Month: June 2026

This piece is written by Suzzanne Eden, Partner with CCS Fundraising. CCS Fundraising is a strategic fundraising consulting firm that partners with nonprofits across sectors to design and implement fundraising programs that achieve transformational goals.

When most development professionals are asked about their endowment prospects, they describe the same person: a major donor, probably retired, likely already thinking about their estate, with significant wealth and a long history with the organization.

That search is happening at a meaningful moment. Total charitable giving reached a record $617 billion in 2025, and bequest giving grew nearly 20%, the strongest signal in years that donors are thinking seriously about legacy and permanence. The philanthropic conditions for endowment giving have rarely been better. The question is whether organizations are positioned to take advantage of them.

The problem with the traditional endowment prospect picture isn’t that it’s wrong, it’s that it’s incomplete, and that incompleteness is costing organizations real endowment gifts every year. Your strongest endowment prospects are almost certainly already in your database. They may not look like the profile above, but they share something more important than wealth: relationship depth, values alignment, and a genuine desire for lasting impact. The work of endowment fundraising isn’t finding a different kind of donor; it’s learning to see the donors you already have a little differently.

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Five Trends Shaping Endowment Fundraising Right Now

Understanding who gives to endowment and how to reach them, starts with understanding the environment they’re giving in. Five trends are defining this moment:

• Endowment fundraising is no longer niche. More nonprofits are actively starting or expanding endowment programs, driven by a desire to strengthen financial resilience and diversify revenue after COVID-era funding disruptions and continuing government cutbacks.
• Endowment giving is growing but remains concentrated. Endowment gifts are large in dollar impact but small in share of total giving, typically driven by major and planned gifts, which means the opportunity for organizations that invest in this area is significant.
• Donors expect clear, designated impact. Most endowment gifts are restricted by donors, often tied to specific purposes like scholarships, faculty chairs, or programs. This can limit institutional flexibility, but it also means that organizations that can intentionally offer specific funding opportunities of their choosing that are budget-relieving are better positioned to close, utilize, and steward, these gifts.
• Total giving tracks market performance with less volatility. The U.S. stock market has experienced a prolonged bull run with the S&P 500 over the past three years. Philanthropy tends to follow the market, though to a lower degree of volatility. Positive market growth suggests growth in giving.
• Planned giving and wealth transfer are supporting long-term growth. Bequest giving grew nearly 20% in 2025 (the largest single-source increase of the year) and the share of giving from bequests grew from 8% to 10%. Whether or not the Great Wealth Transfer has fully arrived, donors are clearly thinking about legacy.

Best Practice #1: Your Best Endowment Prospects Are Already in Your Database

Four donor profiles are worth knowing. The loyal annual donor, someone with five or more consecutive years of giving, is often the most overlooked endowment prospect precisely because they feel “already engaged.” But loyalty is one of the strongest predictors of endowment readiness, and that consistent giver deserves a closer look. The major gift partner is already investing at a significant level and looking for a way to deepen that commitment; naming opportunities tend to be a natural fit here. The values-aligned donor is motivated by a specific mission area or program and responds well to the question: “What does your gift make possible forever?” And the planned giving prospect may already be thinking about their estate, making endowment a natural bridge conversation, though it’s worth saying out loud that endowment isn’t only about planned gifts. Endowed gifts can be made now, named now, and felt now.

Across all four profiles, the signals look similar: tenure and consistency of giving, an expressed connection to a specific program or outcome, and life stage moments like retirement, an inheritance, or the sale of a business. If you’re not sure where to start, pull a list of everyone who has given for five or more consecutive years as a starting point.

Best Practice #2: Pipeline Management Doesn’t Require New Infrastructure

Knowing your profiles is step one. Moving donors toward a conversation is step two, and most organizations stall here, not because they lack the right donors but because they don’t have a structured way to prioritize and progress them.

When qualifying endowment prospects, think across three dimensions: affinity, access, and ability. Affinity is about relationship depth. Does this donor support your annual fund or express a personal connection to your work? Access is about entry points; are they an alum, a former board member, someone your leadership already knows? Ability is about feasibility, and this is where organizations cut their lists too early. A donor who can’t write a large check today might be able to make a multi-year pledge, give through a donor-advised fund, or designate a portion of their estate. Expanding your thinking about gift vehicles meaningfully expands your prospect pool.

