About Watershed / Who We Are

An experienced online fundraising, advocacy, and marketing consultant, speaker, and author, 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.

At Donordigital, Madeline led internet strategies for many organizations, including Amnesty International USA, the Campaign to Defend the Constitution, Earthjustice, Human Rights Campaign, the Humane Society of the United States, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and CARE.

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 Ajax. Together, they run a pretty crazy, open to the public, haunted house every other year.

Contact Madeline here.

Watershed’s Executive Vice President Jenn Smith previously served as Vice President of Donordigital and led the strategic work and campaign development for organizations such as UNHCR, CARE, The Humane Society of the United States, Girl Scouts of the United States and The Human Rights Campaign. Jenn’s reputation has been built around delivering top-notch client service, thoughtful and effective strategy, and spectacular results for her clients and their programs.

Prior to her work in the world of online fundraising and advocacy, Jenn spent over 9 years in the non-profit sector where she worked in both public policy and program development, and led membership and individual giving programs. Her intimate knowledge of the challenges and opportunities facing non-profits is key to her ability to understand her clients’ needs and help them achieve their goals online. When she’s not staying awake at night planning the next big campaign (sadly, this is true) she’s cooking up a storm, making homemade sourdough bread, and drooling over beautiful produce at her local farmer’s market. (Yes – she’s yet another Watershed foodie). Her dream client would be an organization working on building local and sustainable food communities – is that you? E-mail Jenn here if you are interested in working with us!

Lauren joins Watershed after working as a Campaign Manager at Care2.com, where she helped organizations like NARAL Pro-Choice America, Consumers Union, and Save Darfur achieve their list-building and advocacy goals through effective e-communications. She graduated cum laude from the University of Massachusetts as a Communication major, with an emphasis on women’s representation in visual culture.

In her spare time, Lauren can be found ogling other people’s dogs (someday she’ll get her own), swimming/biking/running (but don’t call her a triathlete), traveling (Southeast Asia is next on her list), and mulling over her weekly supplement of the New Yorker. Lauren embraces her nerdiness through a mild obsession with memorizing useless vocabulary words (courtesy of her ELECTRONIC dictionary) and riding her bright blue bike with a leopard-print seat to work.

Since the dark ages of online direct response - the era before Howard Dean’s bat and MoveOn’s anti-war campaign - Rachel has been raising dollars and awareness for non-profits online. For over five years Rachel worked with Donordigital, a premier online direct response firm. As Associate Creative Director for Donordigital she helped craft online campaigns for clients such as: Earthjustice, NARAL Pro-Choice America, Human Rights Campaign, Amnesty International, CARE International, and many more. She is most proud that both the FDA and Wal-mart have cited the thousands of activist emails she’s helped generate as reasons for changing their bogus policies. Since Rachel joined the team at Watershed as Creative Consultant, she is helping the excellent team here to plan and execute creative new ways to help people make a difference online. In the hours she that is not proudly representing Watershed as its lone East Coast staffer, Rachel is getting her MFA degree in Illustration at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

Heather is an Account Executive who arrived at Watershed after supervising projects on civil liberties and technology with the Consumer Federation of California. 

She took a *marginally* existential whirlwind tour of Andalucia, Morocco, Argentina, and Chile after graduating magna cum laude in Global Studies from UC Santa Barbara. She heeded the progressive call to action following a semester in DC living next to the Heritage Foundation and learning to stop worrying and love the free market (true story). She caught the reporter bug as a Free Speech Radio News capital correspondent, and upon returning to California she plugged into the local indy media scene as Associate News Director with KCSB-FM. 

Heather is a cellist, diarist, foodie, and stand-up/improv comedy aficionado. Until recently, she called lovely (but foggy) Half Moon Bay home, and she now shares a quintessentially San Francisco Victorian in Bernal Heights with a merry band of do-gooders. 

Ellen comes to Watershed from the world of freelance graphic design and publications consulting for mostly smaller, local non-profit organizations, a business she started shortly after graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford University in 2004 with a bachelor of arts in English. In early April 2007, Ellen opened her own fifties-era diner in the middle of Watershed’s offices, serving up project & administrative assistance, and more recently assorted flavors of account executiveness (and the occasional daily special).

When she’s not at work, Ellen writes poetry, attends women’s college basketball games and rugby matches, runs a pen pal program for youth with LGBT parents, and plots various means to save humanity from eminent self-destruction. She lives with her partner, the ghost of Susan B. Anthony, and a very fat cat with a very short tail in a charmingly crooked 1860s Victorian atop Liberty Hill, overlooking the twinkling lights of San Francisco.

