The Science Museum has won the Best Campaign for Consumer Relationships award at the annual Institute of Public Relations Excellence Awards, held on 7 July.

The museum, which is currently the London Tourist Board Visitor Attraction of the Year, won the award for work on Grossology – The Impolite Science of the Human Body, an exhibition centred around demystifying the workings of the body for younger visitors.

The award was judged across arts, sports, leisure and tourism while its PR campaign included appearances on Have I Got News For You and Radio 4’s Today programme. Other PR hits included editorial support from The Beano, an attempt on the world burping record, plus an inclusion in The Times leader, which warmly praised the museum for “boldly going where no sane biology master has gone before”.

The PR campaign was masterminded by the museum’s in-house team alongside its retained PR agency, Mission 21.

Grossology was quite a risk for the severe traditionalists to stomach, being an exhibition that creatively dealt mainly with the disgusting, but funny, science of flatulence, mucus, excrement and other bodily “nasties”.

It was a huge hit with children with 2,527 visitors on one day alone, exceeding the museums target two-and-a-half times.

Museum Communications Manager, Stephen Bromberg, commented: “We took big risks with the PR programme for this exhibition. We could easily have been accused of dumbing down, but instead bold PR earned us great visitor numbers and affection and turned this into a memorable campaign,” Details: www.ipr.org.uk/excellence