Youth Endowment Fund

Managing £200 Million of Public Money with Confidence, Transparency, and Control Through Salesforce

About The Youth Endowment Fund

The Youth Endowment Fund (YEF) is an independent charitable trust with a mission that matters: to prevent children and young people from becoming involved in violence. Established in March 2019 by Impetus with a ten-year, £200 million endowment from the Home Office, YEF is the UK's largest What Works Centre focused on youth violence prevention.

The organisation funds carefully evaluated projects across England and Wales, commissions rigorous research, and works directly with government, schools, health services, and communities to put evidence into practice. Every pound it spends is public money – and every decision has to be traceable, justifiable, and transparent.

The Challenge: Building a Platform Capable of Managing Public Funding at Scale

YEF's model is unlike most funders. Each grant doesn't just support an organisation delivering work. It also funds an independent evaluator, often a university or research body, working in parallel to assess whether the intervention is actually having the right impact. That means every project runs with at least two funded organisations, multiple payment milestones, and a requirement to report progress to the Home Office every quarter.

As the organisation grew and more teams began commissioning work, including the Change and Evidence directorate, the need for a connected, trustworthy system became critical. Spreadsheets, email inboxes, and manual trackers had served their purpose early on, but managing a portfolio approaching £200 million across dozens of multi-year projects was simply beyond what those tools could reliably support.

Hyphen8 were brought on board as YEF's implementation partner, chosen because of their deep understanding of the funder and charity sector, and the work began to build a Salesforce platform fit for one of the most complex grant management environments in the UK.

"We couldn't manage all of these projects if we didn't have a proper system in place. Some of it was being done offline, people had little spreadsheets, little trackers. It was just becoming too complex."

Abheesh Busawon, Assistant Director of Finance & Operations, Youth Endowment Fund

Pain Points

The team struggled with:

Managing a uniquely complex funding structure
- Every project involves at least two funded organisations: a grantee delivering the work and an independent evaluator assessing its impact, each with its own payment schedules and reporting requirements.
- Projects run across multiple years, with payment milestones tied to agreed deliverables, making manual tracking increasingly difficult as the portfolio grew.
- Without a central system, continuity of knowledge was at risk whenever team members moved on.
Keeping pace with growing commissioning activity
- As the Change and Evidence directorate expanded its work, partnering with schools, research bodies, and local authorities, it became clear that the existing processes needed to scale alongside it.
- Applying a grants model built for large, multi-year programmes to smaller commissions created unnecessary administrative burden for teams trying to move quickly.
- The team needed to find a way to give people the right tools without adding friction to their day-to-day work.
Maintaining financial controls and data integrity
- As more people worked within the system, it became important to ensure that key actions such as approving payments or marking grants as paid were protected by the right governance controls.
- Without clearly defined permissions, there was a risk of accidental actions affecting payment records and creating issues for grantees.
- Finance needed to be able to trust the data sitting in Salesforce before they could use it to manage £1.5 million payment runs and quarterly disbursement reporting.
Meeting GDPR obligations across a large and evolving dataset
- YEF holds data on grantees and evaluators across years of funding activity, and its data retention policy requires records not actively in use to be deleted after three years.
- There was no automated process in place to identify, flag, and remove data that had passed its retention period, meaning the organisation was carrying risk it needed to address.
Reporting commitments to the Home Office and banking partners
- YEF is required to report quarterly to the Home Office on how committed funds are being deployed and disbursed.
- Providing banking partners with accurate, forward-looking disbursement profiles, essential for releasing invested funds at the right time, depended on having reliable, real-time data in one place.

The Solution

Hyphen8 worked with the Youth Endowment Fund to design and implement a Salesforce platform built around the specific demands of a public-funded, evidence-led grant-maker, and have continued to develop and refine it as the organisation's needs have evolved.

