Lived experience
at the heart of
every decision.

Matter of Voice helps foundations and their partners collect, organize, and learn from community experience, to:

  • •Inform strategy
  • •Strengthen relationships
  • •Create community-led shifts
  • •Improve programs
  • •Support better decisions

— without increasing burden on communities or grantees.

Why lived experience matters

The better we understand the priorities of those we serve, the better our work meets their needs.

Better Input = Better Outcomes

Foundations increasingly rely on community input to guide funding, learning, and accountability. Yet many listening efforts remain fragmented, extractive, or limited by scale or in the diversity of the people we can reach.

Shifting toward community-informed decision making

Lived experience stories provide deeper understanding into how programs and policies are actually experienced by the people they are meant to serve — often revealing gaps that quantitative data alone cannot surface.

Addressing power and participation

Most feedback systems place the burden on communities while limiting how their input is used. Matter of Voice reduces extraction and supports more equitable, structured ways to listen — so community voice meaningfully informs decisions, not just reports.

What this enables:

  • ✓Clearer understanding of community priorities and barriers
  • ✓Better-informed funding and program decisions
  • ✓Stronger trust with grantees and communities

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, because stories provide a much richer summary of program experiences.
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.
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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.

Matter of Voice workflow diagram

Matter of Voice makes it easy to gather authentic stories, securely store them in one place, and then let our philanthropy-focused tools help surface the powerful themes and stories that matter most to you.

Collect stories from hard to reach people

Supporting asynchronous and anonymous participation through a mobile-friendly portal helps surface perspectives that are rarely captured through traditional engagement.

A shared listening hub

A hub-and-spoke model allows foundations and grantees to collect and learn from community input without repeating time-intensive processes. Everyone benefits from a larger, shared pool of lived-experience stories.

Organize and analyze at scale

Identify themes, patterns, and sentiment across large volumes of qualitative input, with tools designed specifically for philanthropic learning and reporting.

Advisory panels made easy

Automated tools make it easy to identify the right participants and gather specific feedback through asynchronous dialogue.

Learn more:

Matter of Voice is much more than just a way to centrally store community voice. It combines structured collection, permissions, automation, and analysis so community input can be reused, compared, and acted on rather than sitting in disconnected files.
Matter of Voice supports submissions in English, Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, Tagalog, Vietnamese, and Arabic, with non-English submissions translated to English in the portal. More languages will be added over time.
Participation is simple, mobile-first, anonymous, and asynchronous - so people can share on their own time, without logins, long surveys, or public speaking. This lowers barriers and makes it easier for more voices to be heard.
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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.

Strategy discussions became more grounded once we could point to lived experience. It changed how we discussed priorities.
Using real community voices strengthened our needs assessments and made our fundraising efforts so much more compelling.
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. The time savings are enormous.
We reached people we simply weren't hearing from before. Asynchronous and anonymous participation made a noticeable difference in who showed up.
We no longer had to hunt for stories or worry about permissions. We could find relevant community voices quickly and use them responsibly.
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 were actually experiencing.
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:

No one person needs to “own” it. The platform enables shared stewardship of community voice and reduces the burden of collecting input because it is collected once and used across teams.
Different teams work from the same community input, align around a common view of challenges, and can filter to what is most relevant to their role.
Invite one key contact at each partner organization and let them invite their team, or add members in bulk via the provided spreadsheet template.
The hub-and-spoke model lets grantees contribute input, explore and filter their own data, and generate reports—while foundations retain control over platform settings and cost-related decisions.

Built for trust and safety

Because caring for community voice security builds trust and confidence.

Privacy-first data handling

Personally identifiable information and spam are automatically removed. The AI analysis operates in a closed system not connected to the public internet.

Enterprise-grade security

Data is protected using security practices comparable to those used by major financial and technology organizations.

Consent and permissions

Customize consent and permission messages that community members see and agree to—supporting ethical use of stories.

Learn more:

Your organization retains ownership of all data collected through Matter of Voice.
Yes. Contributions can remain anonymous. If identifying information is submitted, it is automatically removed. Sharing demographics is optional.
Each organization has a configuration page to customize consent language, branding, and messages shown during and after submission.
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Robust security was non-negotiable for us. Being able to write our own consent messages for the public and not having to deal with personally identifiable information was a huge relief.

Community of practice

How your peers have created value from using Matter of Voice.

Case studies and articles about best practice: Coming soon

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Matter of Voice helped us move from scattered stories to a shared understanding across programs and partners.

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We finally had a way to learn from community experience without asking grantees to do more work.

Flexible pricing, responsive support

Pricing is structured intentionally to support organizations of different sizes and geographic reach.

Flexible packages

Nine plan sizes are available, with pricing determined by issue areas selected (5, 15, or all) and whether your work operates at the county, state, or national level.

Straightforward onboarding

Onboarding is intentionally simple, allowing anyone on your team to get started in less than five minutes. Video guides and online help are available if you need them.

Ongoing support

In addition to chatbot, email support, and FAQs, Matter of Voice offers personal onboarding sessions and optional strategy reviews to help teams get more value from the platform.

Learn more:

These factors affect how much input is collected and how many teams and partners are involved, keeping plans proportional and predictable.
Yes. Many teams begin with a focused pilot, then expand as they see value.
Plans can be adjusted to reflect how you actually operate.
It’s designed for everyday use across roles and does not require technical staff or a dedicated administrator.
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I started with a small plan for one initiative. Once colleagues saw what I was getting from the platform, they all wanted to use it.

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