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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 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.

To achieve key national security objectives, the U.S. government and the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) must communicate effectively and credibly with a broad range of foreign audiences. DoD spends more than $250 million per year on inform, influence, and persuade (IIP) efforts, but how effective (and cost-effective) are they? How well do they support military objectives? Could some of them be improved? If so, how? It can be difficult to measure changes in audience behavior and attitudes, and it can take a great deal of time for DoD IIP efforts to have an impact. DoD has struggled with assessing the progress and effectiveness of its IIP efforts and in presenting the results of these assessments to stakeholders and decisionmakers. To address these challenges, a RAND study compiled examples of strong assessment practices across sectors, including defense, marketing, public relations, and academia, distilling and synthesizing insights and advice for the assessment of DoD IIP efforts and programs. These insights and attendant best practices will be useful to personnel who plan and assess DoD IIP efforts and those who make decisions based on assessments, particularly those in DoD and Congress who are responsible for setting national defense priorities and allocating the necessary resources. In addition to identifying where and why efforts have been successful, assessment can help detect imminent program failure early on, saving precious time and resources. An accompanying volume, Assessing and Evaluating Department of Defense Efforts to Inform, Influence, and Persuade: Handbook for Practitioners, offers a quick-reference guide to the best practices presented here for personnel responsible for planning, executing, and assessing DoD IIP efforts.

• Chapter One

  Identifying Best Practices and Methods for Assessment

• Chapter Two

  Why Evaluate? An Overview of Assessment and Its Utility

• Chapter Three

  Applying Assessment and Evaluation Principles to IIP Efforts

• Chapter Four

  Challenges to Organizing for Assessment and Ways to Overcome Them

• Chapter Five

  Determining What's Worth Measuring: Objectives, Theories of Change, and Logic Models

• Chapter Six

  From Logic Models to Measures: Developing Measures for IIP Efforts

• Chapter Seven

  Assessment Design and Stages of Evaluation

• Chapter Eight

  Formative and Qualitative Research Methods for IIP Efforts

• Chapter Nine

  Research Methods and Data Sources for Evaluating IIP Outputs, Outcomes, and Impacts

• Chapter Ten

  Surveys and Sampling in IIP Assessment: Best Practices and Challenges

• Chapter Eleven

  Presenting and Using Assessments

• Chapter Twelve

  Conclusions and Recommendations

• Appendix A

  Assessing Assessments: The Metaevaluation Checklist

• Appendix B

  Survey Sampling Models and Management

• Appendix C

  Evaluating Inform, Influence, and Persuade Efforts: Examples and Additional Resources

• Appendix D

  Major Theories of Influence or Persuasion