End-to-end grant and payment management
- Hyphen8 built a structured system to manage the full lifecycle of each grant, from funding request through to final payment, covering both grantee and evaluator records within a single project view.
- Payment milestones are linked directly to grant agreements, enabling programme managers and finance teams to track what's due, what's been requested, and what's been paid without leaving the system.
- A complete payment request and approval workflow was implemented, ensuring that each payment moves through the right stages before being released.
Governance controls and a trusted approval process
- Hyphen8 worked with the operations team to implement clear permission controls, ensuring that only authorised approvers can progress payments through the system, and only finance can mark a payment as paid.
- This gave the team the confidence to use Salesforce as the single version of the truth for financial data, which is essential when managing public money at this scale.
Quarterly reporting and disbursement planning
- Salesforce now provides YEF with a real-time view of total commitments across all directorates, including how much has been committed, what has been disbursed, and what is still outstanding.
- A disbursement report gives finance a rolling, forward-looking profile of when funds will leave the organisation, enabling advance notice to banking partners and accurate quarterly reporting to the Home Office.
Ongoing development as the organisation evolves
- As YEF has grown and its commissioning activity has diversified, Hyphen8 has continued to work with the team to review and refine the system, including exploring ways to simplify processes for smaller commissions within the Change and Evidence directorate.
- The relationship has been one of genuine partnership, with Hyphen8 responding quickly and working through changes collaboratively.
"Hyphen8 were brought on board because they understand the charity and funder context really well, and that was a deciding factor. They built this for how we actually work."
Abheesh Busawon, Assistant Director of Finance & Operations, Youth Endowment Fund

The Impact of working with Hyphen8

£M

Total disbursements tracked and managed through Salesforce across the life of the fund

Payment approval processes now governed by the right controls, giving finance confidence in the data

A single, connected system for programmes, evaluation, change, and evidence

The Impact

Confidence in the numbers that matter most
- Finance can now run payment runs of over £1.5 million supported by reliable, auditable data, knowing that every record has passed through the right approval process.
- The disbursement report gives the team an accurate, real-time picture of when money will leave the organisation, enabling better planning and transparent reporting to the Home Office.
- Having trustworthy data in one place has removed the uncertainty that came with tracking commitments across separate spreadsheets and inboxes.
A platform that grew with the organisation
- As new directorates came onto Salesforce and commissioning volumes grew, the system has scaled alongside the organisation rather than constraining it.
- YEF has been able to commit and track close to £204 million in grants and contracts through a single platform, something that would simply not have been possible without the right infrastructure.
Teams freed to focus on the work that matters
- Programme managers and evaluation managers can see the full picture of their projects: milestones, payment status, monitoring submissions, and partner records, without switching between systems.
- Reducing reliance on manual processes has given staff more time to focus on the work they were hired to do, supporting grantees, commissioning evaluations, and driving evidence-led change.
"Time saving, payment is a lot more streamlined, management of projects is a lot more straightforward. None of that could have been possible without having the right systems in place. We would have been dead in the water, really."
Abheesh Busawon, Assistant Director of Finance & Operations, Youth Endowment Fund
A foundation for what comes next
- With Salesforce connected to Xero and banking systems, YEF has a fully joined-up financial operation capable of supporting the final years of the fund's mandate and any future re-endowment.
- The automated data retention process has resolved a long-standing GDPR obligation and created a model that will continue to run without manual intervention.
- The team is actively exploring further efficiencies, including streamlined processes for smaller commissions and batch uploading of requirements, continuing to evolve the platform to meet the organisation's changing needs.

Why Did You Choose Salesforce and Hyphen8?

"YEF needed a platform capable of managing the full complexity of a public-funded grant portfolio, one that could handle multi-year projects, multiple funded partners, rigorous reporting requirements, and the financial controls that come with stewardship of public money.

Salesforce provided the scalability and flexibility to meet those demands. Hyphen8 were chosen as implementation partner because they understood the funder context from the outset, bringing sector expertise that meant the system was built around how YEF actually works, not how a generic grants platform might expect it to."