The Emerging
Foundation
Playbook

If it's not in your IPS, it doesn't exist

Undocumented investment intentions are not policy. A committee that has verbally agreed to "stay conservative in this environment" has not created a policy. They have created a conversation that will be reinterpreted at the next meeting, and the one after that, and especially those that follows a difficult quarter.

The IPS answers the question ‘why would we make this decision?’ in advance of the decision, so that the answer does not change under pressure.

It also protects individual committee members. A trustee who followed a documented, board-approved IPS has fulfilled their fiduciary duty, even if the outcome was unfavorable. A trustee who acted without one has a much harder case to make.

IPS menu of ingredients

Not every IPS element is equally urgent at every stage. The following lists what is “Essential,” “Ideal,” and “Optional” at the emerging endowment stage. Nonprofit-specific requirements are noted inline.

Ongoing cultivation

The most common IPS maintenance mistake is treating the document as a monolithic body of text that must be broadly rewritten whenever any detail changes. This makes updates feel expensive and therefore postponed, which is how IPS documents become stale.

The structural solution is simple: anything that changes frequently belongs in an appendix, not in the body of the document. Asset-allocation targets, ESG exclusion lists, approved manager rosters, and fee benchmarks should live in the evolving appendices. The core document covers purpose, policy, and principles; it rarely needs to change.

This also makes the annual review manageable. The Chair walks the committee through the appendices: does our target allocation still match our time horizon and return objective? Are there manager changes to note? Has our spending policy produced the right results? The body of the document is touched only when something fundamental shifts — a new grant program, a major gift that changes the liquidity profile, a change in applicable law.

Sample IPS

The template below provides a starting point. Fields in italics require your organization’s specific inputs. Asset-allocation targets belong in Appendix A; ESG or mission-related criteria in Appendix B. Your legal counsel should review the final document before board adoption.

Opportunities & Constraints

Asset size shapes the investment opportunity set in ways that are rarely explained plainly. The following maps what is genuinely accessible at each tier alongside the practical constraints. This is not a statement about the quality of any organization, simply how markets and managers are essentially structured.

Stay frosty

The most dangerous moment for any endowment portfolio is not a market crash. It is the meeting that follows a market crash, when reasonable people with good intentions sit around a table and offer reasonable-sounding arguments for why this time is different.

Committees that change strategy in response to recent market performance, reducing equity exposure after a downturn or chasing returns after a rally, systematically underperform committees that hold their policy allocation through cycles. The research on this is unambiguous and the cost is not modest. Over a decade, strategy-changing committees can give up three to five percentage points of annualized returns relative to more disciplined ones.

“Staying frosty” is not passivity. It is the active, deliberate choice to trust the process you built when conditions were calm and heads level, rather than the reactive instincts that press most urgently when the situation shifts.

Running a productive quarterly meeting

The quarterly IC meeting is the primary mechanism by which the committee exercises its fiduciary duty. Every meeting should cover the same four categories, in roughly this sequence:

Reporting to the board

The IC Chair’s full board is not an investment committee and should not be asked to process the same depth of information. The right format is a 1–2 paragraph summary delivered within a week of each IC meeting, covering three things: how the portfolio performed, whether it remains on track with the IPS, and any decisions the IC made or tabled.

Brevity signals competence: a Chair who can summarize the portfolio’s status in two clear paragraphs demonstrates understanding; a Chair who forwards 40 pages of performance reports every quarter is creating noise instead of exhibiting accountability.

Once a year — typically at the annual board meeting — the Chair (or a designee) gives a slightly more formal 10-minute presentation covering full-year performance, any IPS changes, and the endowment's current trajectory against its long-term objectives. This is also the moment to surface the compounding argument: showing the board in concrete terms what the portfolio is on track to produce over the next decade, and what the cost of a strategy change would be.

Honor the IPS

You spent time building the IPS, you had the full board adopt it, and then, two years in, the market does something uncomfortable and someone in the room suggests that perhaps the IPS should be revisited.

There are legitimate reasons to revisit an IPS: a major gift that changes the liquidity profile, a significant shift in the spending policy, a new programmatic commitment that alters the time horizon. And there are illegitimate reasons: recent underperformance, market volatility, a committee member’s discomfort with an asset class behaving exactly as it should given its role in the portfolio.

The distinction matters because the IPS was written precisely for the illegitimate moments. When markets are stable and everything is working, the IPS requires no defense. It is only when markets give you a reason to doubt it that the document proves its worth. Honoring it, not abandoning it, is a responsible act of governance that compounds over decades.

Managing your relationships

Oversight applies in three directions: within the committee, with the outside advisor, and with underlying managers. Each requires a different lens.

Within the committee. The biggest internal risk is a dominant voice, typically the most experienced investor on the committee, whose views effectively end deliberation before it begins; the Chair’s job is to ensure all voices are heard before this voice closes discussion. Process discipline protects the committee from its own expertise.

With the outside advisor. An advisor relationship goes stale when the committee stops asking hard questions. Annual relationship reviews should cover: are we receiving the service model we were promised? Are the people we were introduced to still the people serving the account? Is the advisor proactive, bringing ideas before we ask, or reactive, drifting with each market movement? The fee is not worth a passive relationship.

With underlying managers. At the sub-$50M tier, most organizations access managers through funds rather than separate accounts, which limits direct interaction. Where direct access exists, the committee should be alert to: organizational changes (personnel turnover, ownership changes), style drift (is the manager behaving consistently with their stated philosophy?), and capacity (is the strategy still investable at the scale the manager has grown to?). Underperformance alone is rarely sufficient reason for termination — the best managers experience extended periods of difficulty. Organizational and process concerns are more reliable signals.

Less is more

The endowments that generate the best long-term outcomes are almost never the most active. They are the ones that built the right portfolio, documented the right policy, and then had the discipline to leave it alone, rebalancing mechanically, reviewing quarterly, and resisting the recurring temptation to prove their engagement by changing things.

Complexity does not equal sophistication. An IC that holds 15 managers across 8 asset classes is not more sophisticated than one that holds 4 low-cost index funds within a disciplined allocation framework. The former is more expensive, harder to monitor, and more exposed to the behavioral risks of committee over-involvement. At this stage of development, the correct amount of activity is often less than you think, while the correct amount of patience is invariably more.

Facing the horizon

Eventually graduating beyond this Playbook is the intended outcome. The self-directed, index-based framework described in Item 3 is the prudent approach for where you are; however, it is not the right approach for where you are going. As your endowment grows, your governance matures, and your committee’s sophistication deepens, the economics of professional advisory management improve, as does your ability to demand the service model you deserve.

The transition from self-directed implementation to a professional advisor or OCIO relationship is equally a portfolio and governance consideration. It changes who makes decisions, how quickly those decisions can be executed, and what the committee’s role becomes. Getting that transition right, and running a proper competitive process rather than defaulting to whoever calls first, is worth more than any single investment decision you will make.

Signals

The following conditions warrant a formal advisor search. When one or more apply, the responsible next step is to run the RFP process described in 5.3.

The RFP process

A formal RFP process protects your organization in two ways: it surfaces the full competitive landscape so you do not default to whoever has the most persistent sales team, and it creates a documented record of due diligence that supports the committee's fiduciary responsibility.

The process does not need to be bureaucratically heavy. A well-constructed RFP, distributed to at least three qualified firms, followed by finalist presentations and a structured evaluation, is sufficient for most emerging endowments. The table below maps the key decision variables across mandate types.

Sample RFP questionnaire

The questions below form the core of a functional investment advisor RFP. Request written responses with a firm deadline. Evaluate responses against a consistent scoring rubric before finalist selection.