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

Howard Lake | 7 October 2002 | News

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.

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.

About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale. He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.