DEFENSE MEDIA ACTIVITY

When the Defense Media Activity (DMA) at Fort Meade required support to better understand the operational effectiveness of the organization, they turned to Vistra. The DMA is a field activity that provides a broad range of high-quality multimedia products and services to inform, educate and entertain Department of Defense audiences around the world. The A3E contract supports the Data and Assessments Office through continuous process improvement and dedicated research on over a dozen subcomponents of the DMA enterprise. Part of this contract includes supporting the DMA’s Public Affairs mission to develop, create and effectively engage audiences with DoD information. Through this program, Vistra has evaluated DMA’s business, program management and quality control processes. We gathered data and conducted research on best practices through surveys, workshops and stakeholder engagement. Our team would monitor select media products that came from DMA in Media Production and determine media market penetration and secondary media usage. We shared our findings and recommendations with DMA leadership through graphical presentations, reports, evaluations and briefings. Vistra’s thorough research and analysis using a range of methods and tools helped inform DMA leadership of areas of opportunity or concern in their Public Affairs efforts.

Vistra’s staff support the DMA by helping fine-tune its efforts and proactively evolve its capabilities to meet mission requirements, which include better support to DoD customers, dominating the ever-changing information environment to achieve the DMA’s vision: to become the essential corporate-level communication resource for the DoD. This work to date has included collaboration and relationship building with Media Production, Public Web Services, Media Distribution (DVIDS), Visual Information Records, the Armed Forces Network and the Defense Information School (DINFOS).

As part of this support, Vistra provides strategic services to:

• Analyze, assess, and evaluate how DMA provides support to mission functions including, but not limited to, information and technology management and property accountability.
• Provide analysis, assessment, and evaluation support to derive and refine capability requirements and associated capability gaps to accomplish assigned Public Affairs functions, roles, missions and operations within the DoD and Joint Forces (e.g., Combatant Commands).
• Analyze, assess, and evaluate the outputs, outcomes and end-results of the media products and services DMA provides to its customers in Media Production and visual information. This includes analytics on media products in all forms and determination of baselines for comparison of future collected analytics, metrics, etc.
• Conduct customer-centric evaluations of business unit functions to produce process mapping and value streams to support strategic initiative planning and continuous process improvement across the DMA enterprise.

As a result of our support, Vistra’s program has been extended and our team continues to play a critical role in supporting DMA’s leadership team in their efforts towards organizational excellence.

Our team’s research into conducting surveys across the DOD as well as conducting in-person qualitative interviews, have been well-received at the American Association of Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) conferences, by the OMB and have been covered by Military Times.