Where Gloo-Type Platforms and ERP Backbones Meet

Religious Publishing’s Technology Opportunity

Religious publishing is enjoying a relatively healthy business climate.

U.S. religious-press revenue increased 2.9% in 2025 to approximately $926 million. The category continues to demonstrate greater resilience than many observers might expect, while other sectors of the publishing industry look on enviously, at a stable market, engaged communities, and content that often remains commercially relevant for years.

There are risks. Retail concentration on Amazon and church networks, changing discovery patterns, and pressure on discretionary spending remain concerns. Nevertheless, relative stability gives religious publishers an opportunity to invest in technology before they are forced to do so under duress.

Two types of systems may be particularly relevant. Firstly, audience and engagement platforms represented by companies such as Gloo, and secondly, publishing ERP platforms such as knkMedia, offer potential that may lie not in what either can do independently, but in how they can work together.

The Case for a Gloo-Type Platform

Gloo Holdings has spent 13 years building a technology, media and services platform for churches, ministries, nonprofits, and other faith-based organizations. Its July 2026 stock offering demonstrates both the appeal of that vision and its growth as a service of value.

Gloo is creating a technology and services layer across a fragmented network of churches, ministries, and nonprofits that it describes as digitally underserved. Its portfolio combines church communications, content tools, artificial intelligence, audience development, fundraising, marketplaces, and managed data services.

Publishers have traditionally been effective at developing and distributing intellectual property, but they have not always had an equally direct relationship with the churches, ministry teams, and small groups that use the content.

A Gloo-type platform can potentially help bridge the gap. Gloo Workspace, for example, includes email and text communications, ministry analytics, AI assistance, and tools that can transform sermons or other materials into devotionals, discussion guides, and social content. Its broader network includes marketing, donor-development, and enterprise technology services.

Those capabilities can help a publisher:

• identify emerging interests within churches and faith communities.
• connect books with study materials, ministry programs, and digital experiences.
• repurpose trusted content into additional formats.
• support institutional subscriptions or licensed content services.
• build relationships beyond the initial book purchase, and
• understand engagement before, during and after a product launch.

Church leaders are already adopting AI. Barna reports that half of pastors use it for brainstorming, while more than one-third use it for theological research, visual creation, and development of group-discussion materials.

The ERP Backbone Makes the Model Commercially Viable

An engagement platform can help generate new forms of content use. And as content is used more frequently, the role of the ERP backbone becomes much more important. That backbone layer answers a different set of questions:

Who owns the content? Which language, territory, format, and digital-use rights are available? Which contributor should be paid? How should revenue be recognized? What did the product cost? Which customer or channel is profitable? Can a particular passage, image or title legally be used within an AI-supported service?

A devotional may begin as a printed book and then later repurposed into an audiobook, church curriculum, email series, subscription product, and licensed translations. The ERP maintains the connection between those uses and the underlying contracts, metadata, sales transactions, and royalty obligations. knkMedia’s royalty and license functions for example, connect posted sales with accruals, returns, author obligations and financial entries.

The Combined Value: From Engagement to Economics

A Gloo-type system can reveal that church leaders are increasingly engaging with content around grief, discipleship, or family life. The publisher can use those signals to inform acquisitions, backlist promotion, and product development. The ERP can then manage the resulting title, contributors, production schedule, formats, rights, metadata, pricing, and costs.

The engagement platform can support discovery, church communications, discussion resources, and community participation. Sales and licensing transactions flow into the ERP, where revenue, fulfillment, royalties, and profitability are measured.

It’s a beneficial cycle. Audience insight leads to content decisions. Content decisions lead to products and services. Engagement generates transactions and usage. ERP data reveals the economic result. That result informs the next investment.

Gloo’s Struggles

Gloo’s history demonstrates that building a platform is difficult and expensive. The company accumulated substantial losses during its development and acquisition phase, however recent performance is encouraging. Management raised fiscal-year revenue guidance and continues to target adjusted EBITDA profitability in the fourth quarter. These are signs of progress.

Gloo’s expansion into Workday implementation and managed enterprise technology is also noteworthy. It suggests that the engagement platform recognizes the importance of core operational systems.

What Comes Next?

The lesson for religious publishers is not that they should automatically invest in Gloo, or in any particular technology provider.

It is that the category is moving toward a more connected model in which content, audience engagement, AI, rights, and financial operations increasingly overlap.

Gloo-type platforms can help publishers understand and activate their communities. ERP platforms ensure that the resulting activity remains controlled, measurable, and commercially sustainable. Publishers should obviously determine which system owns customer data, product data, rights, and financial truth, but religious publishing’s relative health makes this a reasonable time to begin that work.