About
We think the ask is the problem
The hardest part of fundraising is not finding generous people. It is giving them something specific to be generous about — and most donation forms ask for a number and leave the rest to the donor's imagination.
Most giving asks the wrong question
Traditional fundraising asks supporters to give to an abstraction: a budget, a campaign goal, a progress bar creeping toward a number somebody chose. It works — organizations have been funded that way for a century. But it makes the donor do the translating, from “we need forty thousand dollars” to “and my fifty does what, exactly?”
A winter coat for Maria. A week of groceries for a family between paychecks. A bus pass that gets someone to an interview. When the ask is a thing, the donor does not have to translate anything — and neither do you when you write back to say what their money bought.
That is the whole product. Aurora is a small piece of software with one job: put the specific things your organization needs in front of the people who already want to help, on the website you already have, in your own voice, and then get out of the way of the money.
Four decisions the rest of it follows from
Every one of these costs us something, which is the only reason they are worth stating.
The ask is a thing, not a number
A need in Aurora has a title, a price, a photo, a couple of sentences about who it is for, and — if you want — a name. A supporter picks one and funds it. They are not asked to guess what a useful amount would be, and you are not asked to thank them for an abstraction.We never hold your money
Your organization connects its own Stripe or PayPal account and passes those processors' own identity checks. Donations settle into that account on that processor's schedule. There is no Aurora balance a gift waits in, which means there is no month where we are holding your money and no scenario where our problems become your cash-flow problem.The price is arithmetic, not adjectives
The pricing page works a real gift all the way through to what lands in your account, line by line, including the processor’s cost and including the one case where the pass-through works out in our favour rather than yours. We would rather write that down than have you find it on a statement.
Your donors are yours
Export every donor and every donation to a CSV whenever you like, without asking us. We do not email your supporters on our own initiative, we have no mailing list of our own to add them to, and the list of third parties that touch their data is short, named on the privacy page, and verifiable inside the product rather than aspirational.
What Aurora is not
The fastest way to work out whether a piece of software suits you is usually to read what it refuses to do.
- A charity. Aurora is a technology company, we do not solicit donations, and we are not a party to any gift made through the software.
- A payment processor. Stripe and PayPal take the payment on their own hosted checkouts; there is no card number anywhere in our database.
- The recipient. The gift is between your supporter and your organization, and the receipt is yours to issue.
- An events platform. No ticketing, no auctions, no peer-to-peer pages — there are good tools for those and this is not one of them.
- A company with a wall of logos. There are none on this site because we have none to show. When organizations are willing to put their name to this, their names will go here, and not a day sooner.
Who it suits
Food banks, shelters, schools, mutual-aid networks, faith communities, animal rescues, grassroots causes. The common thread is not size or budget — it is having concrete things you could name and price if somebody asked, and a website you can paste one line of code into.
If your needs genuinely are one undifferentiated operating fund, Aurora will work but it will not do much for you that a plain donate button does not. If you can list twenty things you need this month and what each of them costs, this was built for you.
We are paid by you, for the software, on one of two plans — the second exists to add PayPal alongside card giving. You can change or leave either one from your dashboard, and there is no contract keeping you here.
Put something specific in front of your supporters
Create your account and build a widget for free. Nothing is charged until a donation arrives, unless you take the Growth plan.