Insights for Non-Profits

What makes an endowment or foundation successful? Healthy investment returns? Sensible withdrawal levels? Strong fundraising? All of these are certainly important, but I would argue that there’s a more fundamental requirement for success: knowledgeable and engaged board and staff. It’s the trustees, committee members, staff, etc., that ultimately provide the leadership necessary to support an organization. Without knowledgeable and engaged board and staff, an endowment or foundation may find it very difficult to articulate its long-term goals, much less set a path to achieve them.

Because of this, our client engagements almost always make room for ongoing education. Some of the typical challenges an organization might face:

New Board and Staff

Leadership turnover is a natural occurrence and many organizations actually encourage new faces by setting term limits for how long members can serve. This presents the challenge of getting new members involved, while also preserving the continuity of knowledge from prior generations of board members.

Maintaining Diverse Skill Sets

The best boards include people with a range of different skills and backgrounds. For example, finance, accounting, investment, business administration, marketing, public relations, and fundraising are all valuable skills to help with various functions a board must perform. Experienced trustees are a great resource to mentor other trustees and guide the entire board in topics most relevant to their expertise.

Fundraising

Trustees often set the tone for how active an organization is at fundraising. Even those with dedicated development staff often rely on trustees as leaders to set a strategic agenda. Trustees also often carry significant influence with major and planned gift donors. As such, knowledge about different fundraising techniques and strategies are valuable inputs for those organizations that need to raise money on a regular basis.

Board & Staff Knowledge Base

At Manning & Napier, our goal is to be a resource to help in all crucial aspects of an endowment or foundation program. Developing the expertise and experience of an organization’s people, is certainly an important part of that goal, and can help solve some of these typical challenges that board’s face. The chart above contains what we call our “Board & Staff Knowledge Base.” It’s a set of our most valued topics when conducting educational sessions on behalf of our Endowment & Foundation clients, and we think a good baseline for the things board and staff members should focus on in order to remain knowledgeable and engaged.

To learn more about Manning & Napier’s Family Wealth Management services visit, www.manning-napier.com/FamilyWealthManagement.