Getting actionable compensation data into the hands of nonprofit leaders.
The people who carry the nonprofit sector are too often underpaid because good compensation data was expensive, stale, or simply out of reach.
waterline exists to change that, putting real-time, hyper-local pay benchmarks in the hands of every mission-driven organization.
What we believe
Compensation is where a nonprofit's values meet its budget. When pay lags the market, organizations lose the people they depend on, and the gap falls hardest on the roles already closest to the communities they serve.
We believe every organization, not just the ones who can afford a consultant, deserves to know where its pay stands. So we built waterline to be self-serve, affordable, and grounded in real-time data that reflects your peers.
Born from a survey, built for the whole sector
waterline began inside Studio Watershed, a Chicago social-impact studio, where our team ran an annual nonprofit compensation survey that local leaders came to rely on for setting fair, defensible pay.
That survey proved something simple: nonprofits will share honest data when it comes back to them as something useful. waterline takes that idea live, turning a once-a-year PDF into a self-serve platform that any organization can use, with data that updates continuously.
waterline is now its own company. Studio Watershed remains a partner and champion of the work.
The people behind waterline
Amy Kaufman
Amy Kaufman is the financial activist behind Studio Watershed. With the heart of a revolutionary and the mind of a pragmatist, she has spent over twenty years in the social sector blending strategy, finance, and data to drive results for impact-focused organizations. She also leads an impact investment collective for women and serves as a committed board member and volunteer across Chicago's nonprofit community.
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Bryn Murray
Bryn brings over two decades of experience working in and with the social sector. Her specialty is turning data into products that work: productionizing machine learning models, building analytics infrastructure, and helping teams make better decisions with data. At waterline, she leads engineering, analytics, and the data pipeline that powers the product's intelligence.
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