As a former CAIDP Board member and evaluation specialist I found this self-assessment very interesting: https://www.crisisgroup.org/global/our-impact-april-2023
As you no doubt know, Crisis Group aims at strategic (and depending on the topic, sometimes tactical) influence on governments and other powers to deflect or prevent conflict. The self assessment process documented here seems to be a well justified but not overly rote or detailed analysis of what they may have accomplished in various contexts over a period of several mounts. It could be a model, with adjustments, for GAC that could inform the Department far better than their very expensive existing demands for numbers and factoids, and subsequent chronic failures to use any of the information thus gathered.
Crisis Group doesn't claim any big direct impacts, but rather demonstrates the areas where their analyses and outreach seems to have had an informational influence on decision making. It doesn't draw a crystal clear line between what they do and some imaginary results, but makes a reasoned judgement about what might have been achieved.
They don’t claim to have stopped wars, but rather to have informed entities who can—and sometimes, possibly, have changed the direction of existing or future conflicts.
I’d like to see more interest in this kind of exploration across government, rather than the tick/check approach that has unhappily developed over a couple of decades. It could inform policy far better than the low level work currently done (and on which I lived for several years, to my frustration and no little regret).
