Drives and in-kind giving
Not every gift is money
Some supporters would rather bring the coat than pay for it. Some businesses want to run the collection themselves. And the people you serve usually know what they need before you do. These are three different problems, and Aurora handles all three without a spreadsheet.
Let a donor bring the thing
Mark a need as something a supporter can bring in person and the widget offers that beside paying for it. The pledge arrives with the date they said they would come.
- Per-need opt-in, so nothing changes on the needs where bringing the item makes no sense
- The donor picks a drop-off time when they pledge, and you are told the moment they do
- A wish-list link as the alternative, for the needs you would rather were bought and shipped
- Pledges that pass their drop-off date are counted and badged, so “they said Tuesday” doesn't quietly become nobody's job
Run a drive with a business or a school
A coat drive, hygiene kits, sack lunches. The sponsoring group does the collecting; you keep the list of what is still missing.
- Its own public page on a shareable link, which is the whole of what the sponsor has to circulate
- Supporters reserve what they'll bring, and the page shows what is left rather than what was asked for
- Assembled kits as well as single items — a hygiene kit lists what goes into one, so nobody guesses
- A named contact at the sponsoring group, kept with the drive instead of in somebody's inbox
- A delivery location and a planned drop-off, so the coats arrive at the site that needs them
- Holds that expire and return the item to the list, because a reservation nobody honours is worse than no reservation
A drive moves through requested, approved, collecting, delivered — a lifecycle rather than a status somebody remembers to change, so at any moment you can answer the only two questions that matter about a drive: has anyone said yes to it, and has anything arrived.
A business can also start one themselves, from a request page of your own. It lands as a request and waits for you, which is the right default: a collection run in your name is not something a stranger should be able to switch on.
Let people tell you what they need
The requests you get today arrive in a group chat, a voicemail and three separate inboxes. This is the same information, in one place, with a decision attached to it.
A form, on a link, with no login
A caseworker, a teacher or the family themselves can fill it in. Print it as a QR poster and put it on a wall; each of your locations gets its own code, so a request from the east-side pantry is already tagged to the east-side pantry.A queue, not an inbox
Approve a request and it becomes a draft need for you to finish and publish. Decline it with a note, and the note is actually sent to whoever asked — which is the part that stops a queue turning into a place requests go to die.A countdown, and one nudge
Requests expire on a schedule you set. 5 days before one does, the person who submitted it gets a single message asking whether they still need it. One, not a sequence.A check against what you already have
Before you approve, Aurora looks at what has actually been delivered recently — individual drop-offs and drives both — and tells you if something similar arrived. It matches by category as well as by word, so a delivery of mittens surfaces against a request for gloves.
Their contact details are not yours forever
When a requester gives us an email address, we delete it — and their phone number — 30 days after the request closes. Automatically, on a daily sweep, without you asking and without a setting to get wrong. Somebody who told you they needed a coat should not still be in a database two years later because nobody remembered to clean it out.
The qualifier is deliberate and it is worth a sentence. The sweep finds a request by its email address, so what makes this a promise rather than a best effort is that the public form will not accept a request without one. The phone number is optional; the address it is erased alongside is not.
Common questions
While you're here
Put your first need in front of a donor
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