Integrations are the simplest way to quickly populate your Gloo account with people. Rather than adding people one by one or waiting on your congregants to text into your Gloo phone number, you can easily upload your entire contact list into your Gloo account with just a few clicks.
Gloo currently integrates with six church management systems: HubSpot, Planning Center, Church Community Builder, Rock RMS, MinistryPlatform, and Salesforce. Don't use any of these databases? No problem! You can also upload a CSV file with all of your contacts. Finally, you can sync your Gloo contacts and groups out into Mailchimp lists.
Church Management System Integrations
In order to begin an Integration with your Church Management System, just navigate to My People -> Integrations and click Configure.
Then select the Integration you'd like to set up and follow the steps provided.
For more detail and instructions on each, make sure to check out the following articles:
A few important notes:
For the six Integrations listed above, each account can only have one active Integration.
Each Integration will give you the option to sync everyone from your Church Management System into Gloo, or just certain groups/lists. But once you connect the Integration, those people will be permanently in your Gloo account. You cannot remove them by disconnecting the Integration. If you need to delete someone, you can check out some instructions here.
Your Integration will automatically sync and update every night at midnight.
In most cases, changes made to your Gloo account will not affect contacts in your ChMS itself. For example, adding Joe to a Group in Gloo will not automatically add Joe to that List in your Planning Center account. The only exception is that Gloo is able to create new users in your ChMS if they text into your Gloo account and don't already exist in the ChMS (if you have that box checked in your Integrations details).
If you notice a discrepancy between how many people are in your ChMS database and how many actually get pulled into Gloo, note a few things:
Gloo only pulls people over with a phone number listed in your ChMS. Before you connect your integration, make sure that everyone's mobile phone numbers are their primary numbers, as home phone numbers will not work.
Gloo only pulls people over that are older than 13.
Gloo removes any duplicate phone numbers.
Gloo only pulls over people that are "active" in your ChMS.
CSV Uploads
Don't use any of the Church Management Systems listed above? No problem! Most databases have a simple option to export your contacts into a CSV file. You can take that information, put it into Gloo's template, and easily upload your whole contact list to your Gloo account.
To get started with your import, just go to My People -> Integrations and click the green Import button. For more details on this process, be sure to check out our Import People via CSV Upload article.
MailChimp Integration
Our MailChimp Integration is the only integration designed to push data out of Gloo rather than import data into Gloo. This Integration is found the same way as the ChMS integrations by going to My People -> Integrations and clicking Configure. Then just choose MailChimp from the list. For more information, read our MailChimp Integration article.