In Brief:
- Allen, Texas, launched its YouTube channel in 2007. At first, it was an experiment in sharing content from the city’s cable channel on the new platform.
- In the years since, it has attracted enough subscribers to place it in the top 1 percent of active YouTube channels.
- City commitment to building a national brand, and sustained leadership in the media department, have aided this success.
Michael Shayne Durden was facing decades in prison when he was led into an interview room in the Collin County, Texas, jail. Downcast and in handcuffs, he wasn’t about to be interrogated. He was there to spill secrets behind hundreds of successful burglaries.
A video of this interview was posted to a YouTube channel maintained by the city of Allen, Texas, as a crime prevention service for homeowners. It has been viewed more than 7 million times.
The channel, @AllenCityTV, boasts 140,000 subscribers, more people than the entire population of the Dallas suburb. Its success is the result of the city’s long-term commitment to brand building, as well as the sustained efforts of a local government employee who noticed what was working and kept doing it.
Mark Kaufman, Allen’s media operations and production manager, began working for the city in 2000 as a media tech. Allen had just built a new City Hall with a space for broadcasting City Council meetings to its government access cable channel.
When Kaufman learned the one-hour council meetings were held once every two weeks, he wondered how he would fill the hours between them. The first YouTube video was years in the future, but in 2000 the city cable channel was an underutilized resource for connecting with residents.
A survey went out to residents, asking for the top three or four things they’d want to see on the city cable channel. This was the first step in building connections that have grown over decades of content experiments and evolving delivery systems.
An interview in which a burglar explains how he chooses victims has been viewed 7 million times.
Moving to the Internet
Survey results came back. Residents wanted a show with the mayor. They wanted history videos, they wanted an animal show. Kaufman answered all of these requests, working his way up from media tech to video producer, then executive producer.
Other new content was added bit by bit alongside broadcasts of City Council, planning and zoning meetings. In 2007, Kaufman put a few past episodes of The Tales of Allen — short videos about the city’s history — on YouTube. (One looked back at the Texas Electric Railway that ran through the city from 1913 to 1949.)
“I started it as an experiment, to see if there was any kind of traction at all,” he says.
The city wasn’t on any social media channels at the time. “Back in 2007, there really was no strategy, no road for cities on YouTube,” Kaufman says. “It [the YouTube channel] mirrored what was airing on our cable channel, but it wasn’t built for engagement.”
This continued for several years. Kaufman began to produce broadcasts of concerts and lectures that were filmed and added to the YouTube repository.
Around the same time, the City Council developed a new strategic goal for Allen: to position it not as a suburb of Dallas, but as a destination city with a national profile. Kaufman applied this mindset to his media strategy.
Instead of thinking of the YouTube channel as a basic government utility, he started thinking of it as a brand. One that could compete at a much higher level.
“That led us to experiment beyond strictly local content,” he says.
(City of Allen)
Conspiracies and Pop Stars
One of the first experiments was a series of segments with an early YouTube celebrity, German actor, DJ and comedian Flula Borg. Borg had been in Texas for festivals and conferences. He’d made a viral rap video “Dirk Nowitzki: German Moses” about one of the star players of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, a German national. One of Kaufman’s producers saw the video at a game, and suggested they reach out to him. In some of the resulting videos, Borg acted as tour guide to sights in Allen, from a skate park to a senior recreation center.
In others, he offered his take on Allen history and impressions of Texas. One of the latter, filmed on the street in Austin, has been viewed more than 400,000 times. Borg’s subscriber base brought new viewers to the channel.
Soon after, the Allen library began to host lectures on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a tragedy that unfolded just 25 miles away. This turned into a series of specials that are some of the most widely viewed content on the Allen YouTube channel.
“There are only 28 of them, total, but they continue to drive significant traffic,” Kaufman says. The most popular episode, “Lee Harvey Oswald’s Final Phone Call,” a two-hour lecture, has over 12 million views. It alone has generated 31,000 new subscribers.
The interview with the burglar Shayne Durden, envisioned as a public safety message for the local community, has been viewed around the world. Kaufman realized that interviews with performers coming through the city could add another dimension. Conversations with Eddie Money, the Bangles, Loverboy, the Commodores and other artists were filmed and added to the channel.
Along with a range of city meetings, the channel’s offerings continued to grow, covering events in the city, pet adoption at the shelter, city programs and employees, and more. In 2024, it launched a podcast from the Allen Police Department, Behind the Badge.
Behind the Badge
Kaufman saved franchise fees for decades to build a studio. He now has a 1,200 square foot space for filming interviews, talk shows and podcasts.
The police department took advantage of the new studio by starting a podcast. It’s not a show about crime, however. The idea was to humanize the badge, says Alexus Birmingham, the department’s outreach coordinator, to let people know who the officers are outside of work. Many have come to the department as a second career, from jobs as diverse as professional sports and video gaming.
Sammy Rippamonti, the department’s sworn public information officer, hosts Behind the Badge in partnership with Birmingham. He’s surprised how often he’s stopped by residents who have watched it.
(City of Allen)
The podcast is a training opportunity of sorts, says Rippamonti. As a rule, officers don’t enjoy talking to reporters; public information officer jobs are among the hardest to fill. Talking about their families and hobbies helps officers feel comfortable in a media environment. “It helps them polish their skills,” Rippamonti says. “It’s huge for them when they go out.”
It’s also a recruiting tool. One recent hire came to Allen to visit a friend and started dating a resident. “She was looking to move to Texas, and she stumbled on the podcast,” Birmingham says. “She watched them all, learned so much about us, and did great in her interview.”
Fire department staff are guests as well. “Our next episode is with our assistant fire chief,” Rippamonti says. “There’s a lot of banter back and forth, because police and fire, we have the jokes. I’m ready for the public to see that one.”
City leaders have had great vision, he says. Agencies from other cities have toured the city’s studio. “They’re saying, ‘Our chief saw y’all and told us we’re starting a podcast,’” Rippamonti says. “I think it does good for the community; it humanizes us and brings us all together.”
“The City Council’s strategic goal wasn’t necessarily, ‘We need to bring as many people as possible to this channel,’” Kaufman says. “But it went from this experiment to a kind of archive that expanded into something that was proof of what we could do.”
