On Tuesday 14th June, leading HIV and sexual health charity Terrence Higgins Trust (THT) was voted the overall winner of the Marketing for Good Award 2005 by an audience of 200 industry experts for their pitch to the Daily Mail.

THT pitched to the paper's Head of Client Sales, Rosemary Gorman, against children’s charity Winston’s Wish with a campaign to raise funds and awareness for the charity, while driving newspaper sales by appealing to the paper’s existing readership and attracting a younger audience.

Six charities in all pitched to the following three companies:

• Childline and British Heart Foundation pitched to B&Q
• Breakthrough Breast Cancer and National Missing Persons Helpline pitched to Dixons Group
• THT and Winston’s Wish pitched to the Daily Mail.

The winning campaign, ‘Sexual Health Won’t Wait’, combined three tried-and-tested mechanisms, a CD-rom covermount, a reader appeal and a token collect, to meet the marketing brief set by The Daily Mail. The campaign was designed to appeal to a broad cross section of people, combining advice for parents on how to talk to their children about sexual health with a selection of celebrity interviews and competitions, backed up by hard-hitting facts about rising levels of chlamydia and the sexual risks taken by people entering the dating game for the second time.

After each pair of charities pitched head-to-head, the audience used electronic voting to select the winner under each of the following categories: strategic skills, analytical skills, creative skills and presentation.

Cath Cole, Head of Corporate and Trust Fundraising at THT said: “We’re absolutely over the moon about winning the award. It was a great opportunity to test our metal against the competition and show what we can do.

“Corporate fundraising for HIV is a real challenge and matching our sexual health messages with Daily Mail readers was one of our toughest yet. But it’s also an important challenge for us as a charity. We need to spread our messages far and wide if we are going to have an impact on the UK’s rising levels of HIV and sexual ill-health.”

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Notes to Editors

Terrence Higgins Trust is the UK’s leading HIV and sexual health charity, providing a wide range of services to over 50,000 people a year. The charity also campaigns and lobbies for greater political and public understanding of the personal, social and medical impact of HIV and sexual health.