Embrace Your Inner Mary Poppins: Five Tips for Resourceful Communications
Where do you begin when tackling a new challenge or project? Often communicators struggle with knowing where to start or overthinking our process to achieve a result.
I have found that a great communicator’s secret sauce is resourcefulness—it’s not outsmarting, outworking or over-creating, its knowing how to break something down based on what’s applicable, and always indexing that knowledge to apply it down the road when needed.
I first learned this valuable lesson growing up watching one of my favorite childhood movies, Mary Poppins. In the enchanting world of Mary Poppins, this force of nature has captivated me from an early age with her boundless creativity and seemingly endless bag of tricks. While we may not all possess a bottomless carpet bag, there's much we can learn from Mary Poppins about the power of resourcefulness—especially in how we succeed in communications. The “Mary Poppins of communicators” bag of soft skills usually includes a thirst for learning, a keen ability to know what’s under the hood, a knack for leveraging resources, being able to draw inspiration from others and a vast network to work smarter not harder. And I promise you, it makes your job more enjoyable.
“In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. You find the fun, and snap, the job’s a game”
LIFELONG LEARNING
The key to any resourceful communicator is embracing a thirst for knowledge. Whenever I start a big initiative or gain a new client, I jump at any opportunity to learn more about it before tackling the inevitable checklist. Deep research into a process or business model, scanning trade publications for industry trends, and auditing my network to pick someone’s brain that likely can help provide more context. Resourcefulness begins with embracing lifelong learning.
Much like Mary Poppins draws from her experiences to inspire those around her, communication professionals can embrace a humble mindset and thirst for learning to make better decisions. At Peritus, we believe the high-stakes issues we work on require a complete 360 degree perspective of each problem, not its symptoms, to provide strategic counsel.
KNOW WHAT’S UNDER THE HOOD
The next key to leveling up your resourcefulness is to know what to look for and where to find it. My first question is … does something or someone exist that can help me piece this together more thoughtfully? Is there a Public Relations Global Network resource that can help tackle this with more clarity, or a resource in our client files that I need to brush up on to tackle this with more strategy?
Just like Mary Poppins knew the contents of her bag inside out, mastering resourcefulness in communication begins with understanding the tools at our disposal. Whether it's diving deep into the functionalities of AI for better prompts, delving into audience insights, or just being inspired by a previous example, knowing what's under the hood empowers us to wield our resources effectively.
LEVERAGE RESOURCES
Before I write anything for our firm, I ask myself, have we written on this subject matter before? Can I pull from a stellar case study and repurpose this? Has our client or one of their competitors experienced a similar announcement or communications need?
Mary Poppins didn't conjure up her wonders out of thin air; she drew upon her past experiences to work her magic. Similarly, communicators can leverage past project case studies, onboarding files, templates or similar examples found through research to streamline processes and enhance outcomes.
DRAW INSPIRATION
I have always thrived off an opportunity to pick up the phone and tap into someone’s brain who is smarter on a topic than me, has experience with a certain circumstance, or knows how to save me time by pointing me in the right direction. In most cases, in every project I am responsible for I end up saving an ample amount of time just by starting with the end in mind and thinking through someone who can set me up for success before I go too far down a rabbit hole that won’t yield the results we need.
At Peritus PR, we encourage our specialized team to tap into the wealth of knowledge held by colleagues or FOP (friends of Peritus) with deep institutional knowledge. Like Mary Poppins found inspiration from previous nanny adventures to know how to approach the Banks family, communication professionals can level up in any area where they are not deep subject-matter experts.
WORK SMARTER: REPURPOSE TO REIMAGINE
Adaptability is the final trick in a communicator’s bag of tricks. We have to embrace shifts in strategy, even if we are spending more time on the front end to bring more value long term. Working smarter, not harder, involves strategic planning, efficient workflows and leveraging available resources to maximize productivity.
Just as Mary Poppins reminds us that a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, resourceful communicators can optimize their approaches and still breathe new life into existing content and ideas. Whether our team is adapting successful anthropology mindsets into new campaigns or remixing content across different platforms, creativity knows no bounds when fueled by resourcefulness.
OUR TAKEAWAY IS THIS
Mastering resourcefulness is essential for communication professionals to level up their value. By adopting a Mary Poppins-esque approach—where creativity, adaptability, and a knack for leveraging resources help us lead high-stakes work—we can elevate our soft skillset to achieve extraordinary results. Remember none of us know how to be “practically perfect in every way,” but we can dig deep into our own magic bag of resourcefulness to make our jobs more enriching.