The practical takeaway: add an “endowment readiness” flag to your existing prospect tracking and commit to moving those donors forward with intention: signal tracking, life stage moments, deeper engagement. No new infrastructure required, just a new lens. When donors feel uncertain about the present, conversations about permanence tend to land more naturally than they might in a stronger economic moment

Best Practice #3: Cultivation is What Moves Donors

The most effective endowment conversations happen long before the ask through cultivation experiences that make donors feel like partners in your mission rather than targets for it.

Consider two examples. An academic medical center wanted to endow a professorship in oncology research. Rather than opening with that conversation, the development team arranged a private meeting between a longtime major donor and the relevant faculty member about where the research was heading. They then invited the donor to a small advisory gathering where scientists were thinking through a new line of inquiry. The donor was asked for their perspective, not their money. By the time the endowed professorship conversation happened, it wasn’t really an ask. The donor already felt ownership over the work.

An independent school took a different approach. A twelve-year annual donor was introduced to an opportunity they didn’t know existed: the ability to endow an entire cohort of students. Before any ask, the development team invited them to a scholarship breakfast where they sat with three current scholarship recipients. The donor left saying “I want more of them to have this.” The endowment conversation followed within two months.

In both cases, the cultivation activity did the work, not the pitch. Your toolkit is probably already in front of you: faculty meetings, site visits, advisory gatherings. The shift is intentional: using those moments to help a specific donor see themselves in a specific opportunity before you ask them to fund it. That means matching donors to opportunities that genuinely fit, using their own language, and being direct that endowment and annual giving aren’t competing asks, they’re different expressions of the same relationship.

The Takeaway

Endowment fundraising isn’t a separate discipline that requires a different set of donors, a different pipeline, or a different kind of ask. It’s a deeper version of the conversation you’re already having grounded in relationship, activated through cultivation, and timed to when a donor is most ready to hear it.

In a year when bequest giving grew nearly 20% and the data signals that donors are thinking more seriously about legacy and the long term, that conversation has rarely felt more timely. The donors who will make your next endowment gift are almost certainly already in your database. The question is whether you’re creating the moments that help them see themselves in that opportunity before you ever ask.

Explore additional resources in the accompanying slide deck here.

This article is a companion piece to TIFF Investment Management’s Endowment Webinar Series, developed in partnership with CCS Fundraising. Watch Session 1, “Bringing Your Endowment to Life: How to Tell a Story That Resonates with Donors.”

The materials are being provided for informational purposes only and constitute neither an offer to sell nor a solicitation of an offer to buy securities. These materials also do not constitute an offer or advertisement of TIFF’s investment advisory services or investment, legal or tax advice. Opinions expressed herein are those of TIFF and are not a recommendation to buy or sell any securities.

These materials may contain forward-looking statements relating to future events. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by terminology such as “may,” “will,” “should,” “expect,” “plan,” “intend,” “anticipate,” “believe,” “estimate,” “predict,” “potential,” or “continue,” the negative of such terms or other comparable terminology. Although TIFF believes the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, future results cannot be guaranteed.

Executive Summary

• Private credit is dominating headlines, with continued stories of redemption limits and valuations falling, prompting questions as to whether this asset class is headed for a systemic collapse.
• Private credit headlines today reflect liquidity stress and investor expectations more than a systemic collapse in credit quality. It remains unclear how much distress will emanate in private credit.
• Many investors treated semi-liquid private credit vehicles as liquid fixed-income substitutes despite the underlying assets being intrinsically illiquid.
• Redemption gates and withdrawal limits are often functioning as intended by preventing forced selling of underlying assets and protecting remaining investors.
• Private credit can be attractive when underwriting, manager selection, and vehicle structure are disciplined. In fact, it may become more attractive in the near term for investors in new loans if stress continues.
• Private credit should be viewed as having different risk-return characteristics than traditional private equity, as return potential may be more limited by contractual cash flows while maintaining illiquidity. It is also distinct from traditional fixed income investments, which generally offer greater liquidity.

