The Charity Digital Skills Report 2026: in conversation with Zoe Amar

The Charity Digital Skills Report has been running for nearly ten years now. What makes this year's findings stand out for you?

This year is very much a story of progress, but it also reveals that there's no ecosystem in place to support charities with that progress. The stats that really stood out for us are around AI adoption: 79% of charities are now using AI, and the proportion using it actively and strategically has grown from 25% last year to 38% this year.

AI is getting much more embedded in how charities work day to day, which is fantastic. At the same time, 81% of charities have made progress with digital this year, compared to 63% last year.

Given everything charities are facing with squeezed finances, rising service demand and lack of headspace, that is one heck of an achievement and it speaks to the resilience and creativity we see across the sector every day. And despite all those challenges, there's still real optimism: 63% of charities are excited about AI's potential to improve their efficiency and increase their impact.

I love that stat and think we'll see even more exciting use cases coming from the sector over the next year.

The report opens with a rallying call to funders around building digital and AI skills. Why is this such an important message for the sector right now?

We think the report makes a very clear case for it this year. Historically, we've always seen charities express a need for more digital and AI funding, but what's really worrying in this year's data is that access to that funding is going in the wrong direction. Just 17% of charities accessed funding for digital costs from grantmakers this year, down from 30% last year, and this is a year in which finances are the biggest barrier to digital progress for 63% of charities. The maths simply isn't adding up.

Training came up again and again throughout the report whenever we asked charities where they need help: it's the top funding need, with 44% of charities needing funding for training to make more digital progress. The sector has a very clear idea of what it needs and now we need funders to listen.

Only 28% of charities have a digital strategy in place, and you've been tracking this for years. Why does this gap stubbornly refuse to close?

I have two theories. First, I think this year's figure is actually a more realistic picture of where the sector really is: we had a record 807 responses this year and the sample looks even more like the overall makeup of the sector, so in some ways this is a useful sense check. But in terms of why strategy is so hard to prioritise, honestly I think a lot of it comes down to not having the resources, the capacity, the headspace or the finances to take a step back and think strategically. Charities are dealing with rising service demand and falling funding at the same time, and you need headspace to develop a strategy. You also need faith that there's a future to plan for, and that's a hard thing to hold onto right now.

It's something I hear from the charities we work with too. Charities are brilliant at long-term thinking: many have five, ten, even thirty-year strategies. That foundation is there. What they need is the funding and support to turn that into a digital strategy that works for them.

There's a really interesting gap in the data: 74% of CEOs are excited about AI's potential, compared to 60% of their staff. What do you think is driving that difference and what would you love to see leaders do about it?

We were so intrigued by this finding. Kudos to my co-author Nissa Ramsay for doing the additional analysis that unearthed it, because I think it really demonstrates how different the mindset around AI can be across an organisation. Staff are the ones who are truly on the ground with this: they know what's working, what isn't, and what they're worried about, including in many cases concerns about their own jobs. So my first piece of advice to leaders is to go and talk to your staff on a genuinely no-judgment basis. Find out how they're using AI, what use cases they've tried and what hasn't worked. The second thing is to horizon scan and understand how similar organisations are using AI: if you're a youth mental health charity, look at what other youth mental health charities are doing. Leaders need to understand both the external landscape and what's happening at grassroots level within their own organisations.

That internal communications piece is so important. Some of the charities we work with have teams quietly using AI in really impressive ways that have made a genuine difference to their work, but another team across the same organisation has no idea it's happening. Building those internal channels for sharing and learning could make a real difference to that gap.

And that shared mindset point is so key. If you're not all in the same place around AI, even broadly, it's very hard to transform, to bring people with you and to really move forward together.

One of the most surprising stats in the report is that half the sector still doesn't see digital as a critical fundraising tool, at a time when donor numbers have been falling for almost a decade. What do you think the biggest barrier is?

There are a few things going on here. Part of it is about overall digital marketing skills, where there's still room for improvement across the sector. But the other thing I find myself saying to charities again and again when working with them on digital fundraising is: have you actually asked your donors what they think? What's motivating them to give, how did they find you and which other charities are they following? That insight isn't always there, not because charities don't want it, but because they haven't had the time or headspace to really pursue it. So much of improving digital fundraising comes down to building that open, ongoing conversation with your donors and using it to inform your decisions, and charities that do that will be in a much stronger position.

