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City of Aurora, Oregon seal Aurora Connect City of Aurora, Oregon
The City of Aurora's newsletter & story hub

Neighbors keeping neighbors informed.

Neighbors keeping neighbors informed since 1856.

Aurora Connect brings city news to your mailbox and your inbox, and gives every resident a simple way to share a story, an event, or a photo for an upcoming issue. One place to stay in the loop, and to help fill it.

City of Aurora Historic District, established 1856
339
neighbors subscribed
and growing
73%
average email open rate
well above the local-gov norm
23
issues sent since 2024
monthly by email
Every
household reached in print
with the utility bill
Two ways to take part

Subscribe, or send us a story

The same page does both jobs. Get the newsletter the way you prefer, or share what is happening in your corner of Aurora.

Get the Aurora newsletter

Email arrives monthly. The print edition comes every two months with your utility bill. Choose either, or both.

Needed for the email edition.
Update or unsubscribe from any issue, anytime.
One hub, ready for what's next

Where Aurora Connect is headed

It starts as the newsletter you already know. The same hub can grow into the way the whole city and community stay in touch, without depending on any one volunteer.

The email edition

Sent monthly to subscribers from the city's own authenticated address, assembled from the same content with no separate rebuild.

The printed newsletter

Reaches every household with the bi-monthly utility bill, kept because residents told the city they rely on it, and produced without Microsoft Publisher.

Here today
Newsletter & story hub

Subscribe, submit stories, and receive the newsletter by email and print. This page is the working start.

Down the road
A fuller community hub

Event sign-ups, project input, and resident feedback, the way larger cities do it, when the community is ready.

How other cities stay connected

The same idea, at city scale

Cities across Oregon and the country run community engagement and notification platforms to do what Aurora Connect does: subscriptions, resident submissions, surveys, and alerts. A few of the common vendors:

GranicusPowers many "Let's Talk" style engagement and notification sites for cities and counties.
CivicPlusCity websites bundled with mass notifications, forms, and resident requests.
PublicInputCommunity engagement, public meetings, and resident communications in one system.
PolcoCommunity surveys and engagement, widely used for resident feedback.

Published pricing generally runs from about $10,000 a year for a small city into the low six figures for larger agencies.

For example, Granicus's community engagement product has been listed in the range of roughly $12,000 to $20,000 a year for a city of Aurora's size. Most vendors quote by population and by the modules a city turns on.

Aurora Connect provides that same core capability today. The domain, the email platform, and the development have been provided as a volunteer contribution, and it is built to be handed to the city and to outlast any one person's involvement.