Raise scholarship dollars like a school twice your size.
The fundraising and marketing suite built for the federal scholarship tax credit — donor CRM, campaigns, print, and tracked QR codes. One person can run the whole season.
At a glance
Everything in the box. Tap anything to jump to it.
Twelve things, one login, one price.
It costs your donors nothing. It helps your families pay tuition.
A supporter gives to a scholarship fund. They get every dollar of it back — up to $1,700 a year — off the federal tax they already owe. The money becomes scholarships for families at schools like yours. Nobody works this out on their own, and the cap resets to zero every December 31.
A grandparent in your community will owe the IRS a few thousand dollars next April. Up to $1,700 of that can fund a scholarship instead — and cost them nothing.
They will not find that out on their own. Their accountant will not raise it. The credit does not roll over as an ask: a year nobody asked is a year gone. Everything below exists because that conversation has to happen a few hundred times, in one autumn, run by someone who already has a job.
Your annual fund ask
A scholarship gift
Comes out of their giving budget
Comes off the federal tax they already owe
Competes with the gala, the parish, and every other cause
Competes with none of them
A larger gift next year is a harder conversation
The cap resets in full every January
You thank them for a sacrifice
You show them the arithmetic
One December, run two ways.
The difference is not effort. A school working hard by hand writes a good letter, sends it, and raises real money. What it cannot do by hand is tell four hundred households their own number, follow up only the people who did not act, or reach the grandparents and local businesses it has no address for.
Without Advance
A school doing it properly by hand.
- Emails to the parent list, December 1 and December 2811
- A letter home in backpacks, signed by the head of school7
- A note in the parish bulletin and the school newsletter4
- Word of mouth from the board2
$25,200
24 gifts from 412 addresses — parents, and whoever a parent thought to tell. Averaging $1,050, because a general ask can name the $1,700 cap but not the reader’s own number.
With Advance
The same community, one fall, seven asks.
- Appeal letter, merged with each household’s own credit estimate14 gifts
- Emails through the fall: kickoff, Giving Tuesday, mid-December, last chance22 gifts
- Text reminders before December 31, to people who opted inNew6 gifts
- Grandparents campaign — the tax bill without the tuition billNew11 gifts
- Class challenge across 38 family ambassador pagesNew29 gifts
- Nine local sponsors with a QR code on the counterNew12 gifts
- Bulletin inserts and yard signs, each with its own codeNew8 gifts
$132,600
102 gifts · seven asks · five audiences. The first two are the channels the school already ran, doing roughly twice the work; the other five are asks it had no way to make. Averaging $1,300 — still under the $1,700 cap.
An illustration, not a projection. The federal credit does not open until January 1, 2027, so nobody has run a full year of this yet and there are no results to report — ours or anyone else’s. Every input above is on the page: a school of 268 households, a number of gifts per channel, and one average gift per column. Substitute your own and the arithmetic still holds. What is not a guess is the shape of it: the left-hand column is a school working hard, and the ceiling it hits is reach, personalization and follow-up rather than effort.
What that is worth to a school.
It does not come out of your annual fund
The grandparent who gives your annual fund $250 can give $1,700 here and still give you the $250, because the second gift comes back to them at tax time. This is the rare ask that adds to what your community gives instead of dividing it.
Your families pay less, and you discount less
A scholarship is real money against a family's tuition bill — thousands of dollars a year, not a gesture. It lands on your revenue line instead of coming off it, because most K-12 schools fund tuition assistance out of their own operating budget and this is outside money doing part of that job.
More families can say yes to your school
Price is the first reason a family never applies and the most common reason one leaves. Being able to answer “here is how families afford it” changes an admissions conversation — and admissions and retention are the whole business model. One family kept is worth more in a single year than this costs in ten.
Tuition arrives without an invoice
Partner with an SGO running on ClearPath and scholarship tuition for your students is paid straight to your school, on a ledger you can see — no chasing a family for money they are still waiting on, and no entity of your own to form or audit.
Why it matters that they give here
Where the money is raised decides which families can apply for it.
A supporter who wants to fund scholarships has to pick a Scholarship Granting Organization, and more than one will be asking. Every dollar raised by the SGO your school belongs to is a dollar your families are eligible to apply for. A dollar that goes to a different SGO is not. That contest is decided by who actually asked their community — and most schools will not ask at all.
Inside the SGO, awards go to eligible students on financial need, decided by its committee rather than by a school or a donor — federal law does not permit a gift to be directed to a particular school or student. What your community decides is how large the fund is in the first place, and how many of your own families are in front of it with a completed application.
Awarded families get real money
Thousands of dollars a year against a tuition bill, paid to the school on their behalf.
