Reporting on your TIS activities

You will need to provide a formal written report to the TIS program funder, the Australian Government Department of Health (DoH). A new template from the Department will be provided to TIS teams when available.

Tips for performance reporting

The performance report is your opportunity to show the difference your program is making in the communities across your region. As there is a limited number of words, you need to make them count. The NBPU has developed a number of tips for presenting the progress you are making, which should be read along with the guidance document and good practice example:

• Make sure the report includes the full range of information about what is changing in your region. A good way to do this is to make reporting a team effort. For example, if the organisation manager or TIS Coordinator is responsible for writing the report, they might want to sit with the team and a whiteboard and go through the key points before they start writing.
• You don’t need to list all of your activities under each TIS Performance Indicator. It’s great that you are doing so much, but for your performance report the most important thing is to show how all of your activities are making a difference in the community. Think about what has changed since the last report (outcomes).
• Rather than just saying that something has changed, show how you know you have made a difference (present the evidence and remember to provide some context around these changes).
• If you are reporting numbers (quantitative data) include the total number of people who you had contact with as well as the number who made a change (e.g. 14 of the 20 people attending your quit support group during this reporting period were able to cut down their smoking).
• When reporting the percentage of people making a change, remember that it is best practice to include the actual number as well (e.g. 70% of people attending your quit support group during this period were able to cut down their smoking, which is 14/20 people).
• When reporting stories (qualitative data) make sure you focus on the part of the story that shows how your activities are making a difference to smoking. Whilst it’s great that the netball team you sponsor has won all of their games recently, what matters for the performance report are things such as whether all the games have been smoke-free. If your players are ambassadors explain how they helped support your activities, messaging and so on.
• It’s really important that your report brings out the voices of the community and provides narratives where possible, so the report talks about real people and what the program is doing for them (so use short quotes or images to illustrate your report and provide ‘good news’ stories).
• Some TIS teams have been asking for advice about when someone’s status changes from a smoker to an ex-smoker (for reporting on activity outcomes). This will be discussed with the program evaluators once they come on board to ensure everyone is collecting appropriate data. However, in the meantime our stance on defining ex-smoker status is as follows:
  • the NBPU would recommend using the international convention which is four weeks (28 days). Whilst this may not seem like a long time, since those first few weeks are the worst and most of the cravings should be done by that point, anyone who lasts that long is well on the road to giving up the smokes for good. It is also useful to make a distinction between people who have been ex-smokers for <12 months (short term) and >12 months (long term quit). We suggest these two categories because we know that if you are able to abstain for 12 months, the chances of relapse are statistically much reduced and most people at that point will remain smoke-free. However you decide to categorise people, remember that it is important to define clearly the criteria you are using (four weeks, 12 months etc).