Upworthy, the curation site that collects “Things that matter” and expertly helps them to go viral, posted the video above under the title “This Kid just Died. What He Left Behind is Wondtacular.” One of Upworthy’s curators put it on the site and it exploded. The original YouTube video received 433,000 Facebook shares; Upworthy’s received 2.5 million. The Upworthy curator, Adam Mordecai, had lost his father to cancer and found himself crying when he watched the video. Sara Critchfield, Founding Editorial Director, explains: “We asked him, 'Adam, did you know?' That’s what everyone asked. 'Did you know that it was going to be a big megahit?' And Adam said, 'On the second viewing, I was still crying, so I had a sense that it would be a hit.' So, notice he didn’t say, 'I was checking the data and I'- You know it was 'I was crying, and so I thought it would be a hit.'” Every credit union is built on the emotion of passion. The driving force behind every credit union has always been to serve the community and provide customers a valuable and sustainable alternative in the financial world. Analytics and data play a vital role in the success of your credit union and especially for the success of viral video site. Upworthy’s testing tools helped the site find the headline that got the video to 15 million views.

“But the testing tools were no more a larger part of this story than Adam’s emotionally driven decision making,” she says. “So this is Upworthy’s big-data secret, ok? We do emotional data plus analytical data, and we make room for that in our workflow.”

Sara Critchfield was a keynote speaker at THINK 15, helping the audience to understand how to reframe emotion not just as a soft skill, but reframing emotions as data turned into a hard skill.