How a church chose between Gloo and Clearstream
"Texting feels more like a need than a want at this point in ministry culture, especially if you are a busy church with a vibrant student life and children's ministry like ours."
Anna is the office systems coordinator at First Baptist Church in Marble Falls, Texas. First Baptist has mid-week kids' and youth meetings, small groups, and young adult groups, as well as three Sunday services.
As part of her role, Anna helped choose a texting platform that worked well for their staff and helped them connect with their church members.
Our staff values reliability, ease of use, and, most importantly, a strong integration with Planning Center.
"We take stewardship seriously, and so we want to make sure we are making wise decisions as we invest in subscriptions and software. Our church has experimented with several texting tools over the last 10 years. Needless to say, we have tried some things that didn't work for us."
What didn't work
Anna started out using Gloo.
"We were drawn to their platform by their price point — $0 at the time we signed on. Fairly quickly in our relationship with them, we experienced issues such as major pricing restructures with very short lead times and difficulty finding reports and data to help us understand our texting needs (even when we asked customer service agents for help)."
These things caused a feeling of instability to us as clients, because it felt like a lack of transparency. Perhaps most challenging: we encountered significant difficulty managing the integration between Planning Center and the Gloo platform.
"This eventually caused messages to fail to reach certain members, and we were never able to find a way around this problem. We also found that the way profiles were syncing (or not syncing) was causing some data management issues."
While customer support was always friendly, they often couldn't help me solve the big problems with the bridge between our Planning Center database and the Gloo platform without significant ongoing manual upkeep, which felt unsustainable.
Church texting that works with Planning Center
After the problems with Gloo, Anna started looking for another texting service. She tried out multiple platforms before landing on Clearstream.
Clearstream is one of Planning Center's most recommended tools for texting, and its integration is close to seamless. No more having to sync, import, or do any of the data gymnastics that we had been doing before.
"Other things we like about Clearstream are the straightforward inbox and, of course, the ability to text a list of event contacts from within Planning Center itself, which is a complete game-changer."
Easy to use & intuitive
For Anna, it was also important to find a tool that was easy for her staff to use.
"We have a fairly deep staff for our church size, so it has become important to me to consider the learning curve — the training and upkeep required — for our whole team to use it."
I knew almost immediately that I could roll this tool out to my team in confidence. It was a natural flow that they would be able to pick up without extensive, repetitive training from me.
"Setting up keywords and workflows was logical and intuitive compared to some other competitors we experimented with — it just makes sense, without the clunkiness I found in some other places."
Conclusion
Clearstream has given us the reliability, ease of use, and great integration we were looking for. And we appreciate the superior Planning Center integration.
"The benefits that we found in Clearstream have absolutely made it worth the price point for us, and I confidently recommend it to my colleagues in the church worker space."
Thank you, Anna and First Baptist Church Marble Falls!
Curious about switching from Gloo?
Read more reviews here.
Clearstream is a church texting service trusted by 10,000+ churches, ministries, and nonprofits to communicate with their people on a weekly basis. We're a small, product-focused team that offers killer customer support and transparent pricing, and we're constantly updating our software based on customer feedback.