# TheSite.org wins Best Charity Website Award at this year's BIMA's

- Link: https://fundraising.co.uk/2002/10/07/thesiteorg-wins-best-charity-website-award-year039s-bima039s/
- Published: 2002-10-07T23:00:00+01:00
- Author: Howard Lake

Youth advice service TheSite.org (www.thesite.org) won the award for Best Charity&
Non Government Website at this year’s BIMA Awards last week.

Organised by the British Interactive Media Association (BIMA), the BIMA’s are major
awards in the new media industry.

TheSite.org’s award was in response to ‘Drugs Boy,’ its successful online viral 
campaign to promote drugs information. The viral was an application that, once downloaded
onto your PC, took the form of a character that reacts to different types of drugs
taken, including ecstacy, LSD and alcohol. The strapline ‘people talk a lot of crap
on drugs’ then encouraged people to clickthrough to TheSite.org’s drugs homepage
and to pass on the application to their friends.

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BIMA’s judges liked the TheSite.org’s approach to promoting this sensitive and often
emotive subject matter and described ‘Drugs Boy’ as “…cute and to-the-point without
being in any way patronizing. It links users directly to a site with a great depth
of useful content: it does what it sets out to do very well.”

Since its creation in March of this year by TheSite.org’s marketing agency Digital
Outlook, ‘Drugs Boy’ has been played over 5 million times, becoming one of the UK’s
most successful online viral campaigns this year. Its success has had a significant
contribution to TheSite.org’s current traffic levels of more than one million unique
users a month; August saw a record breaking 8.2 million page impressions.

YouthNet UK’s (the charity behind TheSite.org) marketing director Jamie Thomas said:“
Viral marketing is one mechanic that, if done well, really works. I would encourage
charities to consider viral marketing seriously as a cost effective option to communicate
their objectives to users.”

Earlier this year TheSite.org was a highly commended ‘charity’ finalist at the New
Media Age awards.

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