Your SGO or ours. Your staff or ours.
Two separate questions. Own the SGO and run it yourself, own it and let our team operate it, or join an SGO we already run and form nothing at all. Here is the comparison as we would give it on a call — including where the answer is not us.
Run your own SGO
Your SGO · your staff
You form the nonprofit, get certified, seat your board and scholarship committee, and operate the program on ClearPath with your own people.
What you get
- Your board writes the rules and your committee decides every award.
- Your brand on the giving pages, receipts, portal, and application.
- The administrative share of every gift is your revenue, not a vendor’s.
What you take on
- Months before the first gift — formation, IRS recognition, certification.
- A real board, real governance, and an annual audit are obligations.
- You are hiring for a job with almost no experienced candidates yet.
Probably not you if
You have no intention of staffing a back office (Model B is the same SGO without the hiring), or you are a single school, which cannot form an SGO for its own families.
Have us run yours
Your SGO · our staff
You form the same nonprofit and seat the same board. Our team does the work: gifts, receipts, applications, income verification, disbursement, the 90/10 books, and the state filings. This is ClearPath Managed, open today.
What you get
- Your entity, your brand, your receipts — identical to running it yourself.
- Your board still writes the rules; your committee still decides awards.
- No hiring, and no gap when the one person who knows it all is out.
What you take on
- You still form and certify the entity. Managed removes the staffing, not the months.
- Board, independent committee, and annual audit stay your obligations.
- The administrative share pays our team instead of funding your own.
Probably not you if
You want the administrative share as your own revenue, or you already employ the development and compliance staff to run this well.
Join an SGO we run
Our SGO · our staff
You join a certified SGO we operate as a partner school: a branded giving page and QR code, donors who can name your school as their preference, and one recurring job — confirming a student is enrolled.
What you get
- Days to onboard, $0 to start. Nothing to form, certify, or audit.
- No board, no committee, no compliance officer on your side.
- Scholarship tuition is paid straight to your school, on a ledger you can see.
What you take on
- Not open yet — A and B you can begin today, this one you get in line for.
- The SGO’s committee decides every award. Donor preference is advisory by law.
- The receipts, the entity, and the administrative share belong to the SGO.
Probably not you if
You are a diocese, network, or foundation that wants to set scholarship policy across many schools and keep the administrative revenue.
What actually differs
Every row is a real trade. Shaded cells are the models that tend to win it — often two of them, because A and B are the same SGO with different staff.
| Model ARun your own SGO | Model BHave us run yours | Model CJoin an SGO we run | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Time to first gift | Months | Months | Days — once it opens |
| Cost to start | Formation + audit | Formation + audit + our fee | $0 |
| Staff you must hire | One, at minimum | None | None |
| Compliance and filings | Your job | Our job, your obligation | The SGO’s job |
| Board, committee, audit | Required | Required | None |
| Who decides awards | Your committee | Your committee | The SGO’s committee |
| Who sets the rules | You do | You do | The SGO does |
| Whose brand donors see | Yours, end to end | Yours, end to end | Your page, the SGO’s receipt |
| Admin share of a gift | Yours to keep | Pays our team | Stays with the SGO |
| States you can serve | Your call | Your call | Wherever the SGO is certified |
Everyone is paid from the same 10%
Section 25F requires at least 90% of contributions to reach students. Every fee — the platform, the SGO’s administration, a managed engagement — comes out of the other 10%. That holds in all three models. What changes is who stands in which row.
Donor gives $1,000
Earns up to a $1,700 federal credit in an opted-in state
$1,000
Scholarship floor
At least 90% must reach students. Nobody touches this.
$900+
Operating allowance
The ≤10% for administration. Every fee below comes out of this.
up to $100
— Platform (SGO Guide)
Software, payments, compliance tooling, support
set per program
— SGO administration
Staff, audit, state reporting. Yours if you run it, ours if we do.
set per program
Illustrative. Both shares are set per program and bounded by the operating cap — the software blocks any configuration that would breach it.
True in all three models
- At least 90% of every gift reaches students. Fees never touch that side of the line.
- The 90/10 test runs per state — money designated to one state never funds another.
- The SGO’s own independent committee decides every award, at arm’s length.
