From Crawling to Walking: Progress in Evaluating the Effectiveness of Public Diplomacy: Lessons Learned from NATO

Barbora Maronkova, uscpublicdiplomacy.org; Guest Editor Vivian S. Walker. Faculty Fellow, USC Center on Public Diplomacy; Published by FIGUEROA PRESS, 840 Childs Way, 3rd Floor Los Angeles, CA 90089 Phone: (213) 743-4800 Fax: (213) 743-4804 ; original text contains footnotes.

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Excerpt:

Introduction

Since its creation in 2003, NATO’s Public Diplomacy Division has worked to raise awareness and understanding of alliance and alliance-related issues and, ultimately, to foster support for, and trust in, the organization. The result of a merger between the Office of Information and Press and the Science for Peace Program into one, the Public Diplomacy Division emerged as part of a wider reform of the NATO Headquarters structures initiated by then-Secretary General Lord Robertson.

At the outset the first Deputy Assistant Secretary General for Public Diplomacy, Dr. Stefanie Babst, focused on the need for stronger public diplomacy in the new security environment: “In general, NATO faces the challenge to better explain to new generations and future elites what the transatlantic alliance is all about in the 21st century.” At a workshop organized by the newly created Division in Brussels on November 20, 2003, then-NATO Deputy Secretary General Minuto Rizzo also stressed “the need for an effective public diplomacy which is particularly important today, as NATO takes on new missions and reaches out to new audiences, like in Afghanistan.”

At the time NATO faced numerous challenges requiring effective communication and creative public diplomacy, including:

• The need to assist new aspirant countries in their public diplomacy campaigns to promote their accession to NATO;
• The ever-growing network of partner countries from the Western Balkans, Central Asia, Northern Mediterranean and Asia Pacific that required strong public diplomacy elements to explain what NATO is and why the partnership matters;
• NATO’s stand-up of its biggest and most distant operation—the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF)—in Afghanistan in 2003;
• Other new challenges for NATO such as the fight against terrorism, cyber security and energy security;
• The requirement to address the new digital era, to include the proliferation of social media.

During its first decade, NATO’s Public Diplomacy Division focused on creating a strong brand for NATO in a new security environment. In addition, it promoted NATO as a transparent organization that embraces dialogue and an alliance that values strong engagement with civil society from NATO member and partner nations. In 2012, NATO’s Public Diplomacy Division underwent further reforms that aimed to create new ways of working in order to improve the overall performance of the division and enhance its products and programs.

One of the key elements of the reform process was the launch of an effective assessment and evaluation process that would help to better plan activities and budget allocation and increase the effectiveness of its outputs towards the then-28 NATO member nations. Previously, there had been limited measurement of program effectiveness and very little experience with the conduct of effective evaluation and measurement activities. The process needed to be developed from scratch, taking into account the specificities of NATO as a multilateral political-military organization with 28 national stakeholders.

Five years later, the NATO Public Diplomacy Division has made valuable gains in the field of evaluation and measurement. The Division trained a number of its staff in assessing programs, became a member of the AMEC (International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communications) and provided regular effectiveness assessments to NATO leadership. It created a dedicated position of a Planning and Assessment Officer in 2017 to enhance the Division’s monitoring and evaluation capabilities and incorporated new elements into its annual planning cycle. Finally, it adopted the British OASIS model of objective setting and introduced a campaign approach to communicate about key topics and policies.

Since its inception, the Division has experimented with a number of models and methods. This paper offers insights into the past five years of NATO’s build-up of its evaluation capacities, processes and tools and provides lessons learned for public diplomacy practitioners from other international organizations and national governments. ...

Achievements:

The NATO Public Diplomacy Division achieved its first two objectives: to communicate about the Warsaw Summit and to stimulate debate about key decisions adopted during the proceedings among key opinion leaders. Its third objective, to achieve increased global understanding of the political and military decisions made at the Summit, can only be measured anecdotally. However, there appears to have been some successes.

Through their daily engagement with various audiences, whether visitors to NATO HQ, participants in events sponsored by the NATO Public Diplomacy Division, or conversations on social media, the Division’s staff received feedback confirming audience awareness of the NATO Warsaw Summit. Moreover, the Division can confirm that audiences sought out information about Summit decisions that resonated with their areas of interest. For example, a Ukrainian student of international relations now knows that the Ukrainian president attended a NATO Summit in Warsaw to discuss NATO’s support to Ukraine, while an Afghan commentator is aware that NATO has endorsed continuation of support for the Resolute Training Mission in Afghanistan.

The NATO Public Diplomacy Division gained useful insights from this case study, which it will put to work in its new approach towards a dedicated campaign. The NATO Warsaw Summit can be classified as a small campaign in itself.