Assessing impact in global media: methods, innovations, and challenges

International broadcasting, defined as “the use of electronic media by one society to shape the opinion of the people and leaders of another,” is an area of public diplomacy research ripe for scholarly attention (Price in Media and sovereignty: the global information revolution and its challenge to state power, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2002). The primary agent for U.S. international broadcasting is the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which operates in 62 languages in over 100 countries. While there is broad consensus in the literature that evaluation in public diplomacy is extremely difficult, USAGM has a unique challenge of assessing impact across such a broad and diverse geography of audiences and media environments. Moreover, as an independent public service media agency, USAGM is often called upon to show it is a responsible steward of resources by demonstrating the effectiveness of its programs to policymakers and key stakeholders (Metzgar in Seventy years of the Smith-Mundt Act and U.S. International broadcasting: Back to the future? CPD perspectives in public diplomacy, 2018). This paper describes and assesses USAGM’s Impact Model, which serves as the conceptual framework for aggregating, understanding, and communicating the Agency’s research. It illustrates the research-strategy-evaluation loop examining the case of Voice of America in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and discusses some of the challenges that USAGM faces in both research as well as implementation of the recommendations proposed based on that research.