Strategic partnership
delivers joint growth

The background:

The story of CM.com started in 1999 with one SMS: “Will you join me at Highstreet?” – a message sent to engage nightclub visitors and promoters. 

Fast forward 25 years, and with a wealth of experience, CM.com has evolved from that one SMS to a full customer engagement software suite that connects people and builds strong relationships between organisations and customers via marketing automation, customer service solutions, messaging channels, and more.

Today, CM.com supports a wide range of organisations in using technology to enhance customer communication and engagement – one of which is CYMBA.

With the need to help its charity partners overcome the biggest challenge in today's world of keeping up with the rapid pace of technology and messaging channels, CYMBA turned to CM.com in 2022.

“The partnership between CYMBA and CM.com involves more than just us simply sending SMS messages on their behalf. We strategise together with open communication, trust and shared goals to continually look for ways to help CYMBA enhance its customer offering, deliver its strategy and achieve the team’s KPIs. There’s a great deal of trust between us, and a level of transparency that helps us on where to focus our efforts.”

Spike Bowen, Head of Account Management UK and Ireland

The project:

Initially, Cymba started with CM.com’s Business Messaging API to send SMS messages to and on behalf of its charity partners. This rapidly grew to Cymba using RCS for client messages alongside WhatsApp campaigns, mobile landing pages via CM.com’s Mobile Marketing Cloud and offering two-way conversations with customers via Mobile Service Cloud.

With seamless delivery and positive early results, the parallels between CYMBA and CM.com were clear from the outset. Not only that, but both teams instantly connected, sharing the same values and approaches when it came to harnessing technology to enhance its charity partners’ customer journeys and boost fundraising revenue.

Having immediately established a strong working rapport, the decision to host an event entitled How to leverage Rich Messaging in Conversational Fundraising at CM.com’s UK office, The Shard, one of London’s most iconic buildings, was taken. 

With both sides committed to unlocking the opportunities associated with WhatsApp Business and Rich Communications Services (RCS) - which has been designed as the next step to SMS and enhance messaging capabilities on mobile devices - the event attracted 50 attendees from over 30 charities. 

On the back of the event’s success, an official partnership was launched that saw CM.com deliver training to CYMBA and support its onboarding programme.

“CM.com is incredibly hands-on with CYMBA. With both teams based in London, we can have regular face-to-face meetings to brainstorm, problem-solve and build out bespoke demos for use cases. CM.com’s omnichannel approach also means that we can tap into their full software suite to maximise return on our own campaigns and those of our charity partners, and as everything’s integrated there’s always consistency throughout. We look forward to deepening our partnership further this year.”

Rich Mullens, Product Director at CYMBA

The result:

Now, in 2024, CM.com provides the engine for many of CYMBA’s charity partner’s fundraising outreach campaigns across SMS, RCS, and WhatsApp. Early results have shown that Cymba achieved a 50 per cent uplift in response rates with RCS compared to SMS.

One example is Muscular Dystrophy UK, which is now looking to build on its WhatsApp output by adding a two-way communications facility to increase engagement.

Through its relationship with the UK’s major mobile operators, CM.com can access insights directly from the carriers, which enables CYMBA to craft more targeted and effective campaigns. 

The partnership is now looking to host more events throughout 2024 and beyond and is already exploring how to integrate generative AI and chatbots into fundraising campaigns. 

However, when it comes to SMS, the partnership now delivers what CYMBA set out to achieve, with over 40 million messages being sent to supporters of over 200 charities that CYMBA currently works with.