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Across Sectors, Best Practices for Assessing Efforts to Inform, Influence, and Persuade Efforts Adhere to a Handful of Common Principles

• Effective assessment requires clear, realistic, and measurable goals.
• Effective assessment starts in planning.
• Effective assessment requires a theory of change or explicit logic of the effort that connects activities to objectives.
• Change cannot be measured without a baseline.
• Assessment over time requires continuity and consistency.
• Assessment is iterative, not something planned and executed once.
• Assessment requires resources, but any assessment that reduces the uncertainty is valuable.

DoD Has Historically Struggled to Assess the Progress and Effectiveness of Its IIP Efforts

• There is a lack of shared understanding about how IIP efforts function, which broadens the scope of the assessment questions asked. Good accountability assessments would show not only show that these efforts support broader military campaign and national security goals but also how they do so.
• In complex operating environments, IIP efforts often face constraints, disruptors, and unintended consequences. Good assessment can help predict these challenges and overcome them when they do arise.
• Good assessment can support learning from both success and failure. Well-designed, early assessment can help identify problems and get a struggling IIP effort on a path to success.
• Organizations that do assessment well have cultures that value assessment. Organizing for assessment involves dedicating the necessary resources to the assessment process (5 percent is a common benchmark); ensuring leadership buy-in, advocacy, and willingness to learn from assessment results; training assessment personnel; and implementing a system of continuous assessment, data collection, and program change in response to assessment results.