ClearView Member Update - June 2018

We are pleased to share this update from the ClearView Fiduciary Alliance as we continue to pursue our mission to “Help Foundation, Endowment and Not-for-Profit Boards Make More Informed Investment Decisions.”

• ClearView Team Addition - David K. Phillips, Jr., CPA.  David will be joining ClearView in July 2018 as a Member Consultant. He is an accomplished, mission oriented, senior financial and operational executive with more than 35 years of progressive experience with large non-profit organizations in the Washington DC metro area. This included 18 years as the EVP & CFO of The Conservation Fund and prior to that 15 years as the CFO of The Mortgage Bankers Association.  Dave earned a BS in Finance from Virginia Tech in 1980 and is also a CPA.  He has been a speaker at the AICPA, was awarded an Industry Award of Excellence from the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) and Chaired the Natural Capital Investment Fund (a Community Development Financial Institution). In this new role with ClearView, David will focus on helping grow our membership base and enhance our member services. 
• Continued Growth – With 41 Member organizations in NC and SC, the ClearView Fiduciary Alliance has continued to experience solid growth as we have expanded the support we provide our Members. Our Membership roster is available here.
• Q1 2018 Peer Analysis - In mid-May, we issued the Q1 2018 Foundation, Endowment and Non-Profit Peer Investment Analysis.  This quarterly analysis included 44 long-term investment portfolios.  The ClearView Peer Analysis also incorporated the MSCI InvestorForce Foundation and Endowment Universe of 865 foundations, endowments and not-for-profit organizations from around the country into the quarterly peer reports of investment performance and asset allocations that it provides to its Members and their Advisers.
• Quarterly Member Conference Call – On May 9, 2018, we conducted a quarterly conference call to provide ClearView Fiduciary Alliance Members and Advisers with a summary of the investment results of foundations, endowments and not-for-profit portfolios for the 1st quarter of 2018. 
• Investment Advisers Meeting – On May 16, 2018, we conducted an information and education workshop for the financial advisers and investment consultants who serve the ClearView Members. This meeting provided these advisers with an update on ClearView’s work and a discussion of our key observations from the nine (9) RFP projects we have participated in with Clearview members over the last year.
• ClearView “Insights” Publications – As an expansion of our effort to be a “learning and teaching” organization for the benefit of our Members, we have recently written two publications.
• ​Selecting Investment Advisers for Foundations, Endowments and Nonprofits - An RFP Primer -  As an extension of our work as a research based, learning and teaching organization, we agreed several months ago to assist one of the ClearView Fiduciary Alliance Members with the planning, issuance and review of a Request for Proposal (RFP) for investment advisory service.  Now less than a year later, we have assisted nine of our Member organizations with comprehensive RFP projects and have learned much along the way. Based on this experience, we have published our responses to a few of the most common questions we have encountered as organizations plan for an RFP. This report was released on May 23, 2018 and is available here on the ClearView website along with other ClearView “Insights” publications.
• Investment Policy for Foundations, Endowments and Not-For- Profits (Part I) - With the benefit of having reviewed more than 200 Investment Policy Statements of foundations, endowments and not-for-profit organizations in recent years, this ClearView “Insights” document is written for the benefit of these Board and Investment Committee members. They have accepted the responsibility of directing and overseeing the investment of perpetual pools of institutional capital that are intended in some way, shape or form, for the benefit of others. Their investment decisions will impact the organizations they serve long after their finite tenures as Board members have ended. In this context, we submit that sound long-term Investment Policy is one of the most impactful legacies that Board and Investment Committees, as investment fiduciaries, can leave the organizations they serve. The first installment of this multi-part series (Part I) will be released in early July.    

To learn more about the ClearView Fiduciary Alliance, please contact:

Larry D. Coats, Jr.
919.614.3335
LCoats@ClearViewFiduciary.com

Larry D. Coats, Jr. is President and CEO of ClearView by KDI, LLC, the sponsor of the ClearView Fiduciary Alliance.  With three decades of investment industry experience, Larry has served as a Board member and on the Investment Committees of multiple foundations and endowments and has also served as a Trustee for an SEC-registered mutual fund.

About ClearView – The ClearView Fiduciary Alliance is a membership-based service of ClearView by KDI, LLC.  ClearView’s mission is “to help foundation, endowment and not-for-profit Board and Executives make better investment decisions by being more informed and better educated.  ClearView is not an investment adviser and it does not provide investment management services.  It is a resource for Executives and Board members who are focused on being better investment fiduciaries.  Its core offering is a robust, web-based system that provides its Members with independent, objective and confidential quarterly peer investment performance and portfolio allocation analysis specifically targeted to small and mid-size foundations, endowments and not-for-profit organizations.  With a base of more than 35 regional Members (representing more than $1.1 billion) and a database of nearly 800 similar portfolios from across the county, ClearView is uniquely positioned to help Boards and Investment Committees understand and analyze their investment programs and the results of their investment advisers and consultants.