Prayer" status.
3. You can respond to the request by clicking into the conversation and then clicking the Mark as Prayed button.
4. Simply press Send Message to send a pre-filled response, which can be edited in your Customizations tab, or type out an entirely custom note!
Important: This second text message is so powerful because it closes the communication loop. Never again will your congregation fear their request is going unseen and un-prayed for!
Additional Ideas
Not ready to ask your entire congregation to text in? Try asking for prayer requests amongst at your staff team meeting!
Use a slide like this one during church services to ask for requests.
Print flyers with an SMS QR code and distribute them at an outreach to capture a prayer request from people you might not have met before.
