Performance measures for a multisite multiprogram obesity prevention initiative

The performance measure literature for public organizations has tracked the difficulty in developing and using various outcome indicators. In fact, the research suggests that depending on the indicator chosen, a program may not be meaningfully evaluated. It also suggests some outcomes are more difficult to measure, which may make the comparison of “success” across different types of programs challenging.

The Missouri Foundation for Health's (MFH) Healthy and Active Communities (H&AC) Initiative funded a diverse group of programs targeting obesity prevention across the state ranging from trail construction to school nutrition initiatives. Originally, grantees were allowed to establish the primary indicators of program success. Later, a team of external evaluators developed another set of performance measures for individual programs in order to facilitate a cluster analysis of the entire HA&C initiative.

The primary topics of exploration for this paper are: Did individual programs choose performance indicators that were measurable and allowed them to quantitatively assess program success. If yes, how often did those performance measures and the ones chosen by the external evaluators differ? Did that variation lead to different conclusions about the degree of program success? And finally, were conclusions about the relative success of the various H&AC programs in part a function of the ease and accuracy with which the outputs of those programs could be measured?