Terms of Service

These terms are between Aurora and the organization that holds the account — not the individual who happened to click sign up. If you are creating an account on behalf of a nonprofit, you are confirming you are authorised to do that, and the organization is bound by what follows.

Hosted software: a dashboard for listing what your organization needs, an embeddable widget that displays it on your own website, tools for in-kind giving and public requests, and records of the resulting donations.

Aurora is explicitly not any of the following, and nothing in the product should be read as offering them:

• Fundraising counsel or fundraising advice.
• A professional fundraiser or a commercial co-venturer.
• A party to any donation. The gift is between your supporter and your organization.
• A payment processor or a holder of your funds. Stripe and PayPal do that, under your agreement with them.

Some of this is obvious and all of it matters, because Aurora publishes what you write to people who will act on it.

• That what you publish as a need is accurate — the item, the amount, and who it is for.
• Your own charitable status and any registrations your jurisdiction requires of you.
• Issuing receipts to your donors and answering their questions about them.
• The lawfulness of the images and personal details you upload about the people you serve, including having their consent where it is needed.
• Keeping your team's account credentials secure, and removing people who leave.

Donations settle into the Stripe account you connected, or the PayPal account you connected, on that processor's own payout schedule. Aurora never receives, holds or disburses them, and cannot refund a gift on your behalf; refunds are yours to issue through your processor.

What Aurora charges is set out on our pricing page, and that page is the operative schedule — it is generated from the same figures the product bills against, so it cannot drift from what you are actually charged.

Your payment processor charges its own fee on every transaction, on every plan, and no Aurora plan absorbs it. How it reaches you differs by processor, and the difference is worth stating rather than smoothing over. On Stripe, the charge is created by Aurora and the money is transferred straight through to you, which means Stripe bills Aurora — so we recover that cost inside the same deduction as our own share. One line comes off the gift and it carries both. On PayPal you are the merchant of record and PayPal bills you directly, and Aurora takes no share at all of a donation paid through PayPal.

Monthly plans are billed monthly in advance. You can move between plans in either direction at any time.

Changing plan does not change how your supporters can give. Both processors stay connected and both keep working on every plan, including the free one, and recurring gifts your supporters have already committed to keep running in either direction — cancelling somebody's standing gift over your billing would punish the wrong person. What changes when you move is what Aurora deducts, which is set out on the pricing page.

There is no minimum term and no notice period. If you stop, remove the snippet from your site and your widget stops displaying. Recurring donations your supporters set up are yours to cancel or leave running — they are charged through your own processor, so they do not stop simply because your Aurora account does.

Using Aurora, you agree not to:

• Solicit on behalf of an organization you do not represent.
• Use a need to collect money for something other than what it describes.
• Upload images or personal details of identifiable people without their consent.
• Attempt to access another organization's data, or to interfere with the service for anyone else.

We may suspend or close an account that breaches section 7, and we will tell you why. You may close your account at any time.

Your donor and donation history exports to CSV from the dashboard at any time, without asking us and without a support ticket — before, during and after any of this. Take it whenever you like; it is your record, not ours.

If we change anything on this page in a way that affects your rights or what you pay, we will email account holders and update the effective date at the top. Continuing to use Aurora after that date means the updated terms apply.

The version string beside that date is the one recorded against your account when you accepted these terms, so you can match this document to the click that agreed to it. When it changes in substance you are asked again on your next sign-in, rather than being deemed to have agreed to something you never saw.

How we handle personal information is set out separately in our Privacy Policy.