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.)

Mark is an Account Coordinator at Watershed. Oven-fresh from the campaign organizing side of politics, Mark has worked for Democratic candidates and progressive issue campaigns since 2003. As a student activist at Ohio University in Athens, Mark was president of the College Democrats in 2005; the same year, he founded the statewide federation of Ohio College Democrats, becoming the president of that organization in 2006. In 2007, Mark was voted the “Coolest Person in Athens County” by readers of the Athens News; his newfound celebrity was overwhelming, so he ran away to join Watershed and live in peaceful obscurity of the wild west.

Like the first airplane, Mark was born in Dayton, Ohio.  He has a Bachelor of Art in Creative Writing from Ohio University, and he is a proud graduate of the New Organizing Institute. For recreation, Mark can be found playing disc golf, traveling, and listening to his two favorite bands: Jet Set Youth and Daddy’s Gonna Kill Ralphie. Thanks to constant mind-blowing innovations on the Internet, Mark becomes regularly convinced that he is living in the future, which he enjoys.

Brian joins the Watershed team after working as communications and online director with the League of Young (formerly the League of Pissed Off) Voters in Portland, Maine. Before using the web to make young people political players with the League, Brian did everything he could to make those “peace through music” bumper stickers ring true: in 2003 he helped the band Phish launch a national voter registration drive and continued arts-based activism with HeadCount through 2004. 

Brian holds a degree in Environmental Sciences from Northern Arizona University and while working as a fisheries biologist in Northern California, he decided he wanted to swim upstream for change alongside humans, not salmonids (nor Phishheads). 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 enjoys capturing the pedestrian with photos and essays (and photo essays). He also likes riding bikes and hiking, making bad jokes good and the Boston Red Sox.

Nzinga is an Account Director at Watershed. She initially stumbled into the wonderful world of the Web after graduating from Williams College with a double major in Studio Art and History. A veteran of the Bay Area dot com boom and crash, she has honed her expertise via eight years of hands-on internet, software, and strategy experience working with a variety of nonprofits and companies ranging from startup to corporate giant. Raised on the quintessential 1970s California vegetarian fare of nuts, twigs and tamari-seasoned tofu, she now has a predilection for meat-free haute cuisine and an interest in food politics. She spends an inordinate amount of time eating, and when she is not eating, she tends to think, speak, write, and read about food. Send your restaurant and recipe recommendations to her.

Frances, New Yawkuh by birth, Californian at heart, made her way to the Bay Area and Watershed via a very circuitous route indeed.  She earned her BA in Women’s Studies and Sociology in Atlanta, Georgia, forever cementing the words “feminist” and “y’all” in her vocabulary and life.  Upon graduating, Frances followed her youthful fantasy of working at Sea World all the way to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where she worked at a marine mammal interaction/therapy facility, mildly tolerating the tourists so she could live on the beach and perfect her Spanish. 

Compelled to reenter her home country and further develop her understanding of women’s human rights, she bid adiós to Mexico and accepted her very first office job at the Global Fund for Women, where she honed her knowledge of the non-profit world before joining Team Watershed.  A few of Frances’s shining accomplishments include running from Sacramento to Auburn, baking the perfect vegan cookie, and navigating the sea of confused city dwellers who believe her to be her twin sister and wonder why she doesn’t say “hi.”

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.

Leanna spent over a year as art director, production manager, and webmaster at AsianWeek in San Francisco, laying out almost the entire newspaper every week as well as helping out with the AsianWeek Foundation, writing a few headlines, and taming the flora and fauna in the fridge. Leanna also had an on-and-off 7-year tour of duty as a sign artist at two different Trader Joe’s markets.

She graduated with a BA in graphic design from the Academy of Art University (then College).  She later put in a few years at the Diablo Valley College Inquirer, racking up over a dozen design and editorial awards from the Journalism Association of Community Colleges during her tenure as editor-in-chief, news editor and photographer, among other things.

Leanna spends her spare time at the theatre, having seen a few musicals almost (or more than) as many times as years she’s been alive. She’s traveled to strange and exotic places like Salt Lake City, Pasadena, St. Louis and of course, New York City, to see various musicals, and she can give you the lowdown on nearly every seating section of the Curran Theatre.

Leanna was born and raised in a low-key, hilly, grassy area of the Bay Area and now lives in an apartment on an island.