u/Legal-Tennis8569

I started a few months ago as a resource analyst at a forestry consulting firm here in Canada, and somewhere along the way the engagement and consultation piece landed on my desk. A lot of our work is on Crown land that overlaps First Nations traditional territory, so it matters and I want to get it right.

Right now we don't really document any of it consistently. Meetings happen, commitments get made, someone remembers most of it, and then when it's time to write a report showing what we did and what we actually followed through on, we're scrambling to reconstruct it from emails and memory.

I'd like to track this properly as we go, both for the reporting side and so we're not leaning on one person's memory. I'm a bit out of my depth on how to set that up though.

How do you all keep record of consultation and the commitments that come out of it?

I've been trying to figure out whether the tools I'm using are genuinely helping or just adding admin. On straightforward projects, it's fine, but when things get complex (lots of stakeholders, sensitive relationships, multiple teams touching the same contacts), I feel like spreadsheets and email threads start to fall apart pretty quickly.

I know some people swear by well-maintained spreadsheets and others use custom software, but I'm genuinely curious about what people are actually using day-to-day, not just what they'd recommend in theory.

Are you using purpose-built stakeholder engagement software, a CRM you've adapted, spreadsheets, something else entirely? And if you made the switch from one to another at some point, what was the thing that finally pushed you to change?