It’s important to make sure that no message falls through the cracks so that people feel heard and engaged with. Fortunately, Gloo has plenty of built-in features to prevent this from happening. One way to make sure you’re up to date on all your communication is by setting up notifications - there are three places in Gloo where you can do this.
1. Profile notification settings
There are three notification options in your profile which you can toggle on or off. In a new account these settings have the Email Me and Send a Push Notification options turned on by default, and each team member is able to configure their own settings. For each type of notification, you can choose to receive a text, an email, a push notification in the mobile app, or any combination of the three.
The first option, when toggled on, will notify you every time a new prayer request is submitted, and the second option notifies you when any new unresolved message comes in, including messages sent from explorers once you have already started to interact with them. The third option will notify you whenever a brand new explorer is routed into your account.
Note: In order to receive text notifications, you will be prompted to first verify your phone number in your main profile settings.
2. Manually assigning messages to trigger a notification
Some team members may not want the notifications above turned on since they are sent out for every single prayer request, unresolved message and new explorer. It may be helpful to have one main administrator with those notifications turned on who can then assign individual messages to different team members. There are three places where individual messages can be assigned to a team member, who will then automatically receive an email notification.
This type of notification only goes out via email, and at this time cannot be customized to go out via text or push notification in the mobile app.
These type of notifications also override the team member's profile notification settings. For example, if a team member has the "notify me when a new prayer request" notification turned off, they will still get an email notification for any specific requests that you assign to them.
When a new prayer request comes in, it can be manually assigned to a specific team member in the Prayer tab. That team member will receive an email notification, regardless of how their profile notifications are set.
When a new unresolved message comes in, it can be manually assigned to a specific team member in the Messages tab. That team member will receive an email notification, regardless of how their profile notifications are set.
Explorers can be assigned to team members at any time in the Explorer Inbox. The team member the explorer is assigned to will receive an email notification, regardless of how their profile notifications are set.
3. Using Effects
Effects can be added to Automations, Keywords, and Series to perform several additional administrative tasks. The “Email team members” effect can be added to send a notification email to a specific team member each time someone interacts with that particular Automation, Keyword, or Series.
For example, the effect can be added to your “Mission Trip” keyword so that each time someone texts in “Mission Trip” the team leader gets an email notification of the signup. Or you could add the effect to your “giving” Automation so that each time someone asks about giving, one of your team members will get an email notification so that they can reach out to follow up and thank them for their gift.
Similar to notifications triggered by conversation assignments, these notifications only go out by email, and they go out no matter what, regardless of how a team member's profile notifications are set.
Who receives which notification?
Making sure no message falls through the cracks is important, but it also isn't ideal to receive a flood of notifications from Gloo that may or may not relate to conversations you're responsible for. Because of this, the Gloo platform is set up to only send notifications to the team members they apply to.
Unassigned Conversations
If any conversation in Gloo (Prayer request, Explorer message in Reach, conversation with a congregant in Engage, etc) is not specifically assigned to any of your team members, the system will notify multiple team members to make sure nothing falls through the cracks.
If a team member is an administrator or has their permission levels set to be able to interact with all groups, they will receive prayer and unresolved message notifications for all incoming, unassigned messages of those types. However, if a team member only has access to specific groups in their permission levels, they will only receive notifications for unassigned messages from people in those groups.
Any team member with access to the "Explorer Conversations" permission level who turns on the unresolved message and new Explorer notifications will receive those notifications for all Explorers that aren't assigned to a specific team member.
Assigned Conversations
If any conversation in Gloo (Prayer request, Explorer message in Reach, conversation with a congregant in Engage, etc) has been assigned to a specific team member (or multiple team members), only those team members assigned to that conversation will receive those notifications, assuming they have them turned on in their profile notification settings.