STAGE 7: ACTING ON THE RECOMMENDATIONS
How to report on
public engagement
This guide covers how to report on your public engagement. Reporting often happens at the end of an engagement process, but if you’re running multiple sessions or workshops, it can be helpful to share short updates or summary reports along the way.
Why?
How you report on your engagement activities directly impacts how much influence those activities have on actual decision making. Done well, reporting helps build trust—with participants, your wider community, and within your organisation. It also demonstrates that the views people share are valued and can meaningfully shape climate-related decisions.
Reporting often happens at the end of an engagement process. But if you’re running multiple sessions or workshops, it can be helpful to share short updates or summary reports along the way. This keeps people informed and shows progress throughout the process.
Close the feedback loop
One of the most important things you can do is show participants how their input was used. This is essential for building lasting trust and credibility.
If decisions are still being made, keep people informed. If decisions have been made, explain clearly how engagement shaped the outcome.
If it becomes clear during the process that participants’ input cannot influence the decision, communicate this transparently and adjust your approach accordingly. Engagement without the potential for impact risks damaging trust.
By embedding thoughtful, clear, and inclusive reporting throughout your public engagement, you not only meet your accountability obligations—you also create more meaningful outcomes for your community and the climate.
Pause and think
When you’re writing about public engagement, you’re not just ticking a box – you are telling a story. That story matters. It helps people to understand what happened, why it happened and why it matters.
Ask yourself:
- Have I just listed what we did, or have I shown why it was meaningful? Can I bring in voices, emotions and turning points that made this process unique?
- What would someone who wasn’t in the room take away from this? Would they understand what was learned, what changed and what stayed the same?
- Have I answered the ‘so what’? Every part of your report should help explain the difference this engagement made – to thinking, to relationships, or to decisions
- Does this feel human? Storytelling helps people connect. Including quotes, moments of learning, or event challenges makes your report more reliable and useful
- Would a community member recognise themselves in this story?
By creating your report as a story – not just a summary – you create something that builds trust, invites understanding, and supports better decisions.
What to report and who you’re reporting to
Effective reporting means tailoring both the message and the format to suit different audiences. Not everyone needs the same level of detail or technical depth, so it’s important to think carefully about who you’re reporting to, what they need to know, and how they’re most likely to engage with the information.
Reporting isn’t just about summarising what happened—it’s about helping people see where their voices have made a difference. Clear, accessible formats like infographics, short videos, or summary reports can help build understanding and trust.
When planning your reporting, consider the practicalities too. Some formats—such as video reports, infographics, or professionally designed documents—require specific skills. You may have these in-house or need to commission external support. Either way, make sure these requirements are reflected in your project budget as internal resources or direct costs.
It’s also worth working with a communications specialist early in the process to shape your key messages and ensure consistency across all your reporting outputs. This can make a big difference to how well your findings land with your intended audiences.
The table below shows different examples of reporting formats you can use to connect with different audiences.
📩 You can download this table as a word document here.
| Audience | What to include | Suggested Formats |
|---|---|---|
| Participants | Their ideas, contributions and how they’ve informed decisions | Infographic; summary powerpoint; short video |
| Wider public | What happened, key findings, next steps, and how they can get involved | Infographic; summary report, short video, social media, short bits of information |
| Commissioning body | Purpose of the engagement, process overview, key outcomes, learning, feedback from participants, impacts | Detailed report; summary report; infographic; short video; social media posts |
| Decision makers | Purpose of the engagement, process overview, key outcomes, next steps | Summary report; infographic; short video |
| Engagement practitioners | Methods used, details on the process, outcomes, impacts | Derailed report; short video |
| Other partners and interested parties | Summary of the process, key outcomes, implications for wider partners | Infographic; summary report; short video |
Planning your reporting
To make sure your reporting is meaningful and has impact, it’s important to plan for it from the start. The table below outlines the key steps to think about when building reporting into your engagement process.
📩 You can download this table as a word document here.
| Action | Why it matters | Suggested Timeline |
|---|---|---|
| Map out your timeline and decision points the engagement is feeding into | Helps align engagement with decision making processes. Clarify what decision are being informed by the engagement and when they are taking place. | Deciding if public engagement is what you want to do |
| Key actor mapping | Identified the individuals and organisations who influence or are impacted by the decision. Helps tailor engagement and reporting strategies to achieve maximum impact. | Creating your engagement brief |
| Assign roles for creating and sharing reports | Clarifies who is doing what and avoids last minute confusion. Ensures people with the right skills (e.g. design, videography) are involved early in the process. | Commissioning your engagement |
| Engage decision makers, key partners, and interested parties | Builds relationships and ensures there is wider buy-in to the engagement process. Understand what key actors and decision makers want to see from a report. Build report dissemination networks early on. | Planning stage |
| Plan how you will collect data for your report | Ensures you gather the right information during the process to create a meaningful, accurate, and accessible report. Supports later evaluation and communication. | Planning stage |
| Identify key messages for each audience | Keeps your reporting focused and relevant, making it easier for people to understand the value of the engagement | Planning stage |
| Choose the right format for each stage (see above) | Helps communicate your findings in ways your audience can use. Avoids inaccessible, on-size-fits-all outputs | Planning stage |
| Disseminate reports with participants and key actors | This is essential to closing the feedback loop and maintaining public trust | Delivering your engagement and Acting on recommendations |
| Reflect, learn and adapt for future reports | Helps improve your reporting and future engagement projects. Encouraged a culture of learning and improvement | Learning and evaluation |