Why

You've listed four distinct workflows: event planning (project management), donor info (actual CRM), volunteer hours (time tracking), and volunteer tasks + employee coordination (task management). Buying a "nonprofit CRM" like Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud will solve donor records and make the other three worse. Google Drive spreadsheets aren't the problem — the problem is that nobody has decided which of those four jobs is the bleeding one.

What you actually need

1. Airtable (free up to 1,000 records, then $20/user/mo; nonprofit discount available) — one base, four linked tables: Donors, Events, Volunteers, Tasks. Linked records mean a volunteer's hours roll up to the event they worked.
2. Trello or Google Tasks (free) — for the volunteer-and-employee task coordination piece specifically. Spreadsheets are terrible at "whose turn is it." Kanban isn't.
3. A habit — the weekly 20-minute sync — one volunteer lead and one employee, every week, walk through upcoming events and open tasks. Without this, no tool survives month two in a volunteer org.

Do this today

Go to airtable.com, sign up free, and use the "Nonprofit" or "Event Planning" template as your starting base. Rename the tables to Donors / Events / Volunteers / Tasks, then import ONE of your existing Google Sheets (start with the donor list) via Add → CSV import. By end of day you'll see whether linked records solve your coordination problem before you spend any money or onboard anyone else.

What to ignore

Skip Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud (free 10 licenses, but the implementation cost is brutal and it's overkill for volunteer task coordination), Bloomerang (~$99/mo, donor-only), and Bonterra/EveryAction sales pitches — all built for nonprofits 10x your apparent size. Anyone telling a volunteer team they need a dedicated donor CRM before they've solved "who's bringing the folding chairs" is selling, not advising.

What doing nothing costs you

With a volunteer team, the cost isn't dollars — it's volunteers quietly disengaging because their hours don't get logged, their tasks get duplicated, and the same three people end up doing everything. That's the compounding loss: burnout, not lost revenue.

Where this leaves you

You've got a diagnosis: four jobs, not one. The plan sequences which to fix first (task coordination before donor CRM, because tasks are what's actively breaking), names who owns each table in Airtable (a volunteer lead per table, not "the team"), and defines the signal that proves it worked — a new volunteer can find their next task without asking anyone.

When to revisit this

When your donor list crosses 500 names or you start running grant-funded programs that require formal donor reporting — then a real donor CRM (Bloomerang, Little Green Light) earns its keep.