Welcome to your Reach tab! This tab helps connect you to your community and reach out beyond the doors of your church or organization. Explorers are people in your area who are looking for someone to help them process life’s big questions through meaningful conversation. Our ad partners do all the work of gathering Explorers and Gloo sends them into your Explorer Inbox, so all you have to do is to use our easy texting features to reach out and start a conversation!
This feature is only available for premium accounts. If you have a free account and would like to upgrade to a premium account, just go to your Reach tab and click Start Now to get started!
If you haven't already, make sure to check out our Full Account Setup Guide for a few necessary setup steps every account must take. Once you've completed those, come back here to go through a few steps that are highly recommended to get started with the Reach tab.
Basic Setup Steps
Update your church’s full address
When signing up for a premium account, you should be prompted to enter in your church address. However, since we send Explorers to the church with the closest zip code to them, it's always a good idea to make sure your information is up to date. To check, just go to the Settings gear icon in the top right of your screen, then click on Account Settings on the left side.
Configure your notifications
If you hop on over to our best practices for interacting with Explorers, you'll notice that responding quickly is incredibly important. Explorers are automatically sent to your account, and each one of your team members can configure their notifications individually to make sure the correct people are notified. Just go to Settings -> My User Profile -> Notifications to make changes.
Note: All new accounts are set to receive all 3 types of notifications by email and push notification by default.
Review your Reach Settings
Your Reach Settings are where you can configure when to receive Explorers, and to some extent, what type and how many. Every new account begins with a Paused status for 3 days to give you time to get oriented to your account. After that your status switches back to Active and you'll begin receiving Explorers. You can come back to these settings any time to Pause receiving Explorers, or adjust the number and type of Explorers you receive.
Learn to respond to Explorers
Three days after signing up, your account automatically goes Active and you'll start receiving Explorers. Congratulations! But how can you respond to them? It's easy with the Gloo platform. Just head over to our Quick Start Guide to learn how to respond to your first Explorer. You'll find instructions here on how to respond, how to assign Explorers to the appropriate team member, and where to go for more resources.
It's important to know that at this time, any church or organization with a premium Gloo account needs to be prepared to respond to any type of Explorer. We cannot send specific types of Explorers to specific churches. For instance, if you run a women's ministry, you will still receive both male and female Explorers. Or if your church is focused specifically on ministry to people dealing with drug and alcohol addiction, you will still receive Explorers dealing with issues outside of those specific areas.
Next Steps
As you'll quickly discover, Explorers are reaching out on a wide variety of topics, from relationships to spiritual questions to mental health to finding a church home. It's one thing to respond to them, but it's another thing entirely to respond to them well. How quickly do you need to respond? What should you say? Is it ok to invite them to church? What should you say to someone struggling with depression? What about grief and loss?
We're here to help! We have an ever-growing library of resources to help point you in the right direction. If you go to the Reach section of our Help Center and scroll down just a bit, you'll see a whole collection of articles about Best Practices, Tips, and Training. Here we'll highlight just a few of those articles you should definitely check out before moving on: