MTV Staying Alive have won an IVCA Clarion award for the Staying Alive blog. Good times! Check out what Ben who manages community engagement across Staying Alive has to say about the win, and how YOU could win yourself an IPod by telling us what MTV Staying Alive means to you.

I am so proud that the MTV Staying Alive Blog was awarded the “Charity and Social Enterprise Website” award at the IVCA Clarion Awards 2010 on Friday 24th September.
I feel a great deal of pride and achievement winning this award as it is a recognition of some of the great work we have been doing over the last year through the blog platform with our audience, programme cast, contributors and partners.

The IVCA Award in it's new home - next to MTV Staying Alive Ambassador Travie McCoy

As the person responsible for sourcing the content, communicating with the bloggers, promoting the articles across our social networks and finally driving engagement across these networks, I feel incredibly involved in the blog, along with the issues that go along with it

Yet in the last year I haven’t written one single article on the site. All of our content is written by resident and guest bloggers who have either reached out to us through email, hello@staying-alive.org, been street team members on our local campaigns or been involved in previous projects with us.

We have built up a list of some great bloggers, who over time have developed both their writing styles and their knowledge of the often complex issues that are related to HIV, that alone is a great achievement.

Staying Alive aims to provide crucial information on HIV/AIDS to empower young people to make informed choices when it comes to sex. And I feel that through the blog and the social networking platforms such as Facebook and Twitter this has organically evolved into a conversation between the bloggers, the audience our partners and the Staying Alive team.

And even beyond that, the content on the blog is often shaped by the feedback that the audience provide across our networks. This feedback directly affects the kind of direction we go in terms of themes of the blog. An example of this is our recent blog theme called “Right To Be Me”; As part of that theme we uploaded over 15 articles. Yet the idea of getting the audience to write in telling us how they exercise their “Right To Be Me” was dreamt up after having a conversation with a 16 year old guy on the Facebook fanpage who after a discussion on rights, was baffled as to why people weren’t allowed their basic human right to live a normal life (regardless of HIV status) and wanted to write about it.

Another example of the audience participation was a result of a discussion about an anti rape female condom, (which uses internal teeth that clamps down onto a potential rapist’s penis when inserted).  The initial reaction was one of gender empowerment, yet through the Facebook debate, slowly other issues came out of it like “When does a female know she is going to be raped?” and “What risk does that put girls under from an attacker?” As a result of this, we recently posted a blog called “The Trouble With The RapeAXE Condoms” addressing some of these issues.

Talking more about of contributors, I was planning to shout you all out, however there are so many of you that I thought it would be best to thank you all properly over email, but without you, the blog would have missed such a crucial and diverse perspective, without which, I doubt we would have gotten close to winning this award.

Ben with some of the Tribes street team and cast in Trinidad

I think it’s also important to recognise the impact that the cast of MTV Staying Alive Ignite dramas Shuga and Tribes have had on this blog, whether they were Getting Tested,, representing with us at the AIDS 2010 Conference in Vienna or contributing to our Right To Be Me series – they were all a huge help when trying to engage with people in their communities along with globally.

Last but not least it is important to recognise the role our partners have had with our success. Being able to communicate and work with organisations such as UNAIDS puts us in a unique position, we are able to speak with authority on issues relating to HIV and at the same time push the boundaries further in true MTV fashion, it’s a true partnership, one that allows us to leverage our strengths to directly benefit you, our audience.

When reading the above points over it really hits home just how unique MTV Staying Alive is – discussing the issues relating to HIV has never been an easy thing to do – but we have a huge group of people online globally who are willing to discuss these very issues on a daily basis.

So while I was shocked, when news of this award came about, I genuinely think that we deserve it.  And I’m not towing the company line here, I’m personally proud of the work that we do and I believe in it.  I see Staying Alive as something very unique in the world of HIV awareness and something that has opened the conversation of HIV and AIDS up to a wider audience.

The roles have been blurred – with members of the audience becoming contributors, cast members blogging and the whole programme of what we do being shaped around what the audience want to talk about.  It’s a two way communication, it’s not about us telling you guys what’s right or wrong, but really engaging together to find solutions to this epidemic and open a dialogue on sex and other subjects that are often hard to discuss.  Staying Alive is like a friend, an older brother, an older sister, a parent, so we’re basically like family! This, I feel is what makes our campaign so empowering and effective, we’re in this together.

Competition:
To celebrate this achievement that we want you all to be a part of, we’re giving away 2 IPod Shuffles…
You’ve heard about what Staying Alive means to Ben, now for your chance to win an IPod tell us in under 20 words what MTV Staying Alive blog means to YOU.