Learn from our community engagement report template – what you need to include and examples from real engagement projects.
Reporting on your community engagement project is arguably one of the most important elements. All your activity culminates into one report.
In this expert article, we share our template for a community engagement report highlighting the important sections and how you can collate and display your data.
Collecting and reporting on your data is made incredibly simple through an online engagement platform, like Engagement Hub. Here you can use surveys, polls, ideas walls, mapping widgets and up to 27 different tools to inform and gather feedback from your community and generate instant reports. With just one click you can create reports about your community demographic, consultation activity and compare and contrast all your data. Find out more about the reporting functionality available in our quick video here.
Contents of Community Engagement Report
- About the project – When consulting on a particular project (e.g. a new park) the first section needs to introduce the project, explaining the objectives, vision, funding and timelines. Keep this section brief as it’s likely the audience of your report know the details and you’re just providing the context for the community engagement activity
- Executive Summary – Alternatively you can dive right into your Executive Summary. This top-level section briefly tells the story of the project, consultation activity and key findings. Here you can display your leading results from the community engagement e.g. 76% support the new park, 43% are concerned about lack of parking etc. Imagine your audience is only reading this one section so cover off all the contextual information and results here clearly. Keep your graphs and charts for the more detailed results section but you can find visual ways to bring this data alive and communicate the outcomes quickly.
- Plans/Maps (if appropriate) – In the example of creating a new park, this section of your report showcases the maps and plans that were used as part of the consultation. This is important as a record and for anyone reading the report at a later date.
- Community Engagement Snapshot – this is often the main section of your report where you discuss all the activity including the communication channels used to promote your consultation activity.
For example, this chart shows traffic sources to an engagement portal:
An infographic is another great way of visually displaying your data. For example:
The snapshot gives an overview of how you reached your target audience, the methods employed and the numbers of people actively interested.
- Community Engagement Findings / Key Findings – The results section is where you display the feedback from your community and use charts, tables and graphs to visually display the data. Stratify your data so you are showing the composition of the participants.
For example, the table below from a local government consultation on a new park shows the location of the respondents who supported or didn’t support the park upgrades.
- Participant Analysis – Here you display data about the community you engaged e.g. geographic locations, age, gender, stakeholder groups and how they interact with your project e.g. how they use the park, how they interact with your business (customer, supplier, shareholder etc) This provides a picture of how widely you consulted / who you reached and if it was representative of your community/population.
- Considerations / Submissions – This optional section is dependent on your project and is where you bring in anything that’s specific to your project or consultation. This could be:
- Stakeholder submissions – e.g. In addition to your community, you may have engaged particular stakeholders as part of your consultation and you can represent their responses here
- Historical images
- Children’s artwork/submissions
- Further examples of qualitative feedback (e.g. photos from focus groups, videos of citizens panels, images of ideas posted by the community at face-to-face events etc)
- Project-specific considerations – In the example of building a new park, it may be important to showcase popular parks in the area, children’s drawings of what they want to see and information on park infrastructure
- Appendices – your appendices should contain examples of your marketing & communications collateral, survey questions, maps or images given to the public. This section provides a full record of all communications and consultation materials used
Speed up your reporting using Engagement Hub’s one-click instant reports. Collect and report on your data effortlessly with an online engagement platform that shows you data by project or as a whole – by individual, segment or whole database. Import offline contacts, add tasks, notes and actions and manage all your consultation activities in one secure place.
To find out more about the Engagement Hub features and tools visit our webpage, view our demo site to see the tools in action or book a free online demonstration with one of our team today.
