Institutions

Helping board members and trustees create legacies for their organizations.

At Buckingham, we celebrate the effort, service, and dedication you bring to your nonprofit organization. As a fiduciary financial advisor for institutions throughout the United States, we are here to make your life easier and your role even more rewarding.

Buckingham Institutional Services™ offers the prudent, objective financial guidance you need to advance your organization’s missions and goals.

A helping hand to advise and support.

Board members and trustees play an integral role within your organization. We support you by offering education and guidance beyond our core financial services. We want you to feel confident that your board is doing the right thing for your organization, and the people it serves.

With extensive experience serving organizations like yours.

  1. Community Foundations
  2. Continuing Care Facilities
  3. Private Schools
  4. Cultural Institutions

The experience of Buckingham Institutional Services™

Investments that build a solid plan.

Our investment philosophy is based on what decades of peer-reviewed financial studies and evidence demonstrates to be the most effective way to capture market returns. Simply put, we help you ignore the noise and hype in the market, and stick to a solid plan based on the latest evidence. It’s a plan we build and refine with you, so it reflects your specific needs.

We believe this is the best way, perhaps the only way. It's to make sure your organization’s investments fully support its mission and goals, while keeping costs low and maintaining total transparency.

Research and tools help you stay on target and on policy.

Our Investment Policy Committee and Investment Analysis department conduct continuous, extensive research to make sure your investments are on target and on policy.

We provide access to a comprehensive database of approved securities; research on capital markets; tools to evaluate tradeoffs between spending and maintaining principal; evaluation, selection and monitoring of fund managers.

Governance and education support your best interests.

We work closely with you to ensure your trustees, committee members and advisors are all on the same page, working toward the same goals and objectives. We understand you bring to the table diverse backgrounds, experiences and perspectives. We’re here to make sure our advice is always in line with your organization’s best interests.

This includes formalizing or revising your Investment Policy Statement; consulting on spending plans and educating board members on investing and fiduciary responsibilities.

Risk Management

Of course, risk and reward are related – without risk, there is no opportunity for returns. We believe risk can be managed to your advantage. We help you identify the many types of risk in your portfolio, including stock market losses but also inflation, reduced contributions, illiquidity and more.

Part of our initial interview with you and your organization is to establish your comfort with the various levels of risk. Our goal is to craft the right solution for you. Of course, we don’t stop there. The Buckingham Institutional Services team continues to collaborate with you to evaluate your need and ability to take on risk, and makes adjustments to your portfolio.

You can't get good answers without good questions.

And we like answers.

We believe one of the most valuable assets we can offer is education.

We work hard to ensure you, your board and your constituents are fully informed about where you stand, and how market trends affect your organization’s assets. We can even work with member groups or even individual donors to share our investment philosophy, approach and even costs.

Our goal is to make your investment policy as open and transparent as possible, building trust among everyone in your organization.

Yes.

We will work with you and your board to provide any report in any format you need, as specified by your governance documents and/or expressed by your board.

Yes.

One of the first steps we will take as your advisor is to review and, as necessary, write or revise your Investment Policy Statement. This formal process will clearly define who is responsible for what, how assets and resources can be allocated – and specifically how investments and income can be used to support your organization’s mission.

We believe it starts with education

It’s why we show you, right from the beginning, the benefits of our evidence-based investment philosophy. We know you want to do what’s right for your constituents – and we want to do what’s right for you.

Our most recent resources.

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