Maximize your community impact and causes that matter most with a proven endowment planning process. If you’re an organization with an endowment you’d like to secure, we can empower you to scale your impact while you focus on the causes and projects that matter most.
Benefits of Endowment Planning with The Advisory Group of San Francisco
The primary duty of most financial stewards is to manage a prudent investment process. We help you understand and fulfill your fiduciary responsibility, simplify your job and improve outcomes for beneficiaries and stakeholders. Our institutional-quality, proven endowment planning process applies industry best practices and uncommon insight, so you can focus on your core mission or business.
For your foundation or endowment:
When you work with us, we help you set a(n)
- spending policy strategy
- investment policy consistent with spending policy
You also receive:
- fiduciary support for UPMIFA compliance
- sophisticated reporting
- audit support
- short- and long-term strategies as needed
Using our 5-step investment management process, we connect your strategic goals to your investment strategy(ies).
Frequently Asked Questions
Endowment planning is fiduciary investment and governance support for organizations with an endowment, foundation, or long-term reserve fund they need to steward responsibly. It is built for nonprofit boards, foundation trustees, and other financial stewards who want to scale their organization’s impact while staying focused on their core mission rather than day-to-day fiduciary process and investment management. Read more: Endowments 101: What fiduciaries must know.
A true endowment is a fund subject to donor-imposed restrictions on spending principal, typically because a donor gave the money with the explicit intent that it last into perpetuity or for a defined term rather than having the principal spent. Funds a board designates internally as “endowment-like,” but that carry no actual donor restriction, are sometimes called quasi-endowments or board-endowed funds, and they are generally subject to fewer regulatory constraints. The distinction determines whether your board has the legal flexibility to spend down the fund in a crisis. Read more: Endowments 101: What fiduciaries must know.
UPMIFA (the Uniform Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act) is the legal framework most U.S. states, including California, use to govern how nonprofit endowments must be invested and spent. It lets boards spend a prudent percentage of the fund’s total value, rather than only income and realized gains, provided they weigh factors such as the fund’s purpose, duration, expected total return, and the organization’s other resources. We provide fiduciary support to help your organization stay UPMIFA-compliant, which protects both the fund and the individuals serving as stewards or trustees.
A spending policy sets the rules for how much of the endowment can be distributed each year in support of your mission, often expressed as a target percentage of a trailing average of the fund’s value. An investment policy defines how the fund is invested (asset allocation, risk tolerance, rebalancing rules) to support that spending sustainably over the long term. The two have to be built together: an investment policy that targets a conservative return while the spending policy assumes an aggressive one will erode the fund’s real value over time. We conduct spending policy analyses to develop sustainable spending policies. Read more: Endowment spending policy for fiduciary responsibility.
Not necessarily: not everyone who advises an endowment is legally held to a fiduciary standard. Some are brokers or consultants operating under a lower suitability standard, which matters for a fund meant to serve a mission in perpetuity. Ask directly whether they will acknowledge fiduciary status in writing, whether they help you document your process, and whether they proactively flag and act when your spending and investment policies drift out of alignment. Read more: Is your endowment advisor really an advisor?
No. Most boards and finance committees aren’t expected to be investment experts, which is exactly why prudent process and fiduciary oversight matter so much. UPMIFA doesn’t require perfect investment decisions; it requires prudent ones, documented. We handle the technical and regulatory complexity so your board can focus on governance and mission.
