In undertaking an engaged research approach, particularly for those coming from a technical background, new skills must be learned to organise and facilitate different participatory processes. This was a gap we identified in the professional training available to us through our university. Instead, we took courses from outside the university that were designed for people working in community development or social work. This provided a grounding in principles for working with vulnerable communities, how to conduct workshops, and different creative exercises that can be used to help people discuss difficult topics. However, in reviewing existing academic studies on community engagement with energy planning, there was a lack of transparency on how different engagements were run. In energy system modelling studies, focused on sharing the outcomes of the process as opposed to the process by which the results were reached, such details are often buried in an appendix, which doesn’t provide thorough explanation of how workshops were structured, participants recruited, and what preparation was undertaken for the exercises used. This chapter serves to address this gap by outlining our reflections on the various different ways we engaged with groups both on the Dingle Peninsula and further afield. It’s framed around the three levels of engagement proposed by Wellcome Trust’s ‘public engagement onion’: conventional scientific outreach and communication (informing), hosting workshops, interviews, or surveys (consulting), and working in partnership with external partners (collaborating).