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.
The backstory
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. Aside from the videos, the site 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. 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.
A new approach
Coming up with tweets about a website that hadn’t had any new content in 3 years was a challenge, to say the least. And there was zero budget to film new videos. Still, the stories were out there. I found dozens of cancer survivor bloggers sharing their experiences—the heart-wrenching, the joyful, and everything in between. So, instead of posting our own content, we shared their stories on the site’s Twitter page.
The cancer survivor community took notice. I spent weeks building relationships with dozens of bloggers by regularly reposting their content. 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. Over 100 videos poured in the span of three weeks. Naturally, we happily reposted them. The Twitter following (which had started 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 on the site 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 and on sharing strength in the day-to-day.