Families who could not afford you can enroll
The households that never inquired because of price now have an answer worth inquiring about.
You discount less of your own budget
Aid funded from outside is aid your operating budget did not have to absorb.
General information about a federal program, not tax or legal advice. Eligibility, award decisions and the value of any credit depend on facts we cannot see.
What $199 a month has to beat
$1,700
One more donor at the cap
Most of the annual price, from a single supporter who ends up paying nothing.
$3,400
One more couple filing jointly
The year covered, with enough left over for the printing.
One family
Awarded instead of aided
A family whose $5,000 in aid comes from donors rather than your own budget frees $5,000 — every year they stay.
Know your people. Say the right thing. Put it everywhere.
Three jobs an advancement office does badly by hand — and one login that does all three.
Know your people
Import the roster once. Advance resolves two parents into one household, flags the grandparents and business owners who actually carry the tax bill, and names your segments the way advancement offices do — LYBUNT, SYBUNT, lapsed, never given.
- Messy SIS exports in, clean households out
- Filing status doubles the honest size of an ask
- Consented gifts link themselves back to the contact
Household
The Alvarez family
- Maria AlvarezMotherPledged $1,700
- Tomás AlvarezFatherSame household
- Sofía AlvarezClass of 2031
- Mateo AlvarezClass of 2034
- Elena RuizGrandmotherNo tuition bill
Saved segments
412 contacts resolve to 268 households — so one appeal reaches this family once, addressed to both parents.
Say the right thing
Every message is drafted in your school’s voice — your signer, your phrases, the ones you never use. Then it does the thing no other CRM can: it tells that household, by name, what their gift will actually cost them.
The email most schools send
19%
Opened
2%
Clicked
0.4%
Gave
St. Agnes Academy · info@stagnes.example
Annual Fund 2027
Dear Parents,
Our annual fund is now open. Please consider making a donation to support our school. Any amount is appreciated, and all gifts are tax-deductible.
Thank you for your continued support.
— The Advancement Office
- Identical to all 412 households
- Says “deductible” — it’s a credit
- No amount, no deadline, no signer
- Nothing for a grandparent to act on
What Advance drafts
47%2.5×
Opened
18%9×
Clicked
6%15×
Gave
Fr. Michael Doyle · St. Agnes Academy
Maria — a $3,400 gift that costs you nothing
It’s a credit, not a deduction. Here’s what that means for your family.
Dear Maria and Tomás,
You have had two children at St. Agnes for six years, and never once been asked for anything beyond tuition. This ask is different.
Because you file jointly, the two of you can direct up to $3,400 to scholarships this year — and claim every dollar of it back as a federal tax credit when you file, if you owe at least that much. Unused credit carries forward five years.
That is a full year of tuition for one family in this parish — and, once the credit lands, $0 out of yours.
Give $3,400
Fr. Michael Doyle, Pastor
P.S. Grandparents can claim this too, and most have the tax bill to use all of it. Forward this to Elena — her own $1,700 is a second scholarship. How the credit works →
- Subject names the reader and the benefit
- Preheader finishes the subject’s job in the inbox
- Their number, from their filing status — not a suggested amount
- One link, repeated in the button
- A P.S. — the most-read line after the subject
- Anti-earmarking checked before it can send
Sample figures — the same list and the same 412 recipients in both columns, shown to illustrate the difference between a blast and a personalized, credit-aware ask. Advance reports your own, per campaign and per piece.
Put it everywhere
The same campaign, printed. Appeal letters, pledge cards, bulletin inserts, table tents, banners and yard signs in your school’s brand — every one of them carrying its own tracked code.
This year, your gift can cost you nothing.
Your estimate
$3,400 gift · $0 net cost
Fr. Michael Doyle, Pastor
Scan to give
Direct mail
Annual appeal letter
Merged per household with that family’s own credit estimate and a reply device.
I intend to give
Nothing is charged today. Your pledge processes the day the federal credit opens.
Pledge online
Pledge drives
Pledge card
Captures the commitment now; converts automatically the day giving opens.
A scholarship for a family here — at no cost to yours.
Ask about the $1,700 federal credit after Mass.
Scan with your phone camera
Parish
Bulletin & pew insert
Half-page insert for weekend bulletins, sized for a parish print shop.
Give $1,700.
Get $1,700 back.
Scan to learn how
On campus
Yard sign
Two-sided, with a code big enough to scan from the carpool lane.
Every code is unique and repointable. Print five thousand cards aimed at your pledge page in October, then send the same code to your giving page on January 1 — without reprinting a thing. Each piece keeps its own funnel, so you can finally say which one produced gifts.
