What's really going on

You have up to 50 conversations a month across four channels, and three people touching them. That's the exact size where things slip — a sponsor emails Ana, follows up with Luis on LinkedIn, and nobody knows the last thing said. Your problem isn't outreach capacity. It's shared memory. One place where every sponsor, grant officer, and workshop lead lives, with the last touch and the next step visible to all three of you.

What to do instead

1. Airtable (free, paid ~$20/user/mo) — one base with a "Conversations" table: contact, channel, stage (new / talking / proposal / won / cold), owner, last touch, next step. Add a web form that dumps straight into it, replacing your current form.
2. Make (free tier) — one scenario: new LinkedIn or email reply → row updated in Airtable → Slack ping to the owner. That's the follow-up habit, automated.
3. Habit: a 15-minute Monday standup on the Airtable view filtered to "no touch in 10+ days." Three people, one screen, decide who nudges whom.

Do this today: open Airtable, copy their "Sales CRM" template, rename the pipeline stages to match how a sponsor deal actually moves for you (pitch sent → deck reviewed → rate card → signed).

What you're being oversold

Anyone pitching you Outreach, Salesloft, or Apollo is selling a cold-outbound machine built for 20-person sales teams. You are three people working warm referrals and inbound — that stack would cost more than a staffer and sit unused. Freshsales and other "real" CRMs are also overkill at this volume; you'd spend a month configuring pipelines you don't need yet. The cost of doing nothing is qualitative but real: one forgotten sponsor renewal or grant deadline a quarter is more than the tool will ever cost you.

When to revisit this

When a fourth person joins, or when any single revenue line (sponsorships, grants, workshops) needs its own pipeline with different stages — that's when Airtable starts to strain.

The part worth getting right

The one call: do sponsorships, grants, and workshops share a pipeline, or need three? If the stages roughly rhyme — pitch, review, proposal, close — one base with a "type" field works and you're set up in an afternoon. If a grant actually moves through LOI → full application → review panel → award, forcing it into a sponsor pipeline will quietly rot the whole system in three months. Get this fork wrong and you'll rebuild in the fall.