Evaluating projects funded by the Western Australian Health Promotion Foundation: a systematic approach

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Abstract
The paper describes the design of a systematic approach to evaluate projects funded by the Western Australian Health Promotion Foundation (Healthway). Healthway is financed by a specific tax on tobacco and uses this income to fund research, community interventions and promotion of health messages via sports, arts and racing sponsorship. Given the trend towards establishing such foundations and the use of specific tobacco taxes to fund health promotion projects, this paper presents a case study of designing a system for their evaluation. The system has investigative and routine components. The latter, known as Graduated Project Evaluation (GPE) aims to match an appropriate level of evaluation to each project, and to generate statistically tractable output that enables the achievements of a large number of diverse projects to be reported in summary form. The GPE structure consists of four project levels and 10 sets of output measures covering the areas of poulation reach; media publicity; structural reform; community development; promotional benefits of sponsorship; interactive educational activities; target group; cognitive and attitudinal effects; publications; and an outcome report. Three major issues concerning implementation of GPE are discussed including the implications for professional development of grant recipients; the tension between academic rigour and the practical feasibility of evaluation; and the trade-off between generic and customized approaches.

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