The Endowment Handbook

9Achieving and Measuring Success

This chapter enables you to:

• Define success for endowment‐building efforts, using both leading and lagging indicators.
• Learn how current and planned gifts are generally acknowledged, reported, and counted.
• Understand how to budget and allocate the resources needed to raise funds for endowment.
• Develop a holistic strategy and organizational commitment to achieve success.

Success in building endowment or strategic reserves might be measured in many ways: the total size of the reserve or endowment, the number of endowed funds, the number of donors, or the percentage of the budget that is covered. These are all important factors to be considered and measured. However, it is important to keep in mind that they are all in service to the most important measure of all: impact. Do the resources – and the resilience they provide – enable the organization to provide enduring benefit for the common good? Are they deployed in service to the mission, whether that is meeting basic needs, enhancing a community or region, advocating for an important cause, or otherwise elevating the human condition? Funds that sit idly in investment accounts or are deployed with negligible benefit can't be considered a success, no matter how great the sum.

This chapter discusses ways to define success and how to measure the return on an investment in efforts to build endowment or reserves. Because the benefits of these efforts may not be realized for many years, it can be ...