Gloo

2021: Collaboration with churches in the US to attract followers

At the end of December 2021, it became known that American churches began to resort to the use of Big Data tools to attract more parishioners. The US company Gloo is engaged in providing a service for analyzing the personal data and actions of Americans on the Internet. This is done to help churches find the people who are most likely to be open to their messages and join their communities across the country.

Just as retailers or political candidates send online ads to groups of people with certain characteristics including: demographic data, viewing activity, buying behavior, churches can use the Gloo service to advertise to groups of people who they believe are most susceptible to becoming church members, or believe they can help. Gloo buys some data from third-party organizations or collects from open sources and opinion polls, some data is provided to it by religious organizations themselves. The more details about the personal life of a particular person, the more opportunities to find an approach to him and convince him that he needs a specific religious organization. The service sends advertising appeals to potential parishioners in which help is offered, support for the church, something better is promised.

How the church uses Big Data to attract new followers

According to churches, people facing a personal crisis are likely to be open to outreach, and Gloo is processing the data to try to identify them. The company's marketing materials say that based on data analysis, the company can predict the characteristics of people who may have a troubled marriage, suffer from depression or anxiety, or have a tendency to drug addiction. According to marketing documents, Gloo includes thousands of data points from third-party suppliers, as well as data that it itself collects through churches with which it collaborates. The company also creates web pages where it invites people who suffer from such problems to contact local churches, and sites are promoted through advertising on social networks or through Google ads related to certain search queries.

According to the leadership of Gloo, more than 30 thousand churches signed up for its platform. According to the company, this is about 10% of US churches. Among customers there are free and premium users, and the average premium client pays $1.5 thousand a year. For some churches, advertising on the Internet is part of efforts to preserve their parishioners, as the pandemic of coronavirus infection (COVID-19) has accelerated a long-term drop in church parish attendance.^[1]

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