Parsing Through the Noise of the Private Credit Headlines

The recent headlines around private credit, redemption limits / gating, valuation questions, Business Development Corporations (“BDC”) pricing volatility, and regulatory scrutiny have led many investors to ask whether private credit is entering a crisis. We do not believe the current environment represents a systemic collapse of the asset class. Instead, we believe the market is rediscovering something that was always true: private credit is fundamentally illiquid.

Much of the current stress appears less about widespread loan impairment and more about a mismatch between investor expectations and the underlying liquidity of the assets. In many cases, investors appear to have treated semi-liquid private credit vehicles as though they were liquid fixed income substitutes. That assumption was always likely to be tested during a period of market stress or elevated redemption activity.

The core issue is not necessarily whether private credit is “good” or “bad.” The more important question is whether investors properly understood the bargain they were making.

To be sure, there are certainly examples of distressed loans. There are a lot of loans in credit markets which need to be refinanced, and rising rates naturally hurt companies which borrowed on a “floating rate” basis. But those dynamics are frequently present. What’s different this time is the fact that investors believed they could sell when the credit cycle turned because private credit was purportedly “semi-liquid.”

The Rise of Private Credit

Private credit has moved from a niche allocation to a major part of the lending ecosystem. Investors flocked to the asset class in the past five years believing they could attain double digit returns, beating public credit or fixed income, with shorter duration than private equity and the ability to get out when they wanted. With the base rate increases of 2022, the asset class returns started to pique more investor interest. As the number of “semi-liquid” funds massively increased, retail capital flowed into the space. It was the Goldilocks of investments. Or was it?

The Fallacy of Liquid Private Credit

As the credit market started to wobble, investors started to put in redemptions for their “liquid” private credit only to discover their redemption being limited or gated. How did that happen?

Private loans are not publicly traded securities. They are privately negotiated agreements that are often intended to be held to maturity. Secondary markets exist, but they are substantially thinner than public bond markets and can become especially constrained during periods of stress.

However, certain private credit vehicles, particularly those distributed through wealth-management channels, offer periodic liquidity through quarterly redemption programs or interval structures. Those redemption features often work smoothly during stable periods when redemption requests are modest and inflows continue.

The problem emerges when many investors seek liquidity simultaneously. At that point, funds have only a limited set of options:

• Borrow against the portfolio
• Reduce new lending
• Sell loans into a weak market
• Limit withdrawals

As a result, many vehicles include quarterly redemption caps, frequently around 5% of assets. Recent headlines have portrayed these limits as signs of distress. In reality, they are often functioning exactly as designed: preventing forced selling and protecting remaining investors. In our view, those caps generally make sense. They protect against a total mismatch between the vehicle and the underlying assets. Without them, managers could be forced to sell loans at unfavorable prices, harming long-term investors.

Without such limits, “run-on-the-bank” behavior can emerge, not necessarily because the underlying loans are collapsing, but because investor expectations and vehicle structures have become misaligned.

1. Investors request liquidity
2. Funds sell assets to meet redemptions
3. Asset sales pressure marks and transaction prices
4. Remaining assets are marked to the then-lower-prevailing market pricing
5. Lower valuations trigger more redemption requests
6. Managers become defensive precisely when opportunities may be improving

Notably, even the partial forced-selling noted above may be an opportunity for those with capital. A private credit fund facing heavy redemptions may need to keep more cash on hand rather than making new loans. That can prevent the manager from taking advantage of better spreads or stronger lender terms during market dislocation. A liquidity-constrained fund may be forced to play defense just when the best opportunities require offense. Those with permanent capital or offering access to private credit via typical drawdown private structures may be advantaged in this environment.

Recent headlines have included multiple well-known private credit managers with redemption requests upwards of 10-20%, with the outlier of 40% for Blue Owl’s Technology Finance Fund in Q1, far above the 5% threshold.1 Many of these managers have enacted the 5% gate. It will be interesting to see if this potential shrinking demand for making loans, coupled with some poorly underwritten loans and a wall of maturity hitting in 2027/2028, leads to broader credit market distress.

