For new professionals looking to start communications careers, early experience goes a long way.
When he was 13, Jon Zaghloul started the podcast “Sports Talk Chicago” from his bedroom in Aurora, Ill., near Chicago. Later, as an economics major and aspiring sportscaster at the University of Chicago, he produced the podcast from his dorm room and covered college sporting events for the campus radio station.
Now 26, Zaghloul is director of communications for the city of Aurora.
Those formative experiences “taught me so much about the communications landscape,” Zaghloul said during the Aug. 26 episode of Strategies & Tactics Live, PRSA’s monthly livestream series on LinkedIn.
Producing the podcast — and booking baseball legends such as Roger Clemens, Fergie Jenkins and Ozzie Smith — taught Zaghloul “how to write a press release and get coverage in legitimate news outlets about something that a guest of mine would say on the program.”
That early communications experience prepared Zaghloul to write press releases for the city and “get the coverage that we get here all the time.”
Writing came naturally for him, but “public speaking took a lot for me to learn,” he said. “At 13 or 14 years old, my first podcasts were awful.”
Zaghloul worked to improve his speaking skills, and the podcast eventually expanded to radio, TV and YouTube.
John Elsasser, editor-in-chief of PRSA’s Strategies & Tactics publication and host of S&T Live, asked Zaghloul about his quick rise from communications coordinator to director of communications for the city of Aurora.
The city was overhauling its municipal website, “and I was tasked with finishing the job,” Zaghloul said. “Initially, the expectations were rather low.”
Along the way, however, people started to notice his speaking and writing skills, his knack for hooking readers and his ability to generate media coverage.
“Fortunately, two of my superiors at that time believed in me and continued to give me more and more opportunities,” Zaghloul said.
Listening to residents in government communications
To overhaul the city’s website and make it useful to the public, “We solicited feedback from the residents,” Zaghloul said. People in the community were shown a mock website design and asked how they would like its navigation features to work.
“The residents were involved the entire time,” he said.
A survey asked residents questions about how they preferred to receive information, including: “How do you feel about [the city’s] communications today? What could we improve upon? Which outlets do you want to see us use? Which outlets do you not want to see us use?”
The communications team used that feedback to guide the redesign.
Many people in Aurora were using the neighborhood-based social media platform Nextdoor, “so we made an agency account on Nextdoor, which led to significant viewership and a whole new audience that we didn’t have before,” Zaghloul said. “We try to find different ways to engage our residents and to be creative in our approach.”
Residents also rely on the city’s Facebook page and a weekly digital newsletter that is emailed and texted directly to them.
“The goal is to meet residents where they are,” Zaghloul said.
Reflecting on his start as a teenage podcaster, Zaghloul said, “All those years of prepping, all those years of working to refine my skill set, put me in the position that I’m in today.”
Here, Zaghloul takes part in the S&T Live Lightning Round…
