So you've signed up for a Gloo account, gathered and trained your team, activated your account, and now the Explorers are coming into your account. That's great! Hopefully you've already checked out our 5 Keys to Successful Explorer Interactions, but if you haven't, take a moment now to glance through it. You'll notice the first key to is respond quickly. When responded to within 15 minutes, we see response rates from Explorers as high as 70%. But if you wait more than 24 hours, that rate decreases significantly. The best way to create an impactful, lasting conversation with an Explorer is to "strike while the iron is hot" and respond to them quickly, while the issue is still on their mind.

So, how can you manage all this? If you are a pastor attempting to coordinate your Gloo account all by yourself, responding so quickly probably won't be possible. That is one reason we highly recommend you build a team to help respond to Explorers. This is a fantastic way to get others from your church involved in digital ministry, and having a team will drastically reduce your average response time, which will in turn drastically increase your response rates from Explorers!

Below are 3 strategies that we've seen work as churches have tried to put systems in place to make sure that they are responding quickly, and that they are connecting Explorers with the right person from their team.

Some churches, particularly those with large teams, prefer to set things up so that the first team member to see a new Explorer message responds. In this method, every team member leaves their profile notifications on, and the first team member to see the notification and log in simply assigns the conversation to themself using the icon next to the Explorer's name.

This method works well for large teams of self-starters, because it ensures that the Explorer will get the fastest response possible.

It works well for some churches to build their team and have most team members turn off their profile notifications, but have one person leave them on. This person will be the "primary administrator" for your account. Whenever they receive a notification that a new Explorer has been matched with the account, they can sign in, view the Explorer, and decide which team member would be best to communicate with that Explorer. They can then assign the Explorer to that team member, who will receive an email notification of the assignment. Note that this individual notification will always trigger, even if the profile notifications are turned off for that team member.

This method may sacrifice a little bit of speed, but it will ensure that each Explorer is paired with the best team member to have the conversation, and not just the first team member to see the message.

Finally, some churches prefer to set up a rotation of who is responsible for responding to new Explorers. Each week, one person will turn their profile notifications on, while the others leave them off. That person will respond to all new Explorers for that week, assigning them to themself as they go. The next week, the responsibility will shift, a new team member will turn their notifications on, the previous team member will turn theirs off, and the rotation continues.

In this method, since all texts from your Gloo account are sent from the same phone number, it is possible to have the team member for that week handle all ongoing conversations with Explorers, whether they are new or not. However, for the sake of continuity and getting to know people, we do recommend that once a team member begins a conversation, they leave that conversation assigned to themself and continue talking with that Explorer, even if it is no longer "their week" to respond to new Explorers.