YEF –
Evidence Toolkit

The Youth Endowment Fund is a ‘What Works’ Centre with a remit to prevent children and young people from becoming involved in violence.

The YEF Toolkit is a directory of different evidence-based approaches for preventing youth violence, which can be sorted and filtered by impact, evidence quality, and cost, along with several other metrics.

We were asked to approach the design of this toolkit from first principles to explore what content and metrics would be most useful to different stakeholder groups, from practitioners to policy-makers.

We took a deep dive into their content, interviewed a wide range of stakeholders and reviewed academic research on how to communicate and rank evidence-based outcomes effectively and understand what naming conventions and iconography resonated best with users.

We were keen to ensure that the toolkit content didn’t sit in isolation. Semantically, we wanted to ensure that the keywords and topic names were consistent with the rest of the content on the YEF website so we could more easily cross-reference between Toolkit approaches, YEF reports, funded projects and project evaluations. This meant creating a common pool of keywords, topics and outcomes within the WordPress CMS.

In recognition of the quality of our work on the toolkit, YEF then asked us to rebuild their organisational website.

“The YEF worked with DIAS Creative on developing our Toolkit. They were fantastic partners in this work. They produced a clear and attractive website for the tool and were creative, responsive and flexible throughout the project.”

Peter Henderson, Youth Endowment Fund