Balfour served as chairman and later president of the CAS in the 1970s, helping to stabilise the organisation's finances, began a programme to advice corporations on producing contemporary and modern collections and pioneered cultural travel for its members.
[2][5] She began to display a fascination of art while at university and collected small works by Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore.
[4][5] In 1948, she joined the staff of The Economist in London as editor of its American Survey in place of Margaret Cruikshank, who served as her deputy.
[3] Under Balfour, the magazine attempted to feature a broader range of affairs and opinion in the United States by employing the detachment of an editorial base in London to avoid bias from New York and Washington, D.C.[4] While most of the magazine favoured the position of the Government of the United States during the Vietnam War, her section was more critical, reflecting her own democratic politics.
She helped to begin the custom of staging art exhibitions in the foyer and encouraged sculpture students from the Royal Academy Schools to work in its courtyard midway through each year.
[6] Balfour initiated a programme of disinterested advice to corporations producing contemporary and modern collections,[5] and pioneered cultural travel for its members.
"[4] Balfour was described as "a small, dumpy woman with a strongly upper-class English accent",[3] who dressed "elegantly in couture clothes tailored to her diminutive but full-busted figure and until the end of her life kept her neatly coiffed hair ash blonde.
[8] The Nancy Balfour Trust Scholarship loan was set up in her name to be available for an undergraduate or postgraduate student at the Slade School of Fine Art for the duration of their course which they were required to pay at the beginning of each year.