A Re-evaluation of the Place for Private Credit

Recent market developments may prompt investors to re-examine the role of private credit within their portfolios. As liquidity constraints have become more visible, investors may revisit the trade-offs among income generation, return potential, diversification benefits, and liquidity needs when evaluating where to allocate their illiquid capital.

Private credit can produce attractive income and may offer diversification, lower volatility, and better contractual protections than equity. But it is still credit. Upside is usually capped at interest and principal repayment. The lender does not generally participate in open-ended enterprise value creation in the same way an equity owner does. As a result, the risk-return profile of private credit differs from that of traditional private equity. It is also distinct from traditional fixed income investments, which generally offer greater liquidity.

With this rediscovered lesson that private credit is not liquid, we anticipate investors may re-evaluate the risk-return trade-off of private credit and the place it has in their portfolios.

Conclusion

The lesson from the current private credit debate is not that the asset class necessarily should be avoided. The lesson is that private credit must be underwritten carefully at three levels: the loan, the manager, and the vehicle. The vehicle level is most relevant today, as many of these “liquid” private credit structures are liquid until they are not. Unfortunately, semi-liquid usually means “liquid until you want or need liquidity”.

Private credit can be a useful allocation. But it is not a substitute for liquid fixed income, and it is not private equity with better liquidity. It is an illiquid credit strategy whose success depends on underwriting discipline, structure, valuation integrity, and thoughtful liquidity design. The next phase of the market will likely separate managers who earned the illiquidity premium from those who merely sold the prospect of this premium. We also believe that many investors will return to traditional private equity exposure for their illiquid allocation now that the market has come to agree broadly that semi-liquid means illiquid. Some investors appeared to believe they could earn nearly private-equity-like returns while receiving liquidity terms far superior to a traditional private equity fund. In many cases, both expectations were too optimistic.

The materials are being provided for informational purposes only and constitute neither an offer to sell nor a solicitation of an offer to buy securities. These materials also do not constitute an offer or advertisement of TIFF’s investment advisory services or investment, legal or tax advice. Opinions expressed herein are those of TIFF and are not a recommendation to buy or sell any securities.

These materials may contain forward-looking statements relating to future events. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by terminology such as “may,” “will,” “should,” “expect,” “plan,” “intend,” “anticipate,” “believe,” “estimate,” “predict,” “potential,” or “continue,” the negative of such terms or other comparable terminology. Although TIFF believes the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, future results cannot be guaranteed.

Brad Calder, Managing Director Head of Equities, was quoted in an article from Top 1000 Funds about investment strategies in emerging markets. Calder discussed why active management makes the most sense for many developing countries high in technology stocks.

Read the full article here

The materials are being provided for informational purposes only and constitute neither an offer to sell nor a solicitation of an offer to buy securities. These materials also do not constitute an offer or advertisement of TIFF’s investment advisory services or investment, legal or tax advice. Opinions expressed herein are those of TIFF and are not a recommendation to buy or sell any securities.

These materials may contain forward-looking statements relating to future events. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by terminology such as “may,” “will,” “should,” “expect,” “plan,” “intend,” “anticipate,” “believe,” “estimate,” “predict,” “potential,” or “continue,” the negative of such terms or other comparable terminology. Although TIFF believes the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, future results cannot be guaranteed.

Brendon Parry, CFA, Head of Private Markets, Deputy CIO, was quoted in a recent article in Buyouts Insider discussing the rise of novel private equity fund structures. Parry discussed TIFF’s investment philosophy in the independent sponsor market and shared why he believes the independent sponsor structure remains advantageous compared to newer hybrid structures.

Read the full article here
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The materials are being provided for informational purposes only and constitute neither an offer to sell nor a solicitation of an offer to buy securities. These materials also do not constitute an offer or advertisement of TIFF’s investment advisory services or investment, legal or tax advice. Opinions expressed herein are those of TIFF and are not a recommendation to buy or sell any securities.

These materials may contain forward-looking statements relating to future events. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by terminology such as “may,” “will,” “should,” “expect,” “plan,” “intend,” “anticipate,” “believe,” “estimate,” “predict,” “potential,” or “continue,” the negative of such terms or other comparable terminology. Although TIFF believes the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, future results cannot be guaranteed.