Research Summaries

Back Evaluation of USFF’s Environmental Outreach Initiatives

Fiscal Year 2018
Division Research & Sponsored Programs
Department Naval Research Program
Investigator(s) Thomas, Gail F.
Baho, Sally M.
Stephens, Kimberlie J.
Neff, Jessica J.G.
Sponsor NPS Naval Research Program (Navy)
Summary Navy’s Environmental Outreach program, which is expanding to a nation-wide focus, is designed to sustain mission readiness while increasing awareness of environmental stewardship. To optimize effectiveness, this study will evaluate USFF engagement efforts with a focus on improving their ROI.
The Outreach program is designed to address the Navy’s commitment to environmental stewardship as well as to mitigate risks of public opposition to US Navy operations. If the Navy is not successful in satisfying the environment concerns of the public, scientific community, regulatory agencies, and other stakeholders, there can be detrimental effects on Navy training, testing, and operations. Consequences can be the loss of access to ranges and training opportunities which could seriously degrade the Navy’s mission and warfighting readiness.
The study will include three phases:
1. Evaluation of USFF Environmental Outreach Assessment Process. USFF has conducted three End-of-Year Assessments of its environmental outreach program (2014, 2015, and 2016). The purpose of this phase would be to use best practices from the extant program evaluation literature to examine the efficacy of USFF’s outreach assessment processes. This evaluation would identify the strengths and weaknesses of their processes and provide recommendations for establishing the best ROI. Researchers will also recommend metrics that might be used for an ongoing communication dashboard.
2. Effectiveness of Existing Tools and Platforms. Based on command objectives, researchers will determine priority stakeholders and link these to effectiveness of tools, platforms, and other tactics that are currently be used at USFF outreach program. Researchers will offer recommendations for increasing ROI linking measures of performance (MOPs) with measures of effects (MOEs).
3. Media Analysis. Researchers will conduct a proof of concept media analysis (e.g. trends, sentiment analysis, semantic networks) linked to above.
Keywords
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Data Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal