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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.

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? 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. This handbook was designed to be an easy-to-navigate, quick-reference guide to planning and conducting assessments of DoD IIP efforts, analyzing the data generated, and presenting the results. It also offers some background on current assessment practices in DoD and the typical users and uses of DoD IIP assessment results. A companion volume, Assessing and Evaluating Department of Defense Efforts to Inform, Influence, and Persuade: Desk Reference, offers a more detailed exploration and additional examples of assessment in practice.

• Chapter One

  About This Handbook

• Chapter Two

  Assessment Best Practices and Applying Them to DoD IIP Efforts

• Chapter Three

  Why Evaluate? An Overview of Assessment and Its Uses

• Chapter Four

  Determining What's Worth Measuring: Objectives

• Chapter Five

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

• Chapter Six

  Developing Measures for DoD IIP Efforts

• Chapter Seven

  Designing and Implementing Assessments

• Chapter Eight

  Formative and Qualitative Research Methods for DoD IIP Efforts

• Chapter Nine

  Surveys and Sampling in DoD IIP Assessment: Best Practices and Challenges

• Chapter Ten

  Measurement: Collecting IIP Outputs, Outcomes, and Impacts

• Chapter Eleven

  Presenting and Using Assessment

• Chapter Twelve

  Developing a Culture of Assessment

• Chapter Thirteen

  Conclusions and Recommendations