What the Charity Digital Skills Report 2026 tells us about the future of the sector

Funded upskilling and training in AI is the issue of the moment

In the introduction to this year’s report, Zoe and Nissa lead with an unequivocal rallying cry:

“We urge funders to sit up and take notice of where charities need support. Building skills of staff, volunteers and leaders is an organisational priority for 59% of charities. Furthermore, 60% say that training staff or leaders on AI is the sector-wide support they need”.

Throughout the report, stat after stat backs this rallying cry up.

The good news is that, broadly, understanding of this issue is moving in the right direction: 2025’s report showed just 43% of charities saw digital upskilling as a priority compared to 59% this year. 72% of large charities see this as an organisational priority looking ahead. However, it’s surprising that this upskilling is not yet a priority for over 40% of charities, highlighting the depth of the skillset challenge in the sector. Even for the most digitally literate charities, we are on a relentlessly steep curve of adoption — bleeding edge models coming out seemingly weekly, emergent landscape-shifting tools like Claude Design, entirely new disciplines appearing overnight (AEO being the most prominent). As someone who sits agency-side, with access to dedicated engineering and innovation teams to support my own learning, this curve can feel overwhelming. Charities are not at fault here — 44% report they are not keeping up with trends in this space; given the challenges they’re facing, it’s not surprising. They need support from funders, and fast.

There’s real uncertainty about the role of digital assets in critical areas for the sector

Only 51% of charities see digital as a tool to increase fundraising, down from 57% last year. And only 48% of charities see improving digital fundraising as a priority. Put another way, half of the sector are not clear on the role digital plays in fundraising, and focus is drifting on this. This is eye opening — it is hard to imagine the impact removing digital tools and channels would have for the charities we support, yet many charities in the report don’t recognise it as a critical avenue for raising money. There’s nuance here. 59% of charities see growing reach and engagement as a digital priority, so perhaps there’s a job to do first before “the ask”. And perhaps smaller charities are also being pragmatic about the ability they have to drive income on platforms that require spend upfront in a time when income is stretched — that might explain the incredible statistics that 66% of charities make no use of PPC advertising, and 58% make no use of social advertising. Either way, this still presents a major opportunity for those charities to leverage these tools in ways that increase their income while also focusing on the early awareness stage.

Missing strategy, at exactly the wrong moment

“Only 28% of charities have a strategy in place