826 Valencia - Invisible Stories

A tiny thing for a great cause.

Named for their street address in one of the most disadvantaged parts of San Francisco, this non-profit builds confidence in children, through creative writing — and they always need new cohorts of volunteers to mentor the kids. 

With absolutely zero budget for anything else, we started playing with their Instagram, where we realised we could recreate existing student stories, with all their beauty, whimsy and heart, by tagging users who happened to have the username we needed for the next word in the junior authors' story. Once posted, these invisible stories would ping that group of users, then reveal themselves in full once someone tapped to see the tags..

I’m still not sure why there were users named cheese, leaves, smell, and so forth, but our little hack struck such a chord with Instagram that they reposted it to their 40 million followers.

From there, the story made its way to HuffPost and beyond, giving this tiny non-profit a moment in the spotlight it never could have paid for.