A nonprofit receives a lot of grants, many of which are renewals of previous grants...

Managing the "Grant Seeking" lifecycle in NPSP involves tracking multi-year relationships with funders. To provide the "easy access" to history that the nonprofit requires, NPSP provides specific, standard fields on the Opportunity object designed for this exact scenario.

The NPSP Standard Solution:

Previous Grant/Gift Opportunity: This is a standard NPSP lookup field on the Opportunity. When a consultant creates a renewal grant, they should populate this field with the Original Grant record. This creates a direct "link" or "chain" between the two records, allowing a user to click from the current grant back to the previous one instantly.

Is Grant Renewal: This is a checkbox field. Checking this box allows the nonprofit to run reports specifically on "Renewed Revenue" vs. "New Revenue," which is a key metric for many development directors.

Data Integrity: Using a lookup field (Option C) is superior to naming conventions (Option B) because naming is prone to typos and does not provide a clickable link. It is also superior to Campaigns (Option A) because a campaign shows a "pool" of gifts but doesn't specifically define the chronological "Renewal" relationship between two specific grants.

By utilizing these standard NPSP fields, the consultant ensures that the nonprofit can see the "Evolution of a Grant" over time, making it easy to reference past project descriptions, budgets, and reporting requirements from the previous funding cycle.