Duchenne UK

Around 2500 people across the UK live with Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), a rare disease that almost always affects boys. Duchenne is the most severe form of muscular dystrophy, and causes all the body’s muscles to weaken over time. There is currently no cure for Duchenne.

We worked with Duchenne UK to design and build a new solution on Salesforce that will let them more easily fund innovative research, while building a platform that will let them continue to grow over time.

About Duchenne UK

Emily Reuben OBE’s world was turned upside-down when her son, Eli, was diagnosed with DMD. This led her and her husband to establish the Duchenne Childrens Trust in 2012.

At a conference for families affected by DMD, Emily met Alex Johnson OBE, another Duchenne mum who had founded her own charity (Joining Jack) after her son Jack was diagnosed with DMD. Together, they formed a deep friendship before combining forces in 2016 to form Duchenne UK with one aim: to end Duchenne.

Duchenne UK funds research into DMD to improve quality of life for those living with the disease, and to explore new innovations in treatment.

The challenge

Duchenne UK struggled to administer their complex grantmaking processes across an array of spreadsheets which they used to handle their multiple funds and programmes.

There was a lack of visibility between Duchenne UK’s systems and teams, making it difficult to connect fundraising efforts to individual research projects without significant manual effort. Research funders such as Duchenne UK rely on accurate data to ensure that their funding is having the desired effect, but generating reports could take hours of work, and would require thorough checking to ensure that data was accurate.

The goal

Duchenne UK wanted to improve how they handled all grants, from funding innovative technologies such as Elevex, to progressing gene therapy into clinical trials. They wanted a single system to unify their teams and data silos, and to give management the ability to make data-driven decisions.

Hyphen8’s experience of research grantmaking processes (from recent work with Wellcome and Barts Charity among others) made us a great fit for Duchenne UK. They were looking for a partner with a deep understanding of funding who could help them develop a roadmap, and give them the tools they need to grow and evolve.

Our solution

Our projects always start with Discovery. Our Service Designers, who have decades of grantmaking experience between them, worked closely with Duchenne UK to map out current processes and explored opportunities to improve them. Rather than just implementing the processes as they stand, we can challenge and improve grantmaking workflows, speeding up our projects and reducing overall costs for our nonprofit customers while we meet their goals.

Using the latest Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud as the foundation, our Solutions Consultant Yau led the design and build of a flexible grant management solution. They’ve been able to wave goodbye to the spreadsheets and heavily manual processes that were slowing them down before, and to centralise all their grantmaking data into an intuitive system that can grow with them.

The result

Thanks to Hyphen8, we’re now able to better manage all aspects of our research portfolio more efficiently as we previously relied on updating numerous spreadsheets. With Hyphen8’s guidance, we implemented a streamlined solution that was tailored to our specific needs, providing us with a great foundation that could be built upon. Now our data is easy to find and centralised, which is exactly what we needed!

Vanessa Florant, Project Coordinator

One of Duchenne UK’s main pain points was a lack of readily available data. Reports took hours to pull together, and users had to search multiple sources for data. Now, reports take significantly less time to produce, key information can be seen at a glance, and users can trust that the data is accurate.

Through automation, we’ve freed up between 10-20 hours of staff time every month, letting staff concentrate on their jobs and focus on bringing an end to DMD.

Salesforce has transformed our data handling and reporting capabilities. Previously, our data was scattered across different spreadsheets which meant generating reports was a time-consuming manual task. Now that the system enhances the integrity of our data, our team can pull accurate reports in a fraction of the time. This allows us to dedicate more time to make informed strategic decisions and to drive our impactful research projects.

Vanessa Florant, Project Coordinator

Our partnership

This is just the start of our partnership with Duchenne UK. With Salesforce now up and running, we’re now starting work on Phase 2 – a fundraising solution to replace their thankQ fundraising system that’s no longer fit for purpose.

Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud comes with advanced Fundraising features baked in. Bringing fundraising and grants together in the same system will allow Duchenne UK to continue to make better informed decisions, improve the experience of their users, and support their mission to end Duchenne.

We’re so pleased to have worked with Hyphen8 - their knowledge, responsiveness, and attentiveness to our needs made the collaboration successful. The process was very well organised, and we found that our regular catch-ups helped to settle queries as soon as possible and ensured that both parties were aligned along the way. We look forward to working with Hyphen8 as we embark on integrating fundraising over the next few months.