Are you spending any time at the beach this summer? Whether you’re so lucky or not, I hope you’ll enjoy these three beach-related analogies to help you keep your nonprofit communications practices on track.

1. Think long term.

Beachgoers in their 20s and 30s who spend hours in the sun working on their tan are not thinking about what their skin will look like when they’re 50 (much less about melanoma).

Smaller nonprofits that pour all of their resources into programs and none into governance and development are not thinking about what will happen to their programs if they have no infrastructure or funding.

Sit under an umbrella. Do only as much programming as you can manage while building your board, managing staff growth (if any), and developing a sustainable funding plan.

2. Listen.

I will never understand people who bring their music to the beach. The ocean has its own music. When folks around me start blasting their tunes, that’s when I move on.

You can bring your own “tunes” to the job of nonprofit communications, or you can listen to the music that’s already there: the voices of your donors, funders, volunteers, clients or patrons, and other stakeholders.

Listen first. Then speak, but speak in such a way that you’re joining the conversation already in process.

If you want to be heard,  speak to your constituents’ needs and wants. Make sure your music is in rhythm with the ebb and flow of the surf.

3. Make waves. (Little ones.)

Except during the rare hurricane, the gentle swells that come rolling into the Jersey Shore barely qualify as waves. My friend whose previous experience of ocean surf was in Hawai’i took her first look at the Atlantic Ocean and said, “But where are the waves?”

But still. Look at all that sand. How did it get to be sand rather than rocks? Waves, that’s how. Little bitty waves, hundreds of thousands of them every day, turning rocks into sand over centuries and millennia.

No matter what your nonprofit does – feeding hungry families, educating low-income children, advocating for LGBT rights, whatever – the problem is bigger than you are. You can keep doing what you’re doing, scaling up at the rate you’re scaling up now, from now to forever, and the problem will still be here.

But never you mind. Keep on making your little waves.

Yes, there will still be rocks.

But just look at all that sand.