Non-profit Web Presence & Strategy
Technical stewardship and digital modernization for marine conservation.
VSI's mission: foster sustainable, enriching relationships between human societies and the ecosystems that support them — addressing the ecological, cultural, economic, and sociopolitical dimensions of environmental issues.
I've been embedded with VSI since 2016 — building the systems that let that mission survive contact with manual uploads, a messy donor database, and one-off outreach campaigns. This wasn't a technology problem; it was a capacity problem. Three systems, three kinds of friction, one decade.
01 · Whale shark bulk upload — from one-by-one to one pass
Every whale shark encounter VSI logged to Sharkbook went up one at a time — a manual chore that quietly ate into hours researchers should have spent in the field. I vibe-coded scripts that batch those uploads, turning a one-by-one process into a single pass.
Hundreds of hours of research time reclaimed — and put back where it belongs: in the water, not at a keyboard.
02 · Whale shark tracking — from spreadsheet to public map
A decade of whale shark sightings sat in spreadsheets — valuable to researchers, invisible to everyone else. I built a custom WordPress plugin that turns those manual entries into a live, public-facing interactive map.
That same dataset now feeds Sharkbook — thousands of historical sightings contributed to global whale shark science.
03 · Donor infrastructure
VSI's donor systems were a patchwork of one-off campaigns sitting on legacy infrastructure that couldn't support recurring giving. Before any migration could happen, I cleaned 3,000+ donor records in Tableau Data Prep, then designed and launched the org's first tiered membership program.
Recurring revenue is the difference between a conservation program that plans ahead and one that fundraises to survive.
04 · AI-driven outreach — Gemini + Google Ads + Search Console
With a small team and no bandwidth for marketing experimentation, I integrated Gemini — via CLI and MCP — with Google Ads and Search Console, then built automated scripts that adjust ad spend and creative to real-time search trends in marine biology and ecotourism.
AI as a force multiplier for a lean team — making every dollar of ad spend work harder without losing the mission-driven voice.
