Evidence for the effectiveness of sponsorship as a health promotion tool

Abstract

Health sponsorships are undertaken to achieve both structural and individual objectives. Structural objectives refer to the sponsored organisation being required to undertake activities such as the imposition of smoke free areas, or the provision of low alcohol beverages and healthy food choices at the sponsored event. Individual objectives refer to creating or reinforcing people's awareness of a health issue or message, and their beliefs, attitudes and behaviours with respect to the issue or message. This paper focuses on sponsorship's capacity to achieve individual level objectives, describing several studies undertaken by the Health Promotion Evaluation Unit (HPEU) at the University of Western Australia to evaluate the health promotion sponsorship activities of Healthway, the Western Australian Health Promotion Foundation. Given the results of evaluations of Healthway's (and other organisations') sponsorship activities, using a variety of methodologies and across a broad range of events and health issues, it is concluded that health sponsorships can be effective at increasing people's salience of a health issue, and can result in attitudinal and behavioural change.