Goals

A critical step in the planning phase is to establish your goals and objectives. It is important to determine what you hope to accomplish with a health fair in order to establish guidelines for planning, promoting, implementing, and evaluating the health fair. Be sure to validate your perceptions of the goals and objectives with management. Although you may want to promote positive health behavior changes, management might be concerned with morale and union issues. Set the goals and objectives clearly in writing.

Make Your Goals SMART

Sample goals for your health fair might include:

• To increase visibility of the internal health promotion program and staff
• To increase health awareness among employees
• To provide an opportunity for health plan providers to showcase their services during open enrollment allowing employees to become more informed health care consumers
• To provide a variety of health screenings, educational materials, and referrals to community resources
• To motivate employees toward making positive health behavior changes
• To collect data to support future program decisions, allocation of resources, and utilization of time

Objectives

When writing objectives, remember the SMART plan and make the objectives specific and measurable based upon the goals.

Sample objectives for a health fair might include:

• Provide 10 booths on different health awareness topics.
  Each booth at the health fair will have three components--education, experience, and excitement.
• At least 10 smokers will be identified as interested in a smoking cessation class.
• Fifty female employees will receive information about monthly breast self-exam.

The goals and objectives you select will be used to evaluate the overall success of the health fair. Health fairs are generally excellent projects to promote health awareness and are motivational. If the goals and objectives are set for health behavior change, you probably won't meet the objectives with one health fair. If behavior change is the longterm goal, be sure to include referral and follow-up components as part of the health fair.