What's really going on

You came home with 10–50 warm inquiries from one room. Each org has people. Each person has projects. That's a three-layer structure: company → contacts → deals. A flat sheet flattens it and you lose track of who said what about which project. You're not drowning in volume — you're drowning in branches. One missed reply to a $20K+ nonprofit project is the real cost, not the admin time.

What to do instead

1. HubSpot Free CRM (free, unlimited users) — use the Companies → Contacts → Deals objects. One nonprofit = one company, every person = a linked contact, every project = its own deal. Gmail/Outlook plug-in logs every email to the right contact automatically.
2. Folk (paid per seat — check pricing) — only if HubSpot feels too sales-y. It's built for relationship pipelines, which is closer to how nonprofit referral work actually flows.
3. A weekly 20-minute review habit. Every Monday, open the deal list, move stages, send the one follow-up nobody else will send.

First action, today, 30 minutes: open HubSpot Free, import your conference contacts as a CSV, create one company per nonprofit, then create a deal named "[Org] – [Project topic]" for every project anyone mentioned out loud. Even the maybes.

What you're being oversold

Anyone pushing you toward HubSpot Sales Hub paid, Pipedrive at ~$14–15/user/month, or Salesforce is selling you a sales team's tool. You're one person with referral leads — the free tier covers you for years. Doing nothing for another month is the real risk: a single forgotten reply on a high-ticket nonprofit video is worth more than every CRM here costs in a year.

When to revisit this

When you bring on a second person who also talks to clients, or when your active deal count crosses ~80 at once.

The part worth getting right

Decide what a "deal" actually is for you before you import anything. If your projects are mostly concurrent right now — three live opportunities inside one nonprofit this quarter — each project is its own deal and you optimize for pipeline stages. If they're sequential over years — same contact, one project now, another in 18 months — the contact is the asset and you optimize for long-term nurture, not stages. Pick wrong and in six months you're either re-importing everything or staring at a graveyard of stale deals that were never deals. Your conference list almost certainly has both kinds mixed in. Which shape dominates yours?