The problem: HIV. Over 34 million people all over the world are HIV-positive – and this number is on the rise. Even today, the infection claims more than 1,5 million lives every year and nearly 1,7 million children are growing up without their parents because they have lost them to AIDS. HIV remains a global threat – and it still isn’t curable. The solution: .HIV. The first domain ending ever that solely serves a humanitarian cause. From mid-2013 on, anyone can register a .hiv-domain. The surplus from the domain sale go into a pot. And with every click on a .hiv-domain, each visitor triggers a micro-donation out of this pot. So while google.hiv shows the same content as google.com, every click on google.hiv makes a big difference. Because just three tiny letters and the combined power of the internet users will add up to a huge leap forward in the fight against the virus. The .hiv TLD will tackle the topic HIV/AIDS from three sides: it will generate funds to support the dedicated all over the world, raise awareness and work against the stigmatization of people living with the virus. Since dotHIV is a charitable organization, we don’t have a big budget for communication or paid media. So we have used PR measures such as network communication to promote this campaign.

Our campaign plan was implemented on meetings and conferences of many different sort: ICANN-meetings three times a year on different continents, the World AIDS Conference in Washington, the Global Coalition on Health in New York, a TED talk in Hamburg and a Google Tech talk in the Google-headquarter in Mountain View. The submission of our application was featured in the German newspapers Süddeutsche Zeitung and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, as well as in countless blogs and social media contributions. Also, we are the proud charity sponsor of the official New Zealand Bobsled Team who are currently in the process of qualifying for the Winter Olympics 2014, the shirt sponsor of the football team of University Münster and charity partners of the Google Techbikers. In addition, we have used YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to communicate the process of our campaign and to build supporters.

Until this day, we have nearly 6,000 pre-registrations for .hiv-domains, more than 5,000 Facebook-fans from 48 countries and over 30,000 clicks on our concept video on YouTube. We have collected start up capital in the amount of 470,000 $ and pro-bono support of approx. 700.000 $ and won prestigious partners from the Top-Level Domain industry and the AIDS response. We hold the license for the world’s first ever charitable domain .hiv and get messages from all over the world that saying that our idea is the source of new hope.