Stakeholder Engagement Plan (SEP) Log Template
An 18-field engagement log for a stakeholder engagement plan — meeting records, sex-disaggregated attendance, issues raised, response given, and the handoff to a formal grievance.
18 fields · meetings, disclosure and feedback · with the audit reason for each
A meeting log and a consultation record are not the same thing
Most projects can produce a stack of signed attendance sheets. Far fewer can show, for any given session, what was raised, what response was given, and by whom. Attendance proves people were in the room. It says nothing about whether the engagement was two-way.
The fields that make the difference — issues raised, response given, follow-up action — are the ones projects most often skip, because they take longer to write than a headcount and nobody checks for them until a reviewer does.
Three gaps that show up in almost every review
- Attendance not split by sex. A project reporting "62 attendees" with no further breakdown cannot be checked for whether the session actually reached women — and in practice, sessions scheduled around a men's meeting time routinely do not.
- Language not recorded. A session "conducted" in the project's working language, with no local interpretation logged, was not accessible to the population it claims to represent — the language field exists specifically to catch this.
- No handoff to the grievance log. A substantive complaint raised in a public meeting is a grievance, not a meeting-minute footnote. Without a linked reference, it gets neither the response time nor the tracking a grievance is entitled to.
Match the method to who you're trying to reach
A single public meeting, however well attended, over-represents whoever is already positioned to attend a public meeting — often local leaders and land-owning men. Women's groups, tenants, the mobile and the elderly need a different method: door-to-door, small focus groups, radio disclosure for those who cannot travel at all.
The activity-type field in this log exists to make the method mix visible over a project's life, not just to record any one session — because a plan that lists five methods but a log showing 90% public meetings is a plan that was not followed.
Questions
- What's the difference between this and the grievance log?
- The engagement log records planned, proactive contact — meetings, disclosures, consultation rounds — whether or not anyone complained. The grievance log records complaints, whether or not there was ever a scheduled meeting. A concern raised at a public meeting is an engagement record until it is formally logged as a grievance with its own reference — this template has a field for exactly that handoff, so a substantive issue is never absorbed into a meeting minute and lost.
- Why does attendance need to be split by sex?
- Because an aggregate attendance figure hides the pattern that matters most: a public meeting scheduled at a time or venue that works for men and not for women produces a technically well-attended session that has consulted half the affected population. Sex-disaggregated attendance is the first check a lender's field visit or a reviewer runs against an engagement log.
- Does a notice board post count as engagement?
- It counts as disclosure, and it belongs in the log as one channel — but a plan relying on notice boards as its primary method has not consulted anyone who cannot read, does not pass the board regularly, or is not literate in the language it's posted in. The activity-type field exists so a reviewer can see the actual method mix, not just a count of activities.
- What makes an engagement record different from an attendance sheet?
- Four elements: what was raised, what response was given, by whom, and when. An attendance sheet with a topic heading proves people were physically present. It does not prove anyone heard their concerns or that the concerns went anywhere — which is the actual test a reviewer applies.
- How does this connect to the stakeholder mapping?
- The mapping identifies who needs to be reached and by what method — directly affected households, host community, women's groups, elders, local government, each with different access constraints. The engagement log is where you test whether the mapping was followed: the target stakeholder group field lets you check coverage against the plan rather than against whoever happened to show up.
Read before you use it
Practical guides
The software behind this
SmartLARMS keeps this as a live record, not a spreadsheet
A template is a starting point. The version that survives a completion audit is one where every change is attributed to a person and a date, and where the numbers reconcile to what was actually paid.