Matching gifts
The match your donors never claim
Thousands of employers will match a charitable gift, and most of that money is never collected — not because anybody refused, but because nobody asked at the moment it would have taken thirty seconds. Aurora asks in the receipt, while the donor still has it open.
Three steps, and two of them are not yours
Your side of this is one paste. The rest happens to the donor, in the order it has to happen in.
Connect your own account
Paste your Double the Donation public key into Aurora's settings. That is the entire setup, and it is your account with them — Aurora does not resell it, mark it up or sit between you.The ask goes out with the receipt
Every receipt Aurora sends carries a link to that donor's own match page, which looks up their employer and tells them what to do next. The timing is the whole trick: a donor asked three weeks later has forgotten the gift, and a donor asked at the checkout has not made one yet.They claim it from their employer
The match is an arrangement between your donor and the company they work for, and the money comes to you from the company. Aurora's job ends at making sure the person was asked while they still cared.
What Aurora won't do here
Four things that would each make this feature look better in a demo, all of them refused in the code rather than in a sentence on this page.
Only gifts made after you connect.
The date you connected is recorded, and nothing older than it is ever looked at. Retroactively registering the gifts your donors made before you had this switched on would flatter a first-month report and is not ours to do.One payment is one gift.
A donor who fills three needs in one basket made one payment, and it is registered once. Registering it three times would inflate your match volume and send that donor three emails for one act of generosity.No outcome we cannot observe.
When a donor is shown their match, Aurora records that they were shown it. Whether their employer paid out happens somewhere we cannot see, so there is no dashboard figure here implying we watched it happen.The link proves nothing to anyone but the donor.
A match link is a signed token rather than a guessable id, and every way it can fail — a forgery, a refunded gift, an organization that disconnected — renders the identical page. Nobody holding a URL can learn whether there is a gift behind it.
What you need before you start
A Double the Donation account and its public key. That is a relationship between your organization and them, on their pricing, and Aurora neither brokers it nor takes anything from it. If you already have one, this is a two-minute setup. If you do not, get one first — there is nothing here we can substitute for it.
Common questions
Put your first need in front of a donor
Create your account and build a widget for free. Free — Aurora takes nothing from any gift, and we ask your donors for an optional contribution instead — or $0.99 an update, with your donors never asked.