The report shows a really encouraging jump in charities prioritising data and analytics, up from 37% to 51% in a year. How important is getting the data foundations right before charities can really unlock AI's full potential?

Absolutely vital, and I was really encouraged by that stat because it shows the sector is beginning to take this much more seriously. Though as you know from your work at Torchbox, it's not an easy fix: you might have lots of data which you then need to clean, manage and ask the right questions of. What I always say to charities is that if you don't start getting the right data foundations in place you'll very quickly hit what I call the AI ceiling, where you start to realise the limitations you're facing in the use cases you can unlock. The ambitions charities have for AI simply can't be realised without good data underpinning them.

That phrase really resonates. One CEO told us at a recent breakfast event that data and intelligence are the beating heart of their charity, but much of it is inaccessible and siloed across hundreds of spreadsheets. The ambition is there but the infrastructure often isn't yet.

It'll be really interesting to see how that has shifted in next year's report.

You've written about charities having a unique role as a connector between an AI-powered world and communities that struggle to access its benefits. Does this year's report give you confidence that the sector is ready to step into that role?

Honestly, I have some slightly mixed feelings about this, because I think it's such an important role for the sector and we're still working out how to do it collectively. What the data shows is that digital inclusion support is common across the sector, but it's often quite informal and it very rarely includes AI, which is increasingly the thing having a real impact on people's lives and creating new forms of social harm.

Some of the statistics in this area are quite striking: just 8% of charities are advocating for safe and responsible AI development, only 6% are researching AI use experiences or impacts and just 3% offer support for people who have been harmed or are at risk of harm from AI. That feels like an increasingly important part of what our sector should be doing and something we all need to get our skills up on and define our role in, because our communities need us to.

It's something we're seeing play out in really practical ways. At one of our recent breakfast events, Dr Sarah Hughes talked about how people with mental health difficulties are sometimes more willing to open up to an AI because there's no judgment and no fear of saying the wrong thing. That's a genuinely interesting space for charities to think about, with appropriate safeguards, and it shows how fast the terrain is shifting.

Absolutely. Understanding how your role as a charity is shifting, because of how communities are now seeking advice, accessing information and getting support, is something every charity leader needs to be thinking about.

Finally, as we head into the second half of 2026, what's your one piece of advice for charity leaders who want to make real progress with digital and AI?

Some of what I've said might sound quite gloomy, but I do think there are many reasons to be hopeful. What I'd say to any charity leader wondering where to start is that you probably already have more to work with than you realise. 79% of charities are using AI, which means you almost certainly have people in your organisation who have been trying things and learning what works. Go and talk to them on a no-judgment basis: find out what's been effective, what's created impact and where it hasn't worked. Once you have that picture you'll start to see themes emerging and whether they connect to your organisational strategy, and that insight will help you take your use of AI to the next level.

The second thing is to please stress test your AI governance. We review a lot of AI policies as part of our strategy work and you can really spot the ones that were written in a panic after ChatGPT landed. The landscape has changed so fundamentally, with agentic AI, tools embedded in existing tech stacks and new risks emerging all the time, and governance needs to keep pace.

The third thing is probably the hardest: holding two mindsets at the same time. You need to encourage your staff to be entrepreneurial, to innovate and to take some risks safely.

"If you're innovating without failure, you're not really innovating. You're probably just doing business as usual with a shiny new tool."

But at the same time, you need robust guardrails so that innovation happens safely. Not everyone naturally holds both of those mindsets, but the leaders who can move between them and are very conscious about how they hold those two things in tension are the ones who will bring their organisations with them.

And collaboration too, so that charities aren't all building the same things in isolation. One of the things we think about constantly at Torchbox is how open source and shared infrastructure can mean smaller charities benefit from what larger ones have built. There's a real opportunity there.

Exactly. And I think we'll see more of that as the economics of AI tools continue to shift. By the time we're doing the 2027 report, who knows what the landscape will look like.

Torchbox is a proud partner of the Charity Digital Skills Report 2026. Read the full report at https://charitydigitalskills.co.uk/. You can also read Phil's reflections on this year's key findings on the Torchbox blog.