Streamline compliant gift agreement creation and execution
Control intake, review in parallel, close cleanly. Your rules and thresholds, applied to every draft and the whole portfolio.
- Protected-class criteria and proxies
- Flag
- Eligible pool below your threshold
- Review
- Vague or unadministrable language
- Suggest
- Variance power, naming, stewardship
- Locked
- Gifts above your review threshold
- Route to counsel
How does GATO keep gift agreements compliant?
Every draft is screened as it is written for legality, feasibility, and documentation, using a framework built on industry best practices and customized with your general counsel. Each flag shows the clause, the reason, and suggested language, and red flags must be fixed or overridden with a logged reason before the agreement can be approved. Protected clauses stay locked, and when policy changes you re-screen the whole portfolio instead of rereading it by hand.
Three movements, one live document.
Control intake
- Custom forms, not pre-edited drafts
- Approve, hold, or send back
- Templates that branch, so you keep a handful instead of a hundred
Review in parallel
- One live document, comments and mentions
- Locked clauses only you can unlock
- Saved routes; add counsel mid-review
Close cleanly
- Donor review, then signature
- Your e-sign tool or ours, or wet ink
- Signed copy checked against the approved draft
Compliant agreements, based on best practices.
Every draft screened three ways, using our best practices paired with your institution’s policies and guidance.
Legality
Auto-flags language that brings liability, like race, gender, age and ethnicity, and their proxies. With the clause and the reason.
Feasibility
How restrictive the criteria are, with real eligible-student counts. Not too narrow, too vague, or hard to administer.
Documentation
Aligned with your templates, policies and style guides. Vague language caught before it reaches the donor.
When policy changes, re-screen the whole portfolio instead of rereading hundreds of agreements by hand.
Clauses that cannot drift
Variance power, naming, stewardship terms: locked, unlockable only by the people you name, with the reason shown to anyone reading.
Counsel where it counts
Standard gifts move on approved language. Counsel’s time goes to the agreements that genuinely need the review.
Customize your review routes
Run parallel and sequential reviews, so the right people see what they need to, when they need to.
An audit trail that holds up
Every draft, comment, approval, override, and donor reply on one record, exportable when someone asks how a term got there.
The record stays with the fund.
Drafts, comments, approvals, overrides, and donor replies: one exportable audit trail, attached to the fund forever.
Signed copies out, teams notified, filing handled.
- Draft 1 · from intake formDrafted on the endowed scholarship template.
- Screening · LegalityGender criterion in the purpose clause flagged; edit applied by the gift officer.
- Review · Finance, CounselApproved in parallel. Counsel added mid-review.
- Donor reply · by email“Looks right to us.” Added as a comment on the naming clause.
- ExecutedSigned copy matched the approved draft. Filed with the fund.
Your gift officers get their own view of the same record.
For gift officers →Frequently asked questions
Whose rules does the compliance screening use?
Yours. The screening framework starts from industry best practices for gift agreements and is customized with your general counsel for your institution, state, or province. You can add or remove checks and set your own thresholds. When guidance changes, you update the rule and re-screen every agreement instead of rereading them by hand.
Where do the eligible-student counts come from?
From your student information system, such as Banner, PeopleSoft, Colleague, or Workday, connected through Awarded by API or scheduled file transfer. GATO shows aggregated counts of how many current students would qualify under the proposed criteria. It never shows student names, and the counts are for your team, not for donors.
Can we bring in our existing gift agreements?
Yes. Upload legacy PDFs and Word documents and GATO makes them searchable and audits them in bulk for legality, feasibility, documentation, and utilization. From there you can create amendments and addenda, or generate a memo to file for funds that have no documentation.
Does GATO integrate with our CRM?
GATO connects to CRMs, including Salesforce, and to student information systems by API, scheduled file transfer, or flat file, so the final signed agreement can be saved to the donor’s record. Specific connections are scoped during implementation.
How long does implementation take?
Technical setup takes a couple of weeks; most teams are fully live in about four to six weeks, depending on how much the approval process changes. Every customer gets an implementation lead with hands-on gift agreement experience who reviews your current agreements and templates, sets up roles and approval routes, and helps make the case to leadership.