Hear every voice in your neighbourhood.
What People Say helps boards gather what residents are saying, bring it together in one place, and turn it into decisions people can see themselves in.
What people say
“The park is the one place everyone actually meets.”
Resident, doorstep conversation · Oct 12
Gather
Doorstep chats, drop-in sessions, paper forms, online surveys — every conversation lands in one shared place, credited and consented.
Understand
Responses are grouped into themes as they arrive, so the board sees patterns across streets and seasons, not a pile of notes.
Act
Turn themes into published reports and funded actions — and show residents the line from what they said to what changed.
Record what someone said, in the words they said it.
A doorstep chat takes about twenty seconds to log. The words come first; who said it, where and when can be filled in after — and how much you record about a person is up to your board.
- Toggle between a resident's exact words and a staff summary, so the two are never confused.
- Choose anonymous, pseudonymous, or a named person with contact details held separately.
- Addresses are found on a map and stored as an approximate 50m block, never an exact door.
Recorded as the participant's own words.
Who said it
Name
Email address
Address
Pins are shown to about a 50m block, never an exact door.
Age band
Gender
This is a demo — try the toggles. Nothing is saved.
See the streets you haven't heard from.
Every located contribution becomes a pin, grouped into roughly 50m blocks with a count. Hover to read the start of a contribution, click to open it in full. The empty parts of the map are the point: they show you where to knock next.
- Counts per block make hotspots and silent streets obvious at a glance.
- Pins are deliberately imprecise, so coverage is visible without exposing anyone's address.
- A breakdown by full postcode sits alongside the map for hyper-local areas.
Check the picture is actually representative.
Gender, age and full postcode breakdowns, with click-to-filter that combines across every dimension. Ask “what did younger women tell us?” and read the answers underneath the numbers. Try it — this one is live.
- Click any bar to filter; the other charts, counters and responses all update together.
- Combine dimensions to test whether a theme holds across different groups.
- An empty result is a finding too — it names a group you haven't reached.
Gender
Age band
Responses in view
- EV-0211Woman25-34
Access is the issue — half the shops on Middlegate have a step and no ramp.
- EV-0164Woman25-34
A proper after-school club would change our week completely.
- EV-0072Man16-24
There is nowhere to skate. We get moved on from the car park every Friday.
Showing 3 of 15. Click a bar above to narrow it down.
Every session, survey and walkabout, with its evidence attached.
Set up an activity for each piece of engagement — a market stall, a phone round, a doorstep visit — and everything captured lands against it. Public forms get a shareable link and a QR code so residents can respond in their own time.
- Activity types cover events, workshops, phone calls, doorstep visits and paper postcards.
- Contribution counts per activity show which methods actually reach people.
- Open or close an activity to control whether its form still accepts responses.
Auditable from the first word to the final report.
Every contribution gets a workspace-unique reference the moment it's recorded. Statuses track review, and a full history shows who changed what and when — so a board decision can always be traced back to the evidence behind it.
- Unique references like EV-0042 travel with the record through the audit log.
- Statuses cover new, needs clarification, reviewed, restricted and excluded.
- Staff-captured evidence shows who recorded it; resident form submissions stay unattributed.
“For the first time we could show the council exactly what the neighbourhood was asking for — in residents’ own words.”
Board chair, Pride in Place neighbourhood
Talk to us
Questions about bringing What People Say to your neighbourhood board? Send us a message and we’ll reply by email.