- No gift can be earmarked to a school or a student. A preference is advisory.
- Every fee, release, and award is recorded, rate-stamped, and exportable for an auditor.
The signals that usually decide it
Lean toward running your own
- You represent several schools — a diocese, network, district, or association.
- You have, or will hire, someone who owns donors, applications, and compliance.
- You want the administrative share to fund your own mission.
- Deciding who gets a scholarship is the point for you.
Lean toward having us run it
- You want the SGO to be yours, but not the back office that comes with it.
- Your board will govern. It will not become an employer.
- You already have the donors — what you lack is capacity to serve them.
- You want to be live in the first giving year without betting on a hire.
Lean toward joining ours
- You are one school, and the statute will not let you form an SGO for your own families.
- You can wait — the program is not accepting schools yet.
- You would rather raise money than own a nonprofit that raises money.
- You want to test whether your community gives before committing to anything.
Still split? Between A and B: form the entity now and decide who staffs it later — the formation work is identical either way, and it is the part that takes months. (Every stage of it is written out here.) Between owning an SGO and joining one: get on the early-access list. It costs nothing, it tells you in one giving season whether your community will give, and it does not stop you forming your own afterward.
Pricing the work itself — what running an SGO takes week to week, and when an internal team pays for itself — is itemized in Starting an SGO: who is actually going to run it?
Questions people actually ask
What is the actual difference between the three models?+
Two questions, asked separately: whose SGO is it, and who does the work. Model A is your SGO run by your staff. Model B is your SGO run by ours. Model C is our SGO, which a school joins without forming anything. A and B produce an identical entity and an identical donor experience — only the staffing differs. In C you never own an SGO.
Who decides who gets a scholarship?+
The SGO’s own independent committee, always — that is what Section 25F requires, and nothing we sell moves it. In Models A and B that committee is yours; in a managed engagement we only prepare the docket (income verified, eligibility screened, conflicts flagged) and record the vote. In Model C the committee belongs to the SGO you joined.
Can we join an SGO you operate today?+
Not yet. We are standing that SGO up ahead of January 1, 2027, when the federal credit begins. What is live is the early-access list — free, non-binding, and first in line. Forming your own SGO, staffed by you or by us, you can begin immediately, and since it takes months, starting now is not early.
Is SGO Guide a platform, or an SGO?+
Both, kept separate on purpose. Independent nonprofits license the software to run their own SGOs; some of them also hire our team to operate the program under ClearPath Managed, which changes who does the work and nothing about who owns the SGO. We are also standing up certified SGOs of our own for partner schools to join. Every SGO on the platform is labeled by which it is.
How is ClearPath Managed different from joining an SGO you run?+
Ownership. Under Managed you hold the 501(c)(3), the state listings, and the bank accounts, your board sets policy, and your name is on every receipt — we are a service provider paid from the administrative share. A partner school owns none of that, which is exactly why it costs nothing and takes days.
Can we start with a managed engagement and take it in-house later?+
Yes, and many plan to. The entity, the donor records, and the applicant history are already yours, and your staff has had full access and export the whole time. Moving in-house is a change of who logs in plus a documented handover — not a migration.
Can we start as a partner school and form our own SGO later?+
Yes, once the partner program opens. Joining is the cheapest way to learn whether your community will give. If it does and the volume justifies the overhead, you can form your own SGO and bring your donor relationships with you.
What does SGO Guide charge?+
Every fee in every model comes out of the operating allowance — the ≤10% of contributions Section 25F allows for administration — never the 90% that must reach scholarships. Run your own and you pay the platform fee and keep the rest. Have us run it and the managed fee takes the share that would have paid the staff you did not hire. Join an SGO we run and the school pays nothing.
Can a partner school’s donors direct gifts to that school?+
No, and no SGO can lawfully offer that. Section 25F prohibits earmarking a contribution to a specific school or student. A donor may name a preferred school, which the committee sees, but the committee keeps full discretion and awards on need and eligibility.
Does joining an SGO mean giving up our brand?+
No. Partner schools get their own branded giving page, link, QR code, and embeddable widget — your colors, logo, story, and goal. What belongs to the SGO is the legal entity and the receipt, because it is the SGO that is certified to issue one.
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