ClearGov helps local governments across the U.S. do something deceptively simple: budget better and talk about it more honestly. By turning complex financial data into clear, visual stories, they give finance teams a way to show citizens exactly where their tax dollars go and why it matters. But behind every great civic mission is someone making sure people actually know how to use the tools. When Katy Hutchinson joined as ClearGov’s very first customer education hire, she walked into a program that was essentially one spreadsheet, a notebook, and a lot of goodwill. Three people. Hundreds of clients. No way to see if any of it was landing. Fast forward four years, and that program—now with LearnUpon at the center of everything, and a training team that’s grown from three to ten—has reached over 2,000 customers, kept a 94% CSAT, and driven a 32% drop in churn scores for ClearGov’s core product. The numbers, as Katy herself puts it, shouldn’t be possible. “It would be impossible for our team to have stayed as small and mighty as we did without LearnUpon. Without any customer education, our clients have a churn score of 44, and after engaging with everything we've built on LearnUpon, that drops to 30. ” Katy Hutchinson Head of Training, ClearGov The Challenge: Three people, 800 clients, and a spreadsheet called “the spreadsheet of death” When Katy arrived at ClearGov, there was no formal customer education program waiting for her—just a blank slate and a growing list of clients who needed support. Training was entirely live, entirely manual, and tracked with handwritten notes that no one would ever be able to search. ClearGov’s service model was generous: every client got as many live sessions as they needed. Which sounds great until you’re one of three people responsible for 800 organizations and the list keeps getting longer. There was no way to know who’d been trained on what, whether a recorded session had ever been watched, or where customers were quietly getting stuck. As Katy shares: “There was no accountability or scale. We didn’t know who was watching the recordings, we didn’t know how far they were getting, we didn’t know if they were getting stuck.” Katy Hutchinson Head of Training, ClearGov The audience made it even trickier. ClearGov’s end users aren’t full-time software people—they’re fire chiefs, public works directors, Parks and Rec staff who have a specific task to complete and approximately zero interest in navigating to a separate learning portal to figure it out. Learning needed to meet them where they already were. The case for a learning solution was easy to make. Finding the right partner was the real task. The Solution: A customer academy built for accessibility, automation, and scale After evaluating the market, Katy chose LearnUpon. Drawn in by the responsiveness of the team, a pricing model that worked for where ClearGov was at, and a platform that felt intuitive enough for both admins and learners. The result was the ClearGov Academy: a full-lifecycle learning environment covering everything from initial onboarding through to year-two renewal—all running through LearnUpon. Education in the flow of work with LearnUpon Anywhere One of the most significant changes was embedding learning directly into the ClearGov platform using LearnUpon Anywhere. For end users—the fire chiefs, public works directors, and Parks and Rec staff who needed to complete a specific task and weren’t going to go hunting for a separate learning portal—this removed the single biggest barrier to engagement. “Being able to embed courses from LearnUpon right within our product, so they don't have to click anywhere else, has been huge for our customers, and for us. ” Katy Hutchinson Head of Training, ClearGov When customers engage with learning in context, they complete the task, feel good about the product, and come back. That ripples upward: the client champions who own the platform see their teams actually using it, and renewal becomes a much easier conversation. The product gets stickier, one embedded module at a time. Automation that removed the admin entirely Behind the academy, Katy built a fully automated enrollment engine using LearnUpon’s API and a direct integration with the ClearGov backend. The moment a new account is created in ClearGov, the backend passes custom user data to LearnUpon via API—and LearnUpon automatically drops that user into the right groups and courses based on their subscriptions and permissions. Nobody has to touch it. “We use the ClearGov backend to pass through custom user data to auto-assign groups and courses in LearnUpon. It means our customers get the right learning at the right time—and it happens without anyone on my team lifting a finger.” Katy Hutchinson Head of Training, ClearGov ClearGov also integrated with ChurnZero, their customer success platform. Learner progress data flows between both systems, giving relationship managers real-time visibility into engagement. When a customer’s relationship manager changes—say, moving from the implementation stage to a customer success manager—the assignment in LearnUpon updates automatically too. The right person always has the right view. This automation is what made the early numbers possible. A team of three, supporting 800 organizations, could only do so because the platform was doing the heavy lifting between live sessions. As ClearGov continued to grow past that point, the training team grew too. LearnUpon’s automation meant that growth could go toward higher-touch, higher-impact work, instead of manual enrollment and tracking. A live learning strategy built around where clients get stuck On-demand courses handle the baseline, but ClearGov’s live learning strategy—entirely managed through LearnUpon’s ILT features—has become one of Katy’s proudest achievements. The team runs multiple session formats each week: 15-minute training consultations to help clients find the right next resource, individual 30- and 60-minute workshops for deeper needs, and recurring Getting Started Workshops for new clients across a rolling four-week cycle. The most recent addition, and the one generating the most excitement, is what the team calls Working Sessions: small-group, facilitated workshops targeted at specific adoption blockers. A trainer walks through the task, then clients work through it together—a format designed to get stuck clients moving again. “The level of success we've seen from those for getting our truly stuck clients moving again has been absolutely amazing.” Katy Hutchinson Head of Training, ClearGov The Results: Numbers that shouldn’t be possible The impact of ClearGov’s education program shows up most clearly in their churn data. Clients who engage with training on LearnUpon Anywhere see a 32% drop in churn scores for ClearGov’s core operational budgeting product—from 44 without training to 30 with it. Across all products, trained clients average a churn score of 37.76 compared to 46.79 for those who haven’t engaged. For a product where lower churn scores signal a higher likelihood of renewal, that’s not a marginal improvement. It’s the difference between a client who sees value and one who doesn’t. At the same time, the team has maintained a 94% CSAT while scaling from 800 to over 2,000 agencies. “Those numbers should not be possible, and they were. That's the biggest thing that we've done.” Katy Hutchinson Head of Training, ClearGov When ClearGov was acquired by a larger organization and merged with another company in their portfolio, Katy’s team wasn’t discussed in terms of redundancy. The work they’d done and the infrastructure they’d built was too clearly tied to the business to question. The challenge now is applying the same approach to that merged organization, which currently delivers 12 hours of individual, custom workshops to every single client. What’s next: Expanding the model With the merger underway, Katy’s focus is on bringing the same scalable education model to the newly merged organization, which has never had an LMS or any ongoing learning resources.The principles are the same: reduce reliance on intensive 1:1 delivery, build scalable on-demand content, and use automation to make the right training available at the right moment. On the product side, working sessions are being expanded to more user groups and product areas—and early results suggest they’ll be just as effective at driving adoption wherever they’re deployed. For Katy, the through-line is simple: if it’s created or hosted by a ClearGov human and it has to do with learning, it’s in LearnUpon.