When Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas decided to "come out" as an undocumented immigrant, he came to Fission Strategy. Fission helped to design a new kind of campaign that would bring his amazing story to light in a way that was very personal, and challenged all Americans to consider how we "Define American."

In the first two weeks after launch, the campaign’s New York Times Magazine feature "Outlaw: My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant" was the single most shared story on the entire Internet - having now been passed on over 150,000 times.

Over the course of one year, the campaign encouraged the sharing of thousands of other stories of undocumented Americans through its website, and spurred a new conversation about immigration across the country that included everyone from Stephen Colbert to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to DREAM activists to the Republican mayor of Uvalda, Georgia.

In June 2012, Define American was featured on the cover of TIME Magazine. The morning that the magazine hit newsstands around the world, President Obama announced one of the first major changes to immigration policy in years, granting work permits to undocumented young people who came to the U.S. as children - using language that could have come directly from Define American emails.

As the campaign moves into 2013, we will be tackling the mainstream media’s use of the word “illegal” to describe American immigrants. Outlets like ABC News, Univision and the Huffington Post have already committed to not using the word “illegal” to describe people, while we continue to pressure outlets like the New York Times and the Associated Press to change their ways.

Visit the website, designed and developed by Fission with a story submission tool, and watch “Jose’s Story” co-produced by Fission.