For 20 years, Cymba has been a trusted partner for top UK charities, including the RSPCA, UNICEF and Macmillian Cancer Support. Specialising in SMS donations and promotions, it helps charities connect with potential long-lasting supporters.
In 2021, Clearcourse acquired Cymba, aligning with its mission to build sector-specific software businesses. Cymba's focus on charity partnerships and recurring payments made it a perfect match. The acquisition provided investment, accelerated roadmap delivery and access to global messaging solutions through partners like CM.com. As part of Clearcourse, Cymba contributed £7 million in charity donations.
“Clearcourse's support fuelled Cymba's growth in technology, development, marketing and connecting with customers in much more meaningful and engaging ways.” Rich Mullens, Product Director at Cymba
Using SMS at the coalface of fundraising, Cymba revolutionised the donation landscape. Fundraisers, once reliant on face-to-face interactions, leveraged SMS to secure donations through Cymba, removing concerns about sharing bank details and significantly increasing donor engagement.
SMS facilitated communication with supporters, enabling timely appeals and seasonal campaigns, Cymba worked on integrating Gift Aid, providing a 25% boost to donations while establishing a clear order trail for accountability, for example.
“The whole foundation of SMS is the baseline of everything that we do, it's all through mobile and it's a nice, easy, frictionless, high touch way, to really connect and engage with supporters.” Rich Mullens, Product Director at Cymba
Cymba’s biggest focus is helping its charity partners overcome the biggest challenge in today's world: keeping up with the rapid pace of technology and messaging channels, including SMS, RCS and WhatsApp, and utilising them to meet the growing expectations of supporters.
For Cymba and its charity partners, success hinges on engaging customers where and when they need support, delivering inspiring messages on the right channels and building lasting connections. This requires a collaborative communication approach that combines high tech, high touch, and trust. Mastering these three elements ensures a successful customer experience and a promising future for the charities.
To reach this goal Cymba believes in “practise what you preach” and bringing its partners on the journey with them, “asking what they want, what their challenges are and working together.” Not simply telling them about technology but demonstrating it by using it in its own interactions and customer engagement to delight the very partners that they serve every day.
“It's like a kid who likes to go and get their favourite ice cream. The more you delight that kid with their favourite ice cream, they're going to be asking you for it every single day. Can we go get ice cream? And I think it's a brilliant analogy of how we should delight our customers and give them dessert.” Rich Mullens, Product Director at Cymba
Cymba has continued this ethos in its partnership with CM.com. “At an event with CM.com, we used WhatsApp through our Cymba WhatsApp profile, to engage and register clients who were coming in so they could experience it before they even learnt about it.”
In the beginning, Cymba started with CM.com’s Business Messaging API to send SMS messages to and on behalf of its charity partners. Today, it sends upwards of 40 million SMS messages, going through the API to one of its internal platforms, which is purpose-built for charity partners, sending out messages every single day, every hour.
“Our partners don't even know the journey of where that SMS begins and goes. They just know we're delivering fantastic, reliable service to their end customers and that’s down to CM.com.” Rich Mullens, Product Director at Cymba
Most recently, Cymba has been testing RCS to deliver messages to clients, utilising backup SMS. In early tests with its charity partners, Cymba has seen a “54% uplift in response rates and 48% increase in form submissions" compared to SMS. But that’s not all, Cymba is also testing WhatsApp campaigns with mobile landing pages via CM.com’s Mobile Marketing Cloud.
These pages are vital for data capture, enabling quick and mobile-optimised forms that feed into the Customer Data Platform for various campaigns. The use of pages has proven effective, especially for time-sensitive marketing needs, offering flexibility and efficiency for Cymba’s team.
A key factor of Cymba’s continued partnership with CM.com has been the ease of use, integrations and reporting across all of our solutions. Notably, having the ability to quickly assess message delivery and email campaign performance, along with the overall platform usability, has been essential to Cymba.
“When a business is adopting something new, often the biggest friction is not another new tool, not something else to use. But when it's so effortless to navigate, like CM.com, you want to keep going back to find out more, actually winning hearts and minds." Rich Mullens, Product Director at Cymba
The partnership between Cymba and CM.com is more than “send your messages and then use the help desk, we strategise together.” Working on ways in which CM.com can help Cymba enhance what it could do for its customers, supporting its strategy, goals and KPIs.
Having a collaborative partnership makes it so much easier to focus on the new innovative products, but at the same time enables Cymba to still deliver value and retain its charity partners. Using the partnership to add value to its own communication and engagement, but also its charity partner’s communication and engagement.
“It's not just about the cost of a message, it's about the delivery of the service, it's about the service, responsiveness and support that you can get, it's about that transparency. And so, for me, that's really what's built this incredible partnership over the years.” Rich Mullens, Product Director at Cymba
Anticipating a rapid surge in demand Cymba’s goal focuses on three key factors; staying ahead of the curve, mastering product knowledge and educating internal teams on the benefits of centralised customer support. To reach this goal, CM.com will enable Cymba to enhance and futureproof its contact centre by integrating AI and automation.
Leveraging a centralised knowledge base with Mobile Service Cloud, Cymba will empower its agents to efficiently address customer inquiries across diverse products and channels, accelerating real-time responses. Utilising the AI assistant feature, the platform can provide agents with AI-generated responses to customer questions based on Cymba’s own internal knowledge sources.
"We're exploring the integration of AI into our first-line support. By incorporating a comprehensive knowledge base, we aim to empower our agents to confidently and skilfully address client inquiries across a diverse range of products and channels." Rich Mullens, Product Director at Cymba
Educating its charity partners with in-person events is a key goal for Cymba. Partnering with CM.com, events create a great opportunity to help educate teams and continue to take them on the journey.
"While I find the products brilliant, we need to focus on education, engagement, and experience. Simply having a great product isn't enough; we must educate and engage with our audience to make a real impact. By involving our charity partners and teams in discussions about the future of fundraising, engagement, and AI, we can invest time and energy more effectively to build a successful future."
“Be bold, be brave and be courageous.” Rich Mullens, Product Director at Cymba
Cymba’s key message to its charity partners is to be bold when testing new technologies. Starting small and testing at a relatively low cost and low volume to demonstrate the wins and the losses, use that to inform the next step and iterate along the way. Cymba demonstrates this to its customers, proving how to get a stronger, healthier ROI.
“We’re early adopters and prepared to take risks. We're prepared to be bold. We're prepared to encourage our customers to be bold. And we're bold in our partnerships.” Rich Mullens, Product Director at Cymba
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