Coronary heart disease is the single biggest killer of women in the UK, and affects more than a million women. Our objectives were to:• raise awareness that heart disease affects women and is their biggest killer.• drive people to take action to prevent and/or get treatment.• increase the relevance of the British Heart Foundation (BHF) to the target audience. Our target audience were at risk post-menopausal women, usually with lower incomes, across the UK, who had previously not engaged with the BHF for heart health advice.

The unique insight was that women don’t want to hear about another health scare. So we decided to engage with women by doing the opposite of most health campaigns – using humour to spread a serious message, to engage with their biggest killer.

We enrolled the nation’s funniest women, led by Victoria Wood, and created The Angina Monologues, a comedy event to raise awareness of heart disease amongst women. Before the event itself, print and online advertising, as well as PR, created a buzz, sold tickets, and simultaneously let women know that heart disease kills three times more women than breast cancer.The night itself, at London’s prestigious Theatre Royal Haymarket, played to a sold-out audience of paying guests, journalists and celebs and was simulcast to Vue Cinemas across the country.Many performers wrote original material exposing the facts or exploring the psychology behind women’s tendency to ignore affairs of the heart.A TV broadcast of the show was produced to run on Sky1 in highly visible time slots from December onwards, including Christmas Day prime-time. And 440,000 DVDs of the show were distributed around Mother’s Day in Woman’s Weekly magazine.

The huge success of the Angina Monologues was demonstrated by the 1.3m Sky viewers and 4-star reviews in the Evening Standard and the Independent. Media coverage totalled £1.5m, providing 130 million extra OTS.The BHF saw a fivefold increase in the number of ‘Women & Heart Disease’ booklets requested and distributed during the campaign period. There has also been a 44% increase in agreement that heart disease is the biggest killer of women (and therefore 2.3m more women now thinking about their heart health), and 1 in 20 women have consulted their GP about heart disease.