Where Your Donation Goes — and Why We Will Not Invent Numbers

August 5, 2026 · Transparency · All4Aries

Nonprofit fundraising has a convention: a tidy row of figures telling you exactly what each amount buys. $25 provides. $50 delivers. $100 transforms. We are not going to do that, and it is worth explaining why, because the reasoning is the same reasoning we apply to everything else here.

Why we do not publish those numbers

Those figures are usually derived by dividing total program spending by a count of something and rounding to a memorable number. Sometimes they are honest. Frequently they are marketing wearing the costume of accounting.

In our case they would be meaningless. Our three programs have wildly different unit costs. A private cremation gap is a few hundred dollars. A legal consultation is a different figure entirely. A treatment referral may cost us nothing but staff time, or a great deal. Averaging those into “$50 helps a person” would tell you nothing true.

So instead: here is where the money actually goes.

Where it goes

• Direct program costs first. Payments to crematories, funds toward legal consultations and counseling, and the referral and support work that runs each program.
• Designations are honored. Give to one program and it goes to that program. Undesignated gifts go to the general fund and get directed where the need is greatest that month.
• We pay providers directly where we can. A grieving family should not have to front money they do not have and wait for reimbursement.
• The board is unpaid. No board member is compensated by the organization.

Why we use Zeffy

Our donations run through Zeffy, a payment platform built specifically for nonprofits that charges the organization no platform fee. Zeffy funds itself by asking donors for an optional voluntary contribution during checkout. That contribution is entirely up to you and can be set to zero — your gift to All4Aries is unaffected either way.

We mention this because donors reasonably ask what gets skimmed off. For most platforms the answer is a percentage plus a per-transaction fee. For us it is nothing.

Recurring gifts matter more than they sound like they should

If you are choosing between one larger gift and a smaller monthly one, the monthly one is worth more to us — not sentimentally, structurally. Our costs arrive unpredictably: a family contacts us the week their pet is dying, not the week a grant lands. Predictable income is what lets us say yes on a Tuesday instead of “let us see what comes in.”

What we will report

As a young organization, our first full annual financial summary and applicable IRS filings will be published on our transparency page as they become available. When we report impact, it will be real counts over a stated period, not extrapolations. If that means the early numbers are small, so be it — small and true beats large and invented.

And if you want to know something before we have published it, ask us. We will answer directly.

---

Published August 5, 2026 by All4Aries, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit based in Austin, Texas. This article is general information, not legal, medical, or financial advice.