ClearPath Managed
Your SGO. We run it.
Full outsourced administration of an SGO you own. Your nonprofit, your board, your brand on every receipt — and our team doing the operating work: donor processing and receipts, application intake and income verification, disbursement, 90/10 accounting, state reporting, and audit preparation. You keep the entity and every decision that has to be the board's; you do not staff the back office.
Who does what
Most organizations that should own an SGO cannot staff one — and hiring for it is the slowest, riskiest part.
The work is continuous, not seasonal
An SGO is not a campaign you run each spring. Gifts arrive year-round and have to be receipted with a unique donor number, applications have to be screened and verified, tuition has to reach schools on the school's calendar, and the 90/10 test has to hold in every state account on every day of the year — not just at the audit.
The roles barely exist yet
Section 25F begins January 1, 2027. There is no pool of experienced SGO administrators to hire from, and a development director who has never run a segregated state account is not a substitute. The first year is where compliance failures are cheapest to cause and most expensive to explain.
A half-staffed program looks fine until it doesn't
Receipts go out late, an income verification is taken on faith, a release nudges an account over the operating cap, a state report is filed from a spreadsheet nobody reconciled. None of it shows up as a crisis. All of it shows up in an examination.
But outsourcing cannot mean handing over the mission
The organizations that want this are the ones with the donor relationships and the reason to exist. They are not looking to become a school's vendor — they want the program to be theirs.
Owning an SGO and staffing an SGO are two different decisions. ClearPath Managed lets you make them separately.
Why it matters
Your entity, your board, your name on the receipt
ClearPath Managed does not change who the SGO is. You hold the 501(c)(3), you seat the board, your logo is on the giving page, the family portal, and the tax receipt. We are your back office and we are named as such — not a partner your donors have to be introduced to.
Your committee still decides every award
This is a line we do not cross, and Section 25F is why: awards have to be made at arm's length by the organization's own independent scholarship committee. We prepare the docket — verified income, eligibility screening, priority flags, conflict-of-interest checks — and your committee decides. We never hold a vote on a scholarship.
The operating work, actually done
Gift processing and same-day receipts, donor cap tracking, application intake in English and Spanish, 300% AMI verification against the applicant's own metro area, disbursement to schools, reconciliation, 90/10 monitoring per state account, state annual reports, and the audit evidence package. Named staff, defined turnaround times, and a monthly close you can put in front of a board.
The same platform, whoever is driving
Managed is not a different system with a slower report. It is the same ClearPath your own staff would use, operated by ours — so you can watch every gift, award, and release live, pull any report yourself, and take the keys whenever you want. Nothing about the engagement makes your data harder to leave with.
Paid from the operating allowance, never the 90%
Our fee comes out of the ≤10% Section 25F sets aside for administration — the same allowance that would otherwise pay the staff you did not hire. At least 90% of every qualified contribution still reaches students, and the platform blocks a fee configuration that would breach the cap rather than flagging it after the fact.
A path back to running it yourself
Plenty of organizations use Managed for the first year or two, then bring operations in-house once volume justifies the hire. The entity is already yours, the donors are already yours, the history is already in the system. Moving to self-run is a change of who logs in, not a migration.
What we take, and what never leaves your board.
A managed engagement is a division of labor, not a transfer of control. These are the stages in order — and the four things that stay yours no matter how much of the work we do.
- 01Weeks 1–12
Formation and listing
If the entity does not exist yet, ClearPath Launch forms it: 501(c)(3) structuring, governing documents, board design, the no-earmarking policy, and state registration. If you already have a nonprofit, we structure the scholarship-granting affiliate or amendment instead. You seat the board; we do the filing work.
- 02Weeks 6–14
Program design, decided by you
Eligibility rules, award sizes, priority for returning students, the application timeline, which states you operate in, your qualified-expense policy. We bring the options and the regulatory constraints on each; your board adopts them, and the platform then enforces exactly what was adopted.
- 03Ongoing
Donors and gift processing
We run the giving pages, process cash gifts on every rail, enforce the $1,700 per-donor cap, issue receipts with the unique donor number, handle recurring giving and pledge conversion, and answer donor questions with your name on the reply. Your development team keeps the relationships; we keep the ledger.
- 04Ongoing
Applications and verification
Bilingual intake, document collection, income verification against 300% of the applicant's own area median, household and sibling logic, appeals and waitlists. Every determination is documented against the rule your board adopted, so a reviewer can see why an applicant was eligible without taking anyone's word for it.
- 05Each cycle
The docket goes to your committee
We assemble it — scored, screened, conflict-checked, and split by state account. Your independent scholarship committee reviews and decides. We record the vote, generate the award notices, and never substitute our judgment for theirs.
- 06Ongoing
Money out, on the school's calendar
Direct ACH tuition to schools, restricted-purpose cards for qualified non-tuition expenses, receipt-verified reimbursement for the edge cases. Dual control on every release, reconciliation against the bank, and funding drawn only from the state account the student's gift was designated to.
- 07Ongoing
Compliance, monthly and continuous
Per-state 90/10 monitoring with over-cap releases blocked rather than reported, a tamper-evident audit log, state annual reports prepared and filed, and a monthly close pack for your board. When the examination comes, the evidence package is a button, not a project.
The entity
You hold the 501(c)(3), the state listings, and the bank accounts. We are a service provider to it, and every agreement says so.
The award decisions
Your board seats the scholarship committee and that committee decides. Section 25F requires arm's-length awards by the organization itself; we prepare, we never vote.
The donors and the data
Your donor records, your applicant history, your reporting — exportable in full, at any time, without asking us first.
The brand
Giving pages, receipts, family portal, award letters, and tax documents carry your organization's name. Ours appears where a service provider's should, and nowhere else.
Everything Managed covers
ClearPath Managed is a complete solution — not a module you configure yourself or a feature set you have to maintain. Every item below is included and actively managed.
Priced as a share of the Section 25F operating allowance, scoped by state count and expected volume — never from the 90% that must reach students.
- Named operations lead and a defined service level for donor, applicant, and school response times
- Gift processing, $1,700 cap enforcement, and same-day tax credit receipts under your organization's name
- Bilingual application intake, document collection, and 300% AMI income verification with metro-level calibration
- Scholarship docket preparation, conflict-of-interest screening, and award-notice generation for your committee's decisions
- Disbursement operations across direct-to-school ACH, restricted-purpose cards, and verified reimbursement
- Per-state segregated account bookkeeping with continuous 90/10 monitoring and blocked over-cap releases
- State annual reports prepared and filed, plus the board close pack every month
- Audit evidence package maintained continuously, and support through an examination
- Full platform access for your staff and board throughout — read everything, export anything
- A documented transition plan to self-run operations whenever you want it
ClearPath Managed connects to the rest of ClearPath
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