Then let the families ask the people you cannot.
A school has no address for a grandmother in another state, an uncle who owns a business, or a parent’s employer. Those are exactly the people with the tax bill the credit offsets. Give each family its own page, link and QR, group them by grade, and a class challenge runs itself.
Class challenge
Fall 2027 · by grade
- 1Class of 2031$12,400
- 2Class of 2034$9,800
- 3Class of 2029$6,150
- 4Class of 2033$3,900
Top ambassadors
- MAMaria AlvarezClass of 2031$5,100Goal met
- JWJ. WhelanClass of 2034$3,400Goal met
- CBC. ByrneClass of 2031$3,400of $5,000
- AOA. OkaforClass of 2029$1,700Goal met
Most of this came from grandparents, aunts and employers — people the school has no address for and could never have asked itself.
Her page
Maria Alvarez
Class of 2031
“Both my children are here because someone we have never met paid for it. This year I would like to be that person for somebody else.”
Her own code. A gift through it counts for her family and her class — and for nobody else.
The page is public, so it holds a name, a story and a goal — and no contact data of any kind.
Their own tracked link
Attribution runs through each ambassador’s own code, so a gift counts for exactly one family.
Teams build the leaderboard
Label them by grade, homeroom or house and the standings assemble themselves.
A story and a goal
Each page carries a few lines in their words and a thermometer that moves in real time.
Share graphics, ready-sized
Generated at the dimensions parents actually post, with the code already on them.
The soccer club, the orthodontist, the tutoring service.
Local businesses and community groups will back a school’s scholarship fund if you make it a two-minute decision. Each one gets its own code, its own page, and a logo on your public donor wall — and the ones who want to bring their whole membership with them can.
On the school page
Our supporters
Founding
- BrookfieldORTHODONTICSFamily dentistry on Main Street
Gold
- NORTHSIDESOCCER CLUBYouth soccer since 1998
- RiversideTUTORINGReading and maths support
Silver
- Hallow & FernBAKERYBakers in Brookfield
- K&PAUTO SERVICEIndependent garage
- St. Bride’sGUILDParish volunteers
Tiers are earned by what each supporter’s own code raised, not assigned by whoever runs the wall — so nobody has to be told why they are where they are.
Adding one
How will they give?
Give on their own
One gift, one placement. Nothing to organize.
Rally their people
Members and customers give through their code.
One line about them
20% off for St. Agnes families
Offers a discount — that is advertising, and it would cost them the credit.
Youth soccer in Brookfield since 1998
Recognition. Publishable as written.
What they get
- A placement on the wall, at the tier their code earns
- Their own page, to link from their site or their window
- Their acknowledgement line in your newsletters and appeals
Their own code, on their counter and in their window. Every gift it brings in is theirs.
Two ways in
The owner gives once and takes the placement, or they rally their members and customers through their code. Setting up the first takes a name and a logo.
Tiers nobody has to defend
Placement is earned by what each code actually raised, at thresholds that are multiples of the $1,700 cap — so every level explains itself in one sentence.
Recognition, never advertising
A name, a logo, a town and a plain description are recognition. A price, a discount or “call us” is advertising — and Advance refuses to publish it.
On the page and in the mail
The wall sits on your school page, and the same acknowledgement line drops into your newsletters and appeals without anyone retyping it.
Why the wall is worded the way it is
A sponsorship is a gift. An advertisement is a purchase.
A supporter who receives advertising in exchange has received something of value, and a federal credit does not survive that. Advance checks every sponsor line before it can go on the wall or into an email, so a school can say yes to the local business without quietly costing them the credit they came for.
The parts you would never get around to building.
Explainer kits
Branded, state-aware handouts that regenerate from live rules on every download — so a PDF you printed last term can never carry a stale claim. The library keeps growing.
Stewardship on autopilot
Thank-you within a day, a January reminder to actually claim the credit, renewal at eleven months, lapsed win-back. All signed by your school.
Board-ready reporting
Participation, donor retention, cost per dollar raised, and campaign ROI scored against industry benchmarks — exported as a board PDF.
Free-entry prize drawings
Drawings, matching, and participation challenges with generated official rules and state-by-state gating. Never paid raffles — those forfeit the credit.
Newsletters & blog posts
Parent newsletters, alumni updates, and website posts that explain the credit — published to your school page or exported for your own site.
Compliance
Federal law forbids earmarking a gift to a school or a student.
Every draft Advance produces is checked against that rule before anyone can send it. Copy that crosses the line is blocked, not warned about — and the required disclosure is appended to every message automatically.
A deduction saves them a little. A credit costs them nothing.
Advance puts that math in front of the specific household reading the letter — in the email, on the page, and printed on the reply card. It is the one sentence a general CRM cannot generate.
A deduction
Lowers taxable income. Returns a fraction of the gift — their tax rate.
This credit
Comes off the tax bill itself. Dollar for dollar, up to $1,700 a year.
Illustrative. The credit is non-refundable and limited by the donor’s own tax liability, with unused amounts carrying forward up to five years. Advance shows each household an estimate based on what they tell you, and always links to the full calculator.
A giving season that runs itself.
Pick a playbook and click through it. Advance drafts each step in your school’s voice, routes it for approval, and sends it on schedule — to exactly the people who still need it.
Fall giving season
The full autumn arc: kickoff, Giving Tuesday, the December run, and the January reminder to actually claim the credit.
- 1
Day 1
Kickoff letter
Print / mailEveryone - 2
Day 8
Season opens
EmailEveryone - 3
Day 36
Giving Tuesday
EmailNot yet given - 4
Day 50
Mid-December reminder
EmailNot yet given - 5
Day 61
December 31 last chance
EmailNot yet given - 6
Day 67
Thank you
EmailGave - 7
Day 81
Claim your credit
EmailGave
Every step is drafted in your school’s voice and held for approval by default. Turn on auto-send and only drafts that pass the anti-earmarking check go out on their own.
Every open, every click, every dollar — back to the piece that earned it.
Most schools finish a giving season knowing what they raised and nothing else. Advance tells you which message was opened, which code was scanned, who clicked through to the giving page, and which of them actually gave.
Campaign results
Fall giving season
| Piece | Scans | Clicks | Gifts | Raised |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bulletin insert QRPrint | 318 | 74 | 11 | $17,200 |
| Grandparent letterMail | 96 | 41 | 8 | $12,900 |
| Yard signsOn campus | 204 | 22 | 3 | $5,100 |
| Giving Tuesday emailEmail | — | 39 | 2 | $3,700 |
$38,900 attributed to a specific piece — plus whatever arrived without a code.
Contact
Elena Ruiz
Grandmother · last contacted 18 days ago
- Nov 21Pledged $1,700
- Nov 21Clicked “Give now”
- Nov 19Opened “A gift that costs you nothing”
- Nov 19Email delivered
- Nov 18Sent — Grandparent letter
- Oct 02Imported from roster
Stewardship will not email the same person twice inside 21 days, whatever else comes due.
Texting, with consent on the record
A phone number on file is not permission. A contact becomes textable only once they have opted in in writing, and one STOP ends it — the TCPA rule enforced in the data, not in a policy document.
Deliverability, handled
Mail leaves a verified domain as “Your School via your SGO” — the pattern Gmail and Substack use — or from your own domain once IT adds a few DNS records. Bounces, complaints and unsubscribes are handled for you.
Every touch on one timeline
Last contacted, every open, every click, every gift — per person, in order. The next conversation starts where the last one ended instead of from nothing.
We already made the decisions you would have to guess at.
Advance is not a blank canvas with a send button. Every default in it is a fundraising judgment we have already argued out — and the product tells you why, so your development director can defend it to a board.
Day 2
The thank-you
Not the same hour. An instant automated thank-you reads as a receipt, not as gratitude.
Month 11
The renewal
While the memory is warm and the annual credit cap has just reset — a fresh opportunity, not a repeat request.
Jan 8
Claim your credit
After the holidays, before filing. Nobody else in this market reminds a donor to actually claim it.
21 days
The cooldown
Automation that mails somebody three times in a fortnight is worse than automation that never runs.
Then it keeps score. Your board report ranks participation, donor retention and cost per dollar raised against benchmarks and against your own last year, so the conversation stops being about effort and starts being about numbers. When a school would rather someone else ran the season, we do that too.
A spreadsheet, a general nonprofit CRM, or ClearPath Advance.
These are the three real options for a school raising tax-credit dollars next year. Here is the whole list, row by row, with the Advance column showing the Pro plan.
