F**ck Cancer has teamed up with Invoke, an interactive agency, to create a Facebook app to educate folks about cancer.
"Invoke loves getting involved with feisty causes and F**ck Cancer's approach is fresh, attention-grabbing, and lends itself to a plethora of creative social campaigns. Working with Yael and the organization allows us to innovate with a lot of the technologies we've developed that other causes may view as too forward-thinking or potentially controversial," Dario Meli, a partner at Invoke, said.
The goal of the app, according to F**ck Cancer founder Yael Cohen, is to make getting the word out as easy and viral as possible. Basically, you visit the F**ck Cancer Facebook Page, click on the F-Tember Tab and click on "Donate Your Status." You can then choose to donate your status daily, once, bi-weekly or weekly via Facebook, Twitter and/or e-mail. The app then does so automatically, sharing out factoids like those below. (NB: There is no option to censor your tweets and updates, so if you're squeamish about the F-bomb, be aware.)
Yeah, the word "f**ck" itself may seem rather... strong, but to Cohen and Co. it perfectly encapsulates the sentiment they want to get across. "I started F**ck Cancer just over a year ago, when my mom got cancer," Cohen says. "When she was recovering from her first surgery, I got her a shirt that said, 'F**ck Cancer.' It was meant to be a private source of strength for her, but she has balls of steel and no filter so she wore it absolutely everywhere. People's response was really astounding. So it became evident that we'd tapped into some sort of emotion and that we should do something with it."
And it's not like your donated statuses and tweets are just expletive-laden gibberish. As you can see from the screenshot above, they're meant to educate people about the disease.
"The first step is really getting our generation to talk to our parents about cancer," Cohen says. "Because our research has shown that parents are much more likely to get that diagnostic test or stay on top of their risk profile if it comes from a child. Talk to your parents, take responsibility, help them, so that by the time that our generation comes to that high-risk demographic, we'll hopefully really internalize the idea that we need to look for cancer instead of just finding it."
And that's why Cohen -- a young 20something herself -- has decided to look to Facebook and Twitter to get her message across in much the same way as MTV took to Foursquare to take on STD testing and Oxfam took to the viral web.
"By seeing [facts about cancer] on 10 friends' news feeds every day for a month, you're going to absorb some of it," Cohen says. "The app actually achieves one of our goals: spreading awareness about early detection. More than 90% of cancers are curable at stage one -- look for them, look for them, look for them."