Gloo has many powerful features, and understanding the similarities and differences between them can help you craft holistic strategies for communication and engagement with your church. Here is a brief comparison of Quick Responses and Keywords.
| Quick Responses | Keywords |
Single, automated responses | ✔ | ✔ |
Fully customizable | ✔ | ✔ |
Natural language processing | ✔ |
|
Built into Gloo, limited options | ✔ |
|
Manually created, unlimited possibilities |
| ✔ |
FAQ's | ✔ |
|
Specific, user-created functions |
| ✔ |
What is the same?
Quick Responses and Keywords are both used to send single, automated messages in response to people’s texts. The responses that are sent for both are fully customizable. Quick responses are set up by navigating to "Settings" then "Automations", and Keyword responses are set up in the Keyword tab when you create each individual keyword. And if you are very thorough in your setup, you can almost use Keywords to create your own custom Quick Responses.
What is different?
While they share some similarities, there are a few key differences between Quick Responses and Keywords.
Quick Responses use natural language processing, much like Siri or Alexa, to understand texts. So for example if someone texts in anything like “I want to give,” “how can I give,” or “can I give online,” Gloo will recognize the intent behind their text and activate the Giving Quick Response, as long as you have it turned on. Keywords, on the other hand, do not use this language processing, and so must be texted in exactly and alone.
Quick Responses are built into Gloo. In order to activate them, you need to turn them on and set up a response, but other than that no setup is required. Each keyword, on the other hand, must be set up manually. There aren’t any keywords specifically built into Gloo, but our Templates Library includes many options that make keywords quick to set up.
Because they are built into Gloo, Quick Responses offer a limited set of options that can’t be changed. Keywords, on the other hand, offer unlimited, customizable options for your church! You can create as many keywords as you’d like for as many different functions as you’d like.
Quick Responses are set up to act like FAQs for your church. They are set up around generalized topics that people often want to know about like giving, service times, and social media. The main goal behind them is to ease administrative burden. Keywords, on the other hand, are set up for much more specific purposes, such as sending more information about a mission trip or registering for an event.
Pro tip: Read more here about some best practices for setting up your Keywords.
What are some common misconceptions?
One misconception is that Keywords, like Quick Responses, use natural language processing. This isn’t true. If you set up a keyword for “mission trip,” then only a text that says exactly “mission trip” will activate the keyword. “I want to go on the mission trip,” “when is the mission trip,” “mission trips,” and a misspelling like “mision trip” will not work.
Another misconception is that keywords need to be set up for everything, including functions like Quick Responses, Stories, and Prayer that do use natural language processing. This is also not true, and if you set up keywords for those features, you will actually break the natural language processing and prevent that feature from working the way it was intended.