Questions teams ask before choosing GATO

GATO is gift agreement software for university advancement and donor relations teams, built by Awarded. It drafts gift agreements from an intake form, screens restrictions for legal, feasibility, and documentation risk, routes internal approvals, and collects donor review and signature. The full record, from first draft to signed copy, stays attached to the fund.

Donor relations, gift administration, and advancement services teams who own gift agreements, and the gift officers, approvers, and counsel who work on them. It fits universities, colleges, community and technical colleges, and institutionally related foundations, whether gift agreements are centralized or decentralized across units. Nonprofits and community foundations use the same workflow.

DocuSign and Adobe Sign collect signatures. GATO covers everything before the signature too: intake, drafting from your templates, compliance screening, internal approvals, and donor review. At the end, donors can sign on GATO’s branded signing page, or you can route the agreement through your existing DocuSign or Adobe Sign account.

GATO is licensed per organization, based on the number of funds you manage. There are no per-seat fees, so every gift officer, approver, and reviewer can have access, and donors are never charged to sign. Book a demo for a proposal.

Every draft is screened three ways: legality (protected-class criteria and their proxies, and donor involvement in selecting recipients), feasibility (how restrictive the criteria are and whether the program still exists), and documentation (vague or unadministrable language, and alignment with your templates and style guide). Each finding is rated red, yellow, or green and shows the clause, the reason, suggested language, and source material. Red flags must be fixed, or overridden with a logged reason, before the agreement can move forward.

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.

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.

Yes, for compliance screening, for pre-filling drafts from an uploaded document or donor email thread, and for comparing signed copies against the approved draft. Intake forms, templates, approval routing, reminders, and signing all work without AI, and the AI features are optional.

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.

You save approval routes, for example scholarships over a set amount, and run steps in parallel or in sequence. Reviewers can be asked to sign off on specific sections, like just the restrictions. Signatory rules follow gift size and unit, delegates can cover for absent reviewers, and automated reminders go out by email, in-app notification, or text.

Yes. Clauses like variance power, naming, and stewardship terms can be locked in a template or a single agreement. Everyone, including the donor, sees that the clause is protected and why. Only the people you name can unlock it.

Yes. Pledge agreements, internal documents like fund-creation forms and terms of reference, and planned-giving confirmations can use the same drafting and routing. GATO is built for gift agreements first, so the compliance screening is most valuable there.

No. Donors get a link (or an attachment) to review the agreement, and they can simply reply to the email. Their reply is added to the agreement as a comment for your team. The document they see is locked, so they comment rather than redline. Optional extra verification includes expiring links and a texted code.

Yes. You can route agreements through DocuSign or Adobe Sign, use GATO’s branded signing page, or collect wet-ink signatures. For wet ink, upload the signed scan and GATO compares it against the latest approved draft and flags any language that changed.

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.

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.

Each institution’s data is isolated, documents sit in private storage behind access checks, and access is role-based with single sign-on available. Every draft, approval, override, and signature is logged. GATO has passed institutional security reviews, and a HECVAT and security documentation are available on request. Student data appears only as aggregated counts.

Yes. There is a Canadian version of the compliance framework that reflects CRA and provincial requirements, reviewed with your general counsel.