Can TikTok connect Delco residents with local government? This millennial and Gen Z comms team thinks so.

Where’s the best park in Delaware County to sit and scroll on your phone? Where can Delco residents get tested for sexually transmitted infections (once they “momentarily stop necking and canoodling”)?

If you’ve been watching Delaware County’s TikToks and Instagram reels, you might have the answer.

Armed with a team of Gen Z staffers and a laundry list of public service announcements, Delaware County’s communications team has embarked on an all-out effort to make county government go viral.

The county’s videos often star 23-year-old communications specialist Liam O’Murchu (whom one commenter affectionately called “Pa. Conan O’Brien”), and regular cameos from Delaware County’s council members and register of wills.

Some videos are funny. In one about Delaware County’s “Code Blue” warning for dangerously cold temperatures, O’Murchu, dressed in a neon yellow Delaware County Public Relations work jacket, throws his hands up to the sky and wonders if the Delaware Valley has “been forsaken, stranded to live out our remaining days in frigid misery.”

Others are more pointed.

In a video about Prospect Medical Holdings’ purchase, and later abandonment, of Crozer-Chester Medical Center and Springfield Hospital, council member Monica Taylor derides the private hospital operator for “[putting] themselves first at everyone else’s expense.”

“Let’s be clear. Private equity is a plague. For-profit healthcare is a menace. None of this should be legal,” Taylor says sharply, eyeing the camera.

For those familiar with the sometimes sleepy nature of municipal government — waste management, district court administration, property tax assessments — Delaware County’s online persona feels surprisingly snappy.

For the county’s public affairs shop, helmed by Mike Connolly, 39, former deputy state treasurer for communications, the video-forward approach is a key part of the strategy to “turn some heads” and not just “reheat the same leftovers” of communications strategies past.

Have they gone viral? Not quite yet. Some of the TikToks have reached beyond 10,000 views, but the team still awaits its big breakthrough.

“We know that it has reached some people. It’s not as many as it’s going to reach in the future,” Connolly said.

However, he added, “If we’re reaching people and getting in front of their eyes and getting in their minds about what our government does for them, we’re doing a good thing.”

Delco’s social media presence evokes the videos that launched Zohran Mamdani, once an obscure state assemblyman from Queens, N.Y., into the New York City mayor’s office last fall (Mamdani was a major inspiration for Delco’s communications team, as was progressive media group More Perfect Union).

While O’Murchu is Delco’s front-facing celebrity, the videos are shot and edited by Annie Bohnenberger, 26, the county’s digital communications specialist. Bohnenberger went to film school and did freelance cinematography work before taking a job with the county last fall.

When Connolly stepped up to lead the department last February, he wanted to build an apparatus that could work beyond the traditional functions of a communications office. He realized quickly that Bohnenberger’s film background could improve the office’s production quality, setting it apart from the thousands of public officials doing ad hoc TikToks with their iPhone cameras.

“We tried to do videos before Annie was here. We were, like, breaking equipment,” O’Murchu joked.

Connolly is no stranger to blending viral humor and government communications. During his tenure with the Pennsylvania Treasury Department, Connolly was a main driver behind @PATreasury, a now-defunct X (formerly Twitter) account that used sardonic humor to publicize the department’s programs, and to sometimes threaten to throw “private equity swindlers out of Pennsylvania and into the ocean” (that 2019 post got 5,100 likes).

With O’Murchu in front of the camera and Bohnenberger behind it, Connolly and George Basile, 29, the county’s assistant communications director, began writing scripts. The county’s council bought in quickly, which Connolly says was critical in getting the videos off the ground.

The office has since launched series like “30 Things in 30 Days” to make viewers “smarter about local government.” A video about the county health department’s Test and Go Kiosks garnered around 16,000 views.

There are challenges that come with short-form video, Connolly said. It’s easier to cut a statement down to a 200-character X post. It’s harder to figure out how to portray it visually without cheapening the message.

It’s “easy to be boring on any platform,” Connolly said, but harder to do something unique and “to try to convey something earnestly.”

“You have to spend a lot of time figuring out where your audience is and how they’re consuming information, and then the onus is on you to go there and be interesting enough that somebody is gonna give you their time and attention,” he said.

Though the communications office did not spill all its trade secrets, O’Murchu confirmed there is a video in the works where he will share another great park to scroll on your phone. Stay tuned.

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