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 People -> Integrations and click Connect under the platform of you're choosing.
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.
Free Gloo accounts are limited to 3 Groups in Gloo. This means that if you try and sync more than 3 groups/lists from your ChMS, you will be prompted to upgrade your account. To use more than 3 Groups, consider upgrading to a Gloo+ membership!
Existing accounts with more than 3 groups/lists synced will not be required to upgrade unless you try and add more groups/lists, or try to manually sync.
Existing accounts with more than 3 groups/lists synced can continue to use the automatic nightly sync like normal without being required to upgrade.
Gloo+ users can sync and edit as many groups/lists as they'd like with no restrictions at all!
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.
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 and only adds a single user with each phone number. Be aware that if you have families where children share phone numbers with their parents, Gloo will only pull over one of those contacts into the system.
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 People -> Integrations and click the Import button. For more details on this process, be sure to check out our Import People via CSV Upload article.
Note: If you get a message at the very end of the importing process telling you the support team needs to look over your upload, please do not resubmit! We will approve your file as soon as possible- feel free to email us at support@gloo.us if you need a quicker approval time!
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 People -> Integrations and clicking Connect under the integration. For more information, read our MailChimp Integration article.