| Feature | A spreadsheet + your inbox | A general nonprofit CRM | Pro plan shownClearPath Advance |
|---|---|---|---|
| The list | |||
| Households, not just contacts | Often an add-on | ||
| Grandparents, alumni and business owners segmented | |||
| Filing status, so the ask is the right size | |||
| Last contacted, plus a full per-person timeline | |||
| Roster and SIS import that survives a messy CSV | By hand | ||
| Reaching people | |||
| Bulk email that actually lands in inboxes | Your school domain gets flagged | ||
| Text messaging with TCPA consent on record | |||
| Multi-step campaigns that branch on behavior | |||
| Copy drafted in your school’s voice, by your signer | |||
| Print-ready branded letters, cards, inserts and signs | |||
| Optional print-and-mail fulfillment | |||
| Ambassador pages and class challenges | |||
| Business sponsors with a logo donor wall | |||
| The tax-credit ask | |||
| Understands the $1,700 federal credit and its annual cap | |||
| Per-household net-cost estimate inside every ask | |||
| Anti-earmarking check before anything can send | |||
| January reminder to actually claim the credit | |||
| Pledge drives that convert on launch day | |||
| Knowing what worked | |||
| Opens, clicks, bounces and unsubscribes | |||
| A tracked, repointable QR code on every printed piece | One static code | ||
| The gift traced back to the piece that earned it | Online only | ||
| Board reporting scored against benchmarks | |||
| What it costs | Free — and your evenings | Usually priced per contact, so it rises as your list grows | $199/mo flat per school · Essentials is free for partner schools |
General nonprofit CRMs are good software. They were built for the charitable deduction, a decade before this credit existed — so nothing on this list is a criticism of them. It is a description of what a school raising tax-credit dollars needs that they were never asked to do.
Essentials free for partner schools. Pro at $199 a month.
Essentials — contacts, tracked links and QR codes, AI-assisted outreach, the content studio and analytics — is free for approved partner schools and stays free. Pro adds everything else on this page. Either way it is billed to the school rather than taken from your donations, so it never touches the 90% that goes to students. SGOs running a group of schools get the network view of all of them at once.
Advance Essentials
$0
Free for partner schools
Schools that have joined an SGO we operate
- Contact list with households, tags, notes, and timelines
- Trackable links and QR codes for every placement
- AI-assisted outreach emails, reviewed before sending
- Content studio for social posts, letters, and inserts
Advance Pro
$199
per school, per month · $1,990 billed annually
Any school raising tax-credit scholarship dollars
- Everything in Essentials
- Campaign engine with scheduling, branching, and season playbooks
- Tax-credit ask engine with per-household net-cost estimates
- Print library with variable data and print-ready export
Advance Network
Custom
for the SGO, across every school
SGOs running a network of schools
- Network command center with per-school activity and dormancy alerts
- School recruitment CRM across every private school in your states
- Template and brand governance pushed down to schools
- Optional approval gate before any school sends
You don’t have to be one of our schools.
Your SGO runs on ClearPath
- Gifts attribute themselves back to the piece that earned them
- Consenting donors land in your CRM automatically
- Live goal thermometer, fed by real gifts and pledges
- Board reporting on real dollars, not self-reported numbers
Your SGO is someone else’s
- Every campaign, template, and printed piece works the same
- Tracked links and QR codes still record every scan
- Your links point at your own SGO's giving page
- Gift results arrive by spreadsheet import
Honest limitation: without a connected SGO, nobody can tell you which postcard produced which gift — that data lives somewhere we cannot see.
What schools ask first
Do we have to use your SGO?
No. Advance runs your list, campaigns, materials and tracked links no matter which SGO your donors give to. It just does more when your SGO is on ClearPath, because then gifts attribute themselves instead of arriving by spreadsheet.
How is this different from Bloomerang or DonorPerfect?
Those are built around the charitable deduction. Advance is built around the credit: it knows the annual per-donor cap, computes what a specific household's gift will cost them, enforces the anti-earmarking rules, and understands that the ask resets every tax year.
Is it really free for partner schools?
Yes. Approved partner schools get Essentials at no cost and no minimum — contacts, tracked links and QR codes, AI-assisted outreach, the content studio, and analytics. Pro adds campaigns, the credit engine, the full print library, ambassadors, stewardship and board reporting.
Who at our school actually runs it?
Usually one development director — often a principal or business manager wearing that hat part-time. That is exactly who the playbooks are for: you approve a season in an afternoon instead of writing emails all December.
Can we run a raffle?
No, deliberately. The IRS treats a raffle ticket as a purchase rather than a gift, so it earns no credit, and paid charitable raffles are illegal or heavily licensed in many states. Advance ships free-entry prize drawings and matching challenges instead.
Pairs with
Talk it through before you decide.
Tell us about your organization and we’ll set up a consultation on your formation path, your state, and the timeline. It costs nothing and there is nothing to sign — and if it’s useful, we’ll walk through the platform on the same call.
What happens next
We read your submission and respond within one business day
A working session, typically 45–60 minutes — your situation, not a sales pitch
Which of the three paths fits, what your state requires, and what the timeline is
You leave with a clear recommendation — including when the answer is to join an SGO rather than form one, or to wait