Department Digest - Gift Administration

Please provide a brief overview of your team
Gift Administration is comprised of two teams: Operations and Gift Accounting. The Operations team, which is led by Bob Marchitto, is responsible for the setup of more than 350 new gifts each year. Adeline Glidden is the gift set up manager and manages a team of three: Meg Strong, Janice SaNogueira, and Seby Gallitto, all of whom joined Gift Administration within the past 18 months. Jeff Perinetti is the Accounting and Systems Analyst, joining the team in November. He works closely with both teams to develop and implement automated solutions to address pain points and gaps between Yale’s needs and Workday’s offerings. 

The Gift Accounting team, led by Matt Govoni, is responsible for ensuring the proper accounting for gifts to the university, including pledge receivables. They distribute annual spending of more than $1.5 billion to more than 8,000 individual endowment gifts. The team works closely with Investment Accounting to ensure the accurate processing of endowment units and with the Budget Office to develop the annual spending budget. Matt is well supported by Dana Whealn and Nolan McDonald—the newest team member, having relocated from Iowa in December.

What work does your team focus on?
Currently, the Teams are busy supporting the university’s most extensive fundraising campaign, “For Humanity,” the public phase of which kicked off in October 2021. The campaign goal is $7 billion, and, to date, it has raised over $4 billion. The campaign will wrap up on June 30, 2026.

What have been some of your team’s most significant accomplishments in the past year?
Unquestionably, our biggest accomplishment this past year has been hiring and onboarding five new staff members to the Gifts Administration area, including four new accountants and our systems analyst, which represents 50% of our entire team. We were able to establish all the new donor gifts, meet our reporting and audit requirements, and significantly enhance some of our system integrations and processes. One project included working with Investment Accounting to create a system integration to operationally record transactions that update the Yale and non-Yale liability endowment unit balances. This new system integration significantly improved a manually intensive legacy process. We worked intensively to enhance and streamline the Workday endowment unit module to the general ledger reconciliation process. By creating complex custom reports that pull and compare data from multiple sources, we significantly reduced the time needed to bring the two modules into balance.

What projects are you looking forward to in the coming year?
We look forward to focusing on continued systems and integration process improvements in the coming year. We are at the early stages of exploring with IT the possibility of systematically loading pledge receivable, and financial data, through system integration, into Workday. Currently, pledge receivable information, which at the detail level resides in the Development Office’s Blackbaud system, must be manually entered into Workday through journal entries to “true” up or down the balance sheet ledger accounts. We will also be working to streamline and automate our work with charitable gift annuities. We will be working to reduce the need for manual reversing journal entries by working with IT/FSS to revise and add to our existing mass allocation operation journals. As a group, we are continuing our work to pare down our Gifts Administration documents server to include only relevant and needed information. This is a lengthy project that is long overdue and will greatly increase the efficiency of our work. Finally, we will document our internal processes by creating or revising our standard operating procedures relating to the endowment unit market price strike and charitable gift annuities to aid in cross-training staff.