For businesses
Give your customers something better than a round-up prompt
A local nonprofit can put its actual needs — a $45 winter coat, a $30 bus pass — on your cart page, on a page with both your names on it, or on a code by the register. Your customer pays them directly. Nothing about your checkout changes.
No account · No contract · Nothing to install
Three steps, and two of them are theirs
Your entire share of the work is deciding where it goes and pasting it there.
A nonprofit you already know sets it up
There is no account for you to create, no contract with us, and nothing for you to install. The nonprofit builds the widget in their own dashboard, points it at the needs they want you featuring, and sends you the code.You paste it where it fits
One div and one script tag, into whatever page you choose. It renders in an iframe, so it inherits nothing from your styles and reaches nothing in your page. Four attributes on that div set the accent color, light or dark, the corner style and the typeface, which is usually all it takes to stop looking like a bolt-on.Your customer gives, the nonprofit gets paid
The gift settles into the nonprofit's own Stripe account — or their PayPal account, if they have connected one. They issue the receipt. The money never passes through your books, and it never passes through ours.
What you get, and what you don't
The absences are deliberate, and they are the reason a partnership like this needs no lawyer on either side.
You get
- A placement your customers can see is real: named things at named prices, with a photo and a sentence about who it is for
- A page of its own, at a web address carrying your name and theirs, with the nonprofit's live needs on it
- An attribute on the embed that tags the gifts your placement produced, so the nonprofit can thank you for the right ones
- A collection drive you can run together, with a public link where people reserve what they are bringing
- A printable code for the counter or the window, which opens the giving page on a customer's phone
You don't get
- A login, a dashboard, or a running total of money raised. That is on purpose: it keeps you a host rather than a solicitor, which is a meaningfully different legal position in several states.
- Any handling of the donation. You never collect it, hold it, refund it, or answer for it.
- Any of your customers' donor details. Those belong to the nonprofit, and the widget never hands them to the page it is sitting on.
- Any change to your checkout, your cart totals, or your payment processor. The donation is a separate transaction on somebody else's account.
Four places this actually goes
These are four different pieces of the product rather than four descriptions of one embed, and a nonprofit can set up any of them without asking us.
The compact strip, beside a cart
A short single-column layout built for exactly this: at most three needs, no expand control, wallet buttons on. It sits next to an order summary at the width of a sidebar instead of taking the page over, and a customer can fund one thing in a couple of taps without losing their basket.A page with both your names on it
The nonprofit can give the partnership its own address and its own headline — your name, their work, and the full widget underneath. Useful when you want somewhere to link a social post or an email footer that is not your homepage and not their donate page.A printed code by the register
The dashboard prints a poster or a table tent around a scannable code, with the web address spelled out underneath for anyone whose camera will not cooperate. It can carry a preselected amount, so a code beside a five-dollar item opens at five dollars.A goods drive you can request yourself
Coats, hygiene kits, school supplies, sack lunches. There is a public form for asking a nonprofit to run one with you; they approve it and send back a link listing what is actually needed. People reserve items on that page as they commit to them, which is what stops you receiving the fortieth tin of the same soup.
Why the arrangement is shaped like this
The obvious way to build this would be to give businesses their own accounts, their own dashboards and their own fundraising totals. We deliberately did not, and it is worth five sentences of your time to know why.
When a business collects for a charity, or advertises how much it has raised for one, several states treat that as a charitable sales promotion and require the business to register, file and sometimes bond itself before it starts. It is a real body of law with real filings behind it, and it exists for good reasons.
The donation here goes straight from your customer to the nonprofit’s own payment account, and the nonprofit’s name is the one on the charge and on the receipt. You provided a place for the ask to appear. That distinction is why there is nothing for you to sign, nothing for you to file, and no money of theirs in your bank account at any point — and it is why we would rather show you no total than build you a leaderboard.
Questions businesses ask
Support a nonprofit from where your customers already are
Tell us which organization you would like to work with, or tell us where you are and we will say who is already using Aurora nearby.