A shared Community Voice platform for your entire partner ecosystem

Matter of Voice helps foundations and their partners collect lived experience stories and use them to guide community-centered decisions.

What Matter of Voice enables

•Share community input across grantees to avoid siloed learning
•Collect input from stakeholder groups not reached currently
•Apply issue-specific filters and analytics across shared input
•Generate structured summaries and reports automatically
•Engage communities in non-extractive ways
•Build cumulative learning over time through ongoing participation

Why lived experience matters

Understanding community priorities helps ensure funding and programs meet real needs. While community input is increasingly valued, many approaches are still difficult to use consistently or at scale.

What lived experience adds:

•Shifting toward community-led decision making
•Explanations for why outcomes occur
•Perspectives often missed by surveys or convenings
•Stronger trust with grantees and communities
•Addressing power and participation
•Input that can be revisited and learned from over time

Learn more:

Surveys and public convenings rely on predefined questions and real-time participation, which can limit what people are willing or able to share. Matter of Voice allows people to contribute anonymously, in their own words, helping surface more candid and complete input.

Quantitative data shows what is happening, while lived experience explains why those outcomes occur and what may need to change. Together, they support more informed decisions.

Absolutely. By collecting experience over time, Matter of Voice supports evaluation and learning by adding context to quantitative data and helping teams refine what they measure. Some organizations submit a small number of relevant stories rather than producing lengthy reports, providing a richer summary of program experience.

After submitting, community members immediately see emerging themes from people like them - giving knowledge back to the community. They are also motivated by the opportunity to participate on paid advisory panels that create genuine dialogue without significant time burden.

We thought we understood our communities well. Hearing directly from people, in their own words, showed us where our assumptions were off and where we needed to change course.

How Matter of Voice works

Built to make community engagement easier - for you and your partners.

1

Collect input through asynchronous, anonymous mobile access

Hear from people who are often missed and surface perspectives on sensitive issues

2

Share input through a hub-and-spoke model that avoids duplication

Streamline data collection so multiple teams can learn from the same input

3

Organize and analyze lived experience using tools designed for philanthropy

Identify meaningful themes and quickly find relevant stories

4

Engage over time using advisory panels for targeted feedback

Build panels quickly and gather focused input from the right participants

For the first time, we had community input in one place that we could actually work with. The ability to see themes emerge across programs saved our team an enormous amount of time.

Who it's for

Designed to create shared value for multiple roles - with one unified system.

Leadership teams and boards

Strategy and resource decisions aligned to community priorities.

Strategy discussions became more grounded once we could point to lived experience. It changed how we discussed priorities.

Fundraisers and development

Community needs assessments that inform funding priorities.

Using real community voices strengthened our needs assessments and made our fundraising efforts so much more compelling.

Evaluation and learning teams

Feedback loops that add context and reduce reporting burden.

For our reporting now, we quickly select some of the most relevant stories and send them to our funders. They find them more illuminating than the long reports we used to make.

Community engagement teams

Scalable participation that reaches harder-to-reach groups.

We reached people we simply weren't hearing from before. Asynchronous and anonymous participation made a noticeable difference in who showed up.

Communications teams

Compelling community stories aligned to key themes, for persuasive communications.

We no longer had to hunt for stories or worry about permissions. We could find relevant community voices quickly and use them responsibly.

Advocacy teams

Narrative and policy work centered in the lived experience of targeted populations.

Matter of Voice grounds our advocacy work deeper in lived experience. It helps us bring abstract talking points to life and focus on what communities are actually experiencing.

Program leaders and service providers

More innovative, community-aligned program design.

Using lived experience early in program design helped us align our proposals more closely with community needs and avoid assumptions that would have limited impact.

Learn more:

Foundation administrators can add their own team members and partner organizations in bulk, and partners can also upload their own team members in bulk to quickly extend access across teams.

Data safety

We treat community stories with care, privacy, and respect.

How trust is supported

•Automatic removal of personally identifiable information and spam
•Enterprise-grade security practices used by major financial organizations
•Customizable consent and permission language

The automatic PII removal gave us confidence to scale community input collection without worrying about accidentally exposing someone's identity.

Plans and support

Designed to be accessible, easy to start, and simple to scale and maintain.

•Nine plan sizes based on issue areas and geographic reach
•Onboarding that takes minutes, not weeks
•No need for technical staff or dedicated administration
•Ongoing support through chatbot, email, and optional strategy sessions
•Ability to pilot without overcommitting