Created in 2000, the Russian Public Council for Combating Teen Smoking, as the name implies, works to prevent youth from taking up smoking. The council’s work is structured along several lines that include separate programs: an educational program, a program to prevent the retail sale of cigarettes to minors, an advertising program aimed at minors, a research program, a program to prevent smoking in schools, and others. An important aspect of the council’s work is its inter-disciplinary approach to the problem of smoking.

The council sees its role first and foremost as a coordinator of the work of various specialists including doctors, teachers, social workers, traders, sociologists, opinion leaders and others. The council’s programs are being implemented in more than 100 cities of Russia by thousands of specialists. In addition, the Public Council has affiliated organizations in St. Petersburg and Krasnodar. All of the specialists need a tool for supporting the cooperation between them. The organization tasked with creating such a tool was the agency, which provided the council with organizational and administrative support during the formation stage.

The agency decided to create an interactive website to support internal communication between the participants in the council’s programs. The website (www.youth-non-smoking.ru), created in 2000, contained a description of the council’s programs, information about its participants, basic documents, a section of releases including press releases, a section of recommended links, and a news ticker. The introduction of the news ticker required the council’s employees to develop their skills of identifying newsworthy information and determining information pretexts. In this area the agency successfully conducted the appropriate training sessions with them.

The website was marked by a clear commitment not to be turned into a tool of direct propaganda against smoking, since there are already many such resources on the Internet. The choice of functionality over declarativeness was expressed in the intentional modest design, strict hierarchy and structured organization of materials. The website support strategy was based not on updating materials, but rather supplementing them. The website was supposed to simultaneously perform the functions of information accumulation for the preparation of materials and reports about the council’s work.

Since the website was conceived as a tool for "internal" information exchange in an environment of specialists of various professions involved in combating the problem, the agency decided not to advertise it on the Internet or include it in banner ad exchange systems. The agency also intentionally omitted to add a forum or chatroom to the website, though, of course, the site allows visitors to send messages to the council’s directorate. The decision against facilitating discussions on the website was first and foremost dictated by the specifics of the council’s policy. The council receives limited financial support from sponsors and therefore supports only specially approved programs.

Developing a model of inter-disciplinary cooperation, the public council worked with the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation and the coordination center of the My Choice educational program (one of the main programs supported by the council) to organize an international congress called Teens and Preteens in the Changing Society: Problems of Deviant Behavior in late 2001. Representatives of affiliated organizations and specialists from the CIS and Baltic countries participated in the congress. In order to support cooperation between the participants in the congress, a special section was opened on the council’s website at www.youth-non-smoking.ru/conf\ that initially included forward-looking information for delegates and forms of interactive registration. Currently it contains the final materials of the forum, including a unique collection of the speeches given by the participants, records of discussions, master-class materials, etc.

Created in full accordance with the concept, for 5 years the public council’s website is regularly supplemented and managed by the agency on the basis of information provided by the public council.
The website management was fully transferred to the customer in 2006. By that time the interactive website of the public council included the main website mentioned above plus an elaborate section based on the results of the international congress and independent websites of the Krasnodar Regional Public Council for Combating Teen Smoking (www.ysp.ru) and the coordination center of the national My Choice educational program (www.mychoice.ru)

Today the web resource contains more than 1000 pages of information, including original materials of sociological research, unique methods for organizing the work of separate programs, samples of communication materials, selected releases about the work of the council and separate programs, news, photos, and much more.

According to mail.ru, the site gets about 1300 visits per month, which is commensurate with the number of specialists involved in the council’s programs. The website is one of Russia’s top 100 websites in the NGO category. The website also serves well as an information bank. The council’s annual brochure and regular reports on the use of sponsor contributions are prepared on the basis of the information that is added to the website on a responsive basis.