The Day I Found Out
For many cancer survivors and their loved ones, this was one of the toughest days of their lives. The Day I Found Out site was a place where people with hope to spare could share it with those who need it most.
A little back story
Copacino + Fujikado is a Seattle-based advertising agency that worked with the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. They developed a website called “The Day I Found Out” that shared 12 professionally made videos that told people’s stories of the day they found out they had cancer. The site also offered resources for new cancer patients and their loved ones.
Flash-forward a few years. Copacino + Fujikado took ownership over the site. The campaign ran its course and there wasn’t much activity on the website or the Twitter account. During that time, I became a copywriting intern and my boss asked me to post a couple tweets a week. Eager to make a good impression, I took it a bit farther.
Twitter is for sharing. But what if you don’t have content to share?
Coming up with tweets about a website that hadn’t had any new content in 3 years was a challenge, to say the least. I don’t have cancer. Nobody I knew had cancer. And there was zero budget to film new videos. Still, the stories were out there. I found and shared dozens of blog posts from cancer survivors who were sharing their experiences—the heart-wrenching, the joyful and everything in between. And then I made an ask of my own—“Would you share a self-made video about the day you found out you had cancer?”
The response was overwhelming.
Building something out of nothing
Building trust in the cancer survivor community paid off. Dozens of videos poured in every week. The Twitter following (which had started out at a hundred or so followers) quickly grew to over 1500 in the same amount of time. But we had a weird problem—the professionally-shot videos just didn’t match the energy of the raw, self-made ones. So, we built a new website with a new format that focused more on community, on sharing strength in the day-to-day.
I learned a lot as an intern at Copacino + Fujikado. But it was “The Day I Found Out” audience who taught me the most.