Matter of Voice is a story-based community feedback platform for foundations, funders, and the nonprofit organizations they support. It collects first-person stories by phone, text message, QR code, and web link, anonymously by default, then holds them in one secure repository and analyzes them for themes and sentiment.
The platform is built for open narrative rather than closed questions. A community member answers a Story Starter in their own words, by voice or by typing, without creating an account or leaving contact details. Program staff, evaluators, and boards then read those stories arranged by Theme and by sentiment, and filter them by Issue Area, Touchpoint, Impact Factor, or place.
Capabilities:
Story Starters. Prompts that elicit lived experience rather than opinion, written by the organization or adapted from a library.
Multi-channel collection. Phone call, text message, QR code, and web link, so contributors use the channel already in their hand.
Anonymous by default. No personally identifying information is collected, and the platform works to strip it where it appears.
One repository. Stories gathered across programs, grantees, chapters, and sites are held together rather than in separate silos.
Philanthropy-focused AI analysis. Stories are clustered into Themes and arranged by sentiment, with more challenging experiences to the left and more positive to the right.
Issue Areas, Touchpoints, and Impact Factors. Structures for what a story is about, where it sits in a person's journey through a service, and which systemic forces it touches.
Place-based filters. Custom geographies for viewing and comparing stories by region, county, neighborhood, or catchment.
Advisory Panels. Recruited groups for ongoing, paid dialogue with the same people over time.
Community Portal. The contributor-facing experience, including what a contributor sees after sharing a story.
Roles and partner access. Account Owners, admins, team members, and partner organizations, so grantees and chapters contribute into one account without seeing each other's data.
Organizations use Matter of Voice to understand what a population is experiencing before setting strategy, to evidence a place-based initiative, to give a board something other than a satisfaction score, to meet a participatory or community-led commitment with a method that repeats, and to report findings back to the people who contributed them.
Matter of Voice is offered by Upstream Thinking, an innovation consultancy working across health, education, business, and community.
