Advertising awareness: evaluation of CHAPS national HIV prevention adverts and leaflets targeted at gay men 1996-2000

Evaluation reports serve several audiences and many purposes. This document reports on a body of research and development supporting national HIV prevention interventions targeted at gay men and bisexual men. It presents the work of two teams, the Sexual Health Programme within the Health Promotion Research Unit at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (University of London) and Sigma Research (University of Portsmouth). The overall purpose of the evaluation activities are to enable us to do what we are trying to do, better. Obviously, this depends on who we are and what we are trying to do. Our first target audience for this report are the people whose interventions we have looked at and asked questions about: the Terrence Higgins Trust and their partners in the Community HIV and AIDS Prevention Strategy (CHAPS). Our key aim for these readers is to provide information about previous health promotion interventions which is useful for planning better interventions. Although mass media adverts are rarely simply ‘run again’, we hope to describe some of the generic characteristics of these interventions so that their future performance can be maximised. This audience can be extended to include all health promoters working with adverts and leaflets for HIV prevention in England and beyond. The second audience for the report is the funder of CHAPS, the Department of Health. Our aim here has been to provide information that is useful to people making decisions about funding. These include decisions about HIV prevention generally, gay men’s targeted interventions in particular, and national media interventions specifically, especially those commissioned in the voluntary sector. Again, we can extend this audience to include other funders of interventions. Our objective has been to describe the utility of adverts and leaflets as targeted interventions to meet particular aims. A third audience is researchers and evaluators, with the objective of describing our research approach, design and findings to assist people engaged in similar activities in the future. We also hope here to convey how we adapted our research process to ensure the data they generate meet the needs of the health promoters we were working with rather than our own information needs. This third group can be extended to include ourselves, the report providing us with an opportunity to take stock of gains and losses, and to consolidate the learning we have done over the past four years about the meaning and substance of success in HIV prevention. Peter Weatherburn