About Watershed / Who We Are

An experienced online fundraising, advocacy, and marketing consultant, speaker, and author, Madeline has led internet strategies for many organizations, including Planned Parenthood Federation of America, CREDO, The Nation, Ocean Conservancy, Amnesty International USA, the Campaign to Defend the Constitution, Earthjustice, Human Rights Campaign, the Humane Society of the United States, ACORN, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and CARE.

Until mid-2006 Madeline was the President and Creative Director of Donordigital, a full-service online agency which helps nonprofit organizations, campaigns, and socially responsible businesses use the Internet to build their constituencies and achieve their goals.

Madeline is a frequent speaker and writer in fundraising, advocacy, and technology conferences and publications across the country. She is a trainer and adviser to the New Organizing Institute, and co-convenes Web of Change, an international annual gathering that connects global leaders in online communications, technology, and activism who are actively building a better world. She is the author of The Mercifully Brief, Real World Guide to Raising Thousands (If Not Tens of Thousands) of Dollars with E-mail, published by Emerson and Church. You can get your copy here.

Madeline has been raising money, organizing, and communicating for organizations and causes for 20 years, not counting her second-grade campaign for George McGovern. She served as director of individual giving at Health Access, a statewide health advocacy organization in California, and as Public Information Officer for the Alameda County Health Department (Berkeley, Oakland). Madeline was the executive director of Access to Software for All People (ASAP), a youth-run Web development business run as a non-profit social enterprise.

Madeline holds a Masters of Social Work from San Francisco State University. She lives in Berkeley with her husband, Scott Connolly, and two rescued greyhounds, Daisy and Scout. Together, they run a pretty fun and funky inn at the end of the world on Mendocino’s north coast.

After over thirteen years in the nonprofit world doing everything from health education to youth leadership development to dealing with dead servers and clogged sinks, he is quite happy to manage offices and do things with numbers.  He is also especially fond of binder clips and tiny post-its. 

Outside the wild world o’ work, Todd lives with a ferocious orange cat Loki.  He also writes science fiction, agonizes over his apartment’s motif, and rides his bike.  Yes, it has gears.  Yes, it has brakes.  And yes, he wears a helmet.  He’s hardcore like that. 

Originally from West-By-God-Virginia, Todd attended the state’s best university (take that, Wesleyan) before moving north to Massachusetts.  It turned out, however, that Todd did not care for living in a state with a name that was so hard to spell, so he moved to California a decade ago.  His mother is still upset about this, and no, she will not learn to live with it.  He has promised his aforementioned mother to return for retirement, but she is still not happy. 

Heather is a Senior Account Executive who arrived at Watershed after supervising projects on civil liberties and technology for the Consumer Federation of California. She’s since worked with a slew of kickass groups at Watershed, including CREDO Action, The Nation, Union of Concerned Scientists and The Humane Society of the United States.

She graduated magna cum laude with a degree in Global Studies from UC Santa Barbara, where she plugged into the community media scene as Associate News Director for KCSB-FM. Progressive politics are in her genes, but her path to the world of fundraising and advocacy was solidified by an eye-opening semester in DC behind enemy lines, being goaded (unsuccessfully) by Koch brother darlings CATO and the Heritage Foundation to stop worrying and love the free market.

Heather is a cellist, cyclist, occasional yoga-practitioner and backpacker, and she likes to write when she’s not at work too—sometimes for blogs and magazines like Feministing and BUST. She’s Watershed’s canary in a coal mine, which might explain why she sometimes has an uncontrollable urge to shout at the sight of birds and other wildlife in the Financial District.

Mark, Watershed’s Research & Data Director (and resident rabid member of the notorious Oakland A’s fan base), grew up as an Air Force brat, splitting time between Nebraska, Virginia, and Florida. After receiving his Bachelor’s degree in Sociology at a sleepy state college on the banks of the Rappahannock River, he traveled through Europe, Africa, Asia, and Central America, rooting for the Baltimore Orioles all the way.

Long before coming to Watershed, Mark had tours of duty with various nonprofits and healthcare organizations including the California HealthCare Foundation, Kaiser Permanente, the Center for Applied Local Research, and Access to Software for All People, where he managed the data business (with Madeline no less!). He recently earned a Certificate in Non-Profit Management at a sleepy continuing education school on the banks of the San Francisco Bay.

Mark is a jack of all sports and master of none, regularly playing in casual leagues of all types, including soccer, softball, basketball, and baseball. Let him know what games you play, especially if it’s one he’s hoping to branch into – like rugby or lacrosse, (where constantly running into other people isn’t frowned upon.)

The year was 2009, the location was the thriving metropolis of San Francisco. And on that cold November day, out from the depths of the city emerged a web developer. He would be the one chosen… to become the Production Manager at Watershed. He helps clients by building campaign websites and sitelets, and by forcing arcane CMS systems to display clean, clear designs that please client and donor alike.

A native of California, Tom graduated from Cal State East Bay (formerly Cal State Hayward) in 2006, majoring in Computer Science, and minoring in Multimedia and Electronic Art. Surprisingly, some of his education actually turned out to be useful for his career, and in some of his spare time, he can be found looking up the latest web design tips and trends, and learning the best ways to create pages that display exactly the same across browsers and platforms.

When he’s not doing that, he can generally be found somewhere in about a three hour driving radius of San Francisco, with his camera. Prone to take more than a hundred pictures in just a single afternoon, Tom estimates that he has taken more than 40,000 photographs since he got his first digital camera in 1997. He refuses to estimate what percentage were blurry.

When Katie made up her own major at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, she had no idea that her degree in branding and communications would lead her on a crusade for youth development through arts education and culture study. Nonetheless, she has spent the last five years or so working with a variety of non-profit organizations sharing this common pillar. Working as a graphic designer, project coordinator, office manager, camp counselor, set designer, and more, Katie has mastered the art of random skills, and is always looking to collect more.

Originally from Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, Katie has see-sawed between open space and cities, at some point realizing that certain places have both, which is why she’s more than a little obsessed with the Bay Area.  When she isn’t doing important things in the office, she enjoys planning fun things to do, and then, of course, doing those fun things. She also has an impressive assortment of bizarre, but non-threatening allergies. 

Brian joined the Watershed team in 2007, after working as Communications and Online Director with the League of Young (formerly the League of Pissed Off) Voters in Portland, Maine. He has helped his clients raise millions of dollars and engage millions of supporters since then, all while developing deep partnerships with the clients he works with day in and day out. 

Brian holds a degree in Environmental Sciences from Northern Arizona University and while working as a fisheries biologist in Northern California, decided he wanted to swim upstream for change alongside humans, not salmonids.  He earned his Masters in Environmental Advocacy and Organizing from Antioch University New England,where he also TA’d two classes—in Nonprofit Leadership and Globalization & Democracy.

When not working, Brian is most likely on his road bike – either on his 24-mile commute home across the Golden Gate Bridge, or on the scenic roads of West Marin on the weekends.  Being a fundraiser, of course he tracks this too: his goal is to log 3,600 miles by year’s end – and his stretch goal is an even 4,000. 

Account Director Nzinga Koné-Miller is a veteran project manager and strategist with a nonprofit and commercial technology, political, and communications background. She has thirteen years experience managing web development projects and over nine years experience working with nonprofits in the technology sector. She has been hiring and managing project and account teams for over seven years.

Prior to joining Watershed, Nzinga was a member of the project management team at the groundbreaking nonprofit consulting and technology firm Carol/Trevelyan Strategy Group (CTSG). She has managed digital implementation projects and developed acquisition, fundraising and advocacy strategies for a variety of organizations, including Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California, AFL-CIO affiliate Working America, the Breast Cancer Fund, Simon Wiesenthal Center, Congresswoman Ellen Tauscher and The Nation magazine. She is a regular contributor to the Grassroots Fundraising Journal.

Nzinga was raised on the quintessential 1970s California vegetarian fare of nuts, twigs and tamari-seasoned tofu, and now has a passion for food lit, cooking blogs, and an interest in food politics. She received her BA in History and Studio Art from Williams College.

Fran came to Watershed with 5 years of online fundraising and advocacy experience--working with clients that are changing the world including The Humane Society of the United States, Habitat for Humanity International, AmeriCares, Earth Justice and The UN Foundation.Before diving into the world wide web, she worked to improve health care’s response to intimate partner violence through education and public policy development as Program Specialist at Futures Without Violence.

Fran is shamelessly in love with San Francisco--especially the Mission district where taquerias, parklets, coffee shops, bakeries, and gourmet ice cream parlors abound. She’s also a fan of keeping public services properly funded and accessible: education, libraries, art, transportation and radio. In her spare time, she thinks a lot about the politics of food and how it’s marketed to children.  She also spends way too much time creating cute vegetarian bento box lunches for her kindergartener.

Fran received her BA in Community Studies with a minor in Sociology from UC Santa Cruz and her MSW from San Francisco State.

After a serendipitous route that included work in overseas cultural exchange, organizing media education conferences, and curating events for one of San Francisco’s best bookstores ever—the worker-run Modern Times—Brenda landed in the world of Web development. Partly she wanted to be paid more than a bookstore wage, but mostly she looked around at the nonprofit and progressive community she worked in and saw a need for some solid Web skills. Now she’s at Watershed doing just what she wanted—helping great causes get their message out.

Brenda received her degree in comparative literature from the University of California at San Diego. When not coding, she spends her free time reading, making things up in Spanish, and screening documentaries for a local film festival. She loves the outdoors and would probably live in a tent if she could. She can often be found backpacking, kayaking, boogie boarding, or cross-country skiing. A Bay Area local, she inherited a love of travel from her immigrant parents and is a strong believer in life-outside-the-USA. She has lived in Australia and also in Mexico (where people knew when she was making up Spanish).

Kathryn came to Watershed with a background in online marketing, copywriting, data analysis and project management. In her time with the ‘Shed, she’s helped develop effective and exciting campaigns for amazing clients like the Smithsonian Institution, Ocean Conservancy, Children’s National Medical Center, Trout Unlimited and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Before Watershed, Kathryn developed online marketing communications for both non-profits and corporations. She also taught composition and literature at the college level. She has a B.A. in Philosophy and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the School of the Art Institute.  Her poems have been featured in various online and print journals, like Diagram, Juked, Opium and Word Riot. An animated trailer for her chapbook, “I Am in the Air Right now” was featured in the New York Times and Poets & Writers magazine. 

Will has been helping progressive nonprofits develop and implement online advocacy and fundraising campaigns since 2005. He spent three years at Donordigital handling everything from drafting copy to designing landing pages, crunching numbers to creating strategy. Along the way, Will was lucky enough to work with great organizations like The Humane Society of the United States, Human Rights Campaign, and the Campaign to Defend the Constitution.

Will embraced the world of nonprofit fundraising after a brief stint at a title company threatened to turn him into Bartleby the Scrivener. Before that, he majored in English with a Creative Writing emphasis at Stanford University, which probably explains the references to Bartleby the Scrivener.

When not being a nerd at work, Will enjoys being a nerd at home. He reads and writes comic books, indulges a serious addiction to crossword puzzles, and plays bass guitar with a spectacular lack of talent.