Our Work with Clients
We seek to provide our clients with investment advice, policy guidance, strategic advice, and specific guidance on mission-aligned investing.
Investment officers and investment committees at nonprofits face big challenges today—complex capital markets, tough regulatory oversight, high donor expectations and, in the coming years, lower expected market returns. We work with many nonprofit institutions, large and small, to help them overcome these challenges.
We seek to relieve investment committees of some of the heavy fiduciary burden weighing on them. We serve clients in a variety of ways, from fully discretionary relationships to situations where we act in a more consultative role. While every client and every relationship is different, our pledge is always the same: To help our clients achieve their investment objectives and empower them to fulfill their organizational missions.
Investment Advice
Drawing on decades of experience working with endowments and foundations, we partner with clients to help them navigate the complexities of today’s capital markets in pursuit of desired investment returns.
Our dedicated E&F investment teams are supported by Brown Advisory’s robust research capabilities. We use a combination of internally and externally managed strategies and leverage Brown Advisory’s equity, fixed income, private equity and alternatives research teams to source high-conviction ideas across the investable universe and construct portfolios that can deliver over the long term.
Mission-Aligned Investing
Many endowments struggle to reconcile two equally important goals when deploying capital: maximizing the return of their investment portfolio, and maximizing progress toward their mission. Brown Advisory believes that a thoughtful, sustainable investment approach can bridge the gap between these goals, and help organizations achieve both their financial and mission-related goals within a unified portfolio strategy.
For decades, Brown Advisory has worked with clients, both religious and secular, to develop value-centric, mission-based investment programs. Just as we do not build portfolios based on models, we do not make assumptions about a client’s values. We start by listening and investigating what is most important before we begin to discuss how to express those values through a client’s investment portfolio.
Read more about mission-aligned investing in "The Other 95%"
Policy Advice
In constructing investment programs, we aim to specifically address each client’s needs and circumstances with an investment policy that clearly supports the organization’s long-term mission. Proper attention to investment policies-- development, refinement, and ongoing review and analysis—is essential to ensure that portfolio strategy is aligned with organizational goals.
Read more about how we help clients develop investment policies in “On A Shoestring: A Spend-Rate Planning Framework”
Strategic Advice
We offer counsel on a wide range of topics beyond traditional investment advice, including strategic planning, values-based investing, endowment governance, donor engagement and planned giving. We seek to provide holistic advice to clients, to help them advance their nonprofit mission.
We engage clients on a wide variety of matters—spend-rate policy, budgetary/organizational issues, optimal methods for structuring planned giving and other donor programs, appropriate strategies for pursuing mission-aligned investing, and many other topics. In our experience, it is most effective to consider these issues in concert with ongoing investment management decisions, and in collaboration with an organization’s other outside advisors, to ensure a cohesive pursuit of long-term goals.
Read more about our strategic advisory work in “Beyond Investing: Strategic Advice for Nonprofits”
