Profile of Gloo, which compiles profiles on Americans and is used by 30K+ US churches, or 10% of all in the US, to target ad campaigns at people facing a crisis
A small company called Gloo mines online data for people who might be receptive to evangelizing and church outreach — Struggling with grief? Tweets: @zoebritton , @bethblackshire , @dannydougherty , @verambergen , @patiencehaggin , @antoniogm , @hypervisible , @tpcarney , and @ryanburge Tweets: @zoebritton : That's not a church. That's a cult. https://twitter.com/... Elizabeth Blackshire / @bethblackshire : Struggling with grief? On the verge of divorce? Churches are ready to deliver a digital intervention, with help from Big Data. https://www.wsj.com/... via @WSJ Danny Dougherty / @dannydougherty : I think there are a lot worse ways that data miners could target folks in crisis, but this also doesn't feel like the witnessing I've known https://www.wsj.com/... Vera Bergengruen / @verambergen : “Gloo said it was started with a moral imperative to give churches access to the same kind of data and technology used by major corporations.” “If you don't come to church, the church will come to you.” Fascinating piece by @khadeeja_safdar https://www.wsj.com/... Patience / @patiencehaggin : Churches are turning to targeted ads too. Fascinating dive by @khadeeja_safdar https://www.wsj.com/... @antoniogm : These Protestants do religion like others do business, and business like others do religion. https://www.wsj.com/... Surveillance Killjoy / @hypervisible : Company claims it “can predict the characteristics of people who might have a marriage in trouble, be suffering from depression or anxiety, or have a propensity for a drug addiction, based on data analysis.” Over 30k churches have joined the platform. https://www.wsj.com/... Tim Carney / @tpcarney : Christianity is really one of the worst business propositions ever. https://twitter.com/... Ryan Burge / @ryanburge : What's funny about this tweet is that a key theory in our field is that religion is a marketplace. They compete for consumers just like Nike courts new shoe buyers. This leads churches to innovate as a means to gain market share. When a religion gets complacent, it declines. https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Faith groups had already moved counseling, services and study online through virtual ministry tools, while Facebook was expanding outreach with faith organizations during the pandemic. Gloo adds a more targeted layer: churches can use inferred crisis signals to direct outreach rather than simply broadcast online.
Later coverage of neighborhood-level religious and ethnic mapping shows that data-led proselytizing extended beyond Gloo’s crisis-focused ad targeting, making the permission boundary around religious outreach more consequential.
First-order effects
- Gloo gives more than 30,000 churches a way to aim ad campaigns at people it identifies as facing grief, divorce, depression or addiction.
- People whose online activity contributes to Gloo’s profiles become targets for religious outreach at moments of heightened vulnerability, raising the privacy and ethical concerns identified in the coverage.
Second-order effects
- Church outreach teams can shift spending from broad digital ministry toward audiences selected by crisis-related predictions, increasing the value of Gloo’s profiling capability.
- The use of sensitive inferred traits for evangelizing puts greater pressure on data-targeting providers to justify how profiles are assembled and used.
Third-order effects
- Religious organizations are becoming participants in the same data-mediated audience market as other digital advertisers, with outreach increasingly shaped by profiling systems rather than only local relationships.
- As tools such as Gloo and Bless Every Home proliferate, the durable fault line is likely to be whether public or inferred data creates meaningful permission to target people on religion and personal vulnerability.
The trend: Faith outreach is moving from general-purpose digital communication toward data-driven identification and targeting of specific communities and vulnerable individuals.