A new grant cycle opens and the tracker gets overwritten. Awarded 2025 becomes Applying 2026, and the history is gone. Cherry Yang, founder of Claribase, demoed a grant tracker live in Airtable for roughly 250 nonprofit builders and showed the structural fix, which is a separate Grant Years table that keeps every cycle intact. Below is the six-table structure behind that build, the AI fields that cut down funder research, and the single automation that stops report deadlines slipping.
The clip below is a short excerpt from that session. The full recording and the template are linked below:
- Recording: https://airtable.wistia.com/s/vqi61y623uz5sa4
- Template to copy: https://airtable.com/app8FVjcKLimBe4HK/shrVYhVtMF3PrBt9C
Webinar Overview
Cherry Yang, founder of Claribase, ran the session with the Airtable Nonprofit Builder Crew on July 30, 2026. Roughly 250 people attended. She walked through a grant tracker she had already built in Airtable, then built a report-deadline automation live during the session.
The grant tracker sits on six connected tables: Funders, Grants, Grant Years, Programs, Transactions, and Reports. Funders holds the organization giving the money. Grants holds the named grant and does not change year to year. Grant Years holds each individual cycle, with its own status, amount, and reporting obligations.
Every grant in the tracker moves through five stages: researching, applied, awarded, reporting, and renewal. Renewal gets its own stage, with a date and an owner attached, so a grant does not quietly lapse once the final report is filed.
She also demonstrated AI research fields against live funder websites. A team pastes funder URLs into rows and the AI field returns eligibility rules, deadlines, and application steps as structured data rather than a block of notes. A person reviews every result before an application goes out.
Interfaces control who sees what, and she recommended keeping sensitive figures like salary allocations in a separate interface or a synced base, open to only a few people, while the grant pipeline stays visible to the whole team.
Key Takeaways
A grant tracker only holds up over time if each funding cycle has its own record:
- Keep Grants and Grant Years as separate tables.
- Grants holds the named grant, Grant Years holds each cycle with its own status, amount, and reports, so past funding history survives a new application.
- Give renewal its own stage with a date and an owner.
- Reporting and renewal are different jobs, and grants lapse in the gap between them.
- Use AI fields for funder research, not funder decisions. Reading eligibility rules off 30 websites is a research task. Choosing which 10 to apply for is not.
- Build one deadline automation before building ten. A report due today with a status other than submitted should email its assignee, and that single rule removes most deadline chasing.
- Use interfaces to restrict sensitive figures. Salary allocations tied to a grant do not need to be visible to everyone who can see the grant pipeline.
FAQ
Three moments from the session did the most work. Each is a structural decision rather than a feature.
1. Why Grant Years Is a Separate Table
Cherry Yang named overwriting as the most common structural mistake in nonprofit grant tracking. A team lands a grant, records it, and then next January reopens the same row and changes the status from Awarded 2025 to Applying 2026. The amount gets replaced. The reports attached to the old cycle lose their context.
The fix is one more table. Grants holds the named grant and the funder relationship, and nothing in it changes from year to year. Grant Years holds each cycle as its own record, carrying the status, the amount awarded, the reporting obligations, and the dates that belong to that year alone.
Three years in, that structure answers a question a flat tracker cannot. Which funders have supported this organization most, and which ones quietly stopped renewing. That is the reporting a board asks for, and a spreadsheet rebuilt every January cannot produce it.
2. AI Fields for Funder Research
Cherry Yang demonstrated AI research fields against real funder websites during the session. A row holds a funder URL. The AI field reads the page and writes back eligibility rules, application deadlines, and the steps required to apply, as structured fields rather than a note somebody has to reread later.
The practical version is a batch. Thirty grant URLs go into thirty rows. The field runs across all of them, and a shortlist of the strongest 10 comes back in roughly 30 minutes instead of a day of tab switching.
She was direct about the limit. The AI field does the reading and a person does the deciding. Nothing gets applied for on the strength of an AI summary alone, because eligibility language is exactly the kind of thing a model will confidently get slightly wrong.
3. One Automation for Report Deadlines
The deadline automation Cherry Yang built live has three parts and nothing more. A report record has a due date of today. Its status is something other than submitted. Airtable emails the assignee.
That is the whole rule. Nobody is scanning a shared inbox for reporting deadlines, and nobody is relying on a calendar invite set eleven months earlier when the grant was awarded.
Cherry framed it as the automation to build first, ahead of dashboards and anything more elaborate. A funder who does not receive a report on time is a funder less likely to renew, so one rule covering the highest-cost failure is worth more than ten rules covering everything.
FAQ
Can Airtable replace a dedicated grant management system?
Airtable can handle grant tracking for most small and mid-sized nonprofits, covering funders, applications, awards, reporting, and renewals in one connected base. Cherry Yang demoed that full structure in a live session in July 2026. Larger organizations with heavy compliance requirements sometimes still need a purpose-built system, so the answer depends on reporting obligations.
How do you track multiple years of the same grant in Airtable?
Split the record across two tables. A Grants table holds the named grant and the funder, and a Grant Years table holds one record per cycle with its own status, amount, and reports. Cherry Yang recommends this because overwriting a single row destroys the funding history a board later asks for.
Is it safe to use AI fields in Airtable for grant research?
AI fields work well for reading funder websites and pulling eligibility rules, deadlines, and application steps into structured fields. Cherry Yang treats that output as research rather than a decision. A person reviews every shortlist before an application goes out, because eligibility wording is easy for a model to summarize inaccurately.
What should a nonprofit automate first in a grant tracker?
Start with report deadlines. One automation checks for a report due today with a status other than submitted, then emails the assignee. Cherry Yang builds this before dashboards, because a late report is the failure most likely to cost an organization its renewal.
Tools and Resources
- Airtable for nonprofits: How Claribase builds donation, grant, volunteer, and program systems for nonprofit teams.
- Grant management webinar recap: The Airtable Nonprofits community thread holding the full session recording and the template.
- Airtable Academy: Free courses on interfaces, AI field agents, and Omni, which are the three features this build leans on most.
- Build your fundraising base in Airtable: The earlier session covering the underlying architecture the grant tracker sits on.
Next Steps
The clip from the session sits at the top of this post, and the full recording plus the template are in the Airtable Nonprofits community thread linked above. For a team already running grants out of a spreadsheet, splitting Grants from Grant Years is the change worth trying first. If it would help to talk through how that maps to your own funders and reporting calendar, you can book a call with Claribase or learn more about how we can help on our nonprofit service page.
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Want to learn more even about Airtable? Claribase has just released its very own Airtable course, Airtable Mastery! This course is brought to you by award-winning Airtable instructors who will walk you through every step of the way.
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