You probably heard about Brittany Maynard this past fall. She was a woman with terminal brain cancer who chose to move to Oregon in order to live out her final months as she chose. (This video is a good summary if you’d like more details.) Oregon is one of only five states in the US that allows its citizens to choose to die with dignity, as Brittany did.

Brittany partnered with Compassion & Choices, a non-profit that advocates for expanding options for end-of-life care, to push for all terminally-ill Americans to be able to die on their own terms. Compassion & Choices used ShareProgress to gain signatures on a thank-you card for Brittany that demonstrated the wellspring of support she had behind her.

The results were remarkable.

Over 112,000 folks visited Brittany’s thank you card as the result of social sharing. These social share visitors resulted in an additional 15,000 people adding their names to Brittany’s thank-you card. And the visitors who came in through social sharing didn’t just sign the card, they shared it with their friends too. The thank-you card achieved seven unique generations of viral visitors–folks who came in through a shared link, who in turn shared the link themselves and empowered new friends to action.

This success was the result of a few key things that Compassion & Choices did.

• They tested every element of social sharing through ShareProgress. They ran A/B tests on the share language for Twitter, Facebook, AND email. This ensured that they would be able to find the most effective message possible, and automatically show those best-performing versions to far more visitors.
• They used an optimized share page from ShareProgress. We’ve tested every element of the ShareProgress share pages to ensure that they maximize the amount of social sharing for each action.

These two tactics in combination ensured that Brittany’s thank-you card was able to reach as many supporters as possible, and that Brittany knew she had supporters across the world who had her back. Compassion & Choices is continuing to honor her legacy by introducing legislation this week to allow Californians the right to die as they choose.

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