Three tools, 97 forms, one CRM of 222,000+ contacts. Then the conference moved in.

The situation

By 2026 the same person could exist in three places and be missing from a fourth. A HubSpot portal held 213,000 contacts. A Brevo account held 217,000 across 239 lists and 1,089 sent campaigns. Seven years of website forms on the Drupal site held speaker applications, sponsor enquiries, and member sign-ups that had never reached either. Member questions, sponsor negotiations, and speaker applications all arrived in the same handful of mailboxes, and answering "have we spoken to this company before?" meant exporting a spreadsheet.

What changed

1. Consolidate the contacts (CRM). The July 2026 import brought 124,773 new contacts into one CRM, carried every suppression across, created 5,209 deals, and deleted or overwrote nothing. The Drupal webform export added 145,494 submissions across 97 forms since 2019, enriched 89,566 existing contacts, and backfilled 67,339 LinkedIn profiles. Data-quality passes fixed locations on 140,032 records.
2. Connect the mailboxes (Shared inbox). The shared partnerships and office mailboxes connected through the organization connector without handing anyone a password, so every conversation now sits on the timeline of the person who sent it.
3. Run sponsor sales from the CRM (Campaigns). Pipelines for annual partnerships and conference sponsorship, with reactivation waves drafted from uniform templates so a whole tier can be reviewed and approved in one sitting. Nothing leaves without a person saying yes.
4. Bring the newsletters home (Campaigns). 1,088 historical Brevo campaigns were classified into series and migrated with their archive, so every edition's metrics are one query away.
5. Put the calls on the record (Appointments and meetings). A 93-mailbox sweep ingested 327 calls and 142 transcripts, so a sponsor conversation shows up on the deal it belongs to.
6. Move the conference in (Tasks and automations). The Women in Tech Global Conference board, 328 rows across 12 workstreams, moved from Monday.com into CommsOperator tasks. Ticketing, sessions, and the speaker portal stay on EventHash.
7. Answer on the website (Widgets). Chat, feedback, roadmap, and help center widgets on womentech.net.

The result

• One record per person, whichever source they came from, with the suppression rules from the old email tool enforced on every new campaign.
• The flagship newsletter series averages a 2.55 percent click rate on delivered mail and a 0.203 percent unsubscribe rate over 175 editions.
• Sponsor follow-ups draft themselves and wait for a person. Conference workstreams live next to the conversations that cause them.
• The team stopped exporting spreadsheets to answer basic questions.

Still open

Two things are not solved. WhatsApp conversations went silent when the previous messaging integration was retired, and WhatsApp is not a supported channel today. Provider spam-complaint feedback loops are not wired yet, so a complaint does not suppress a contact the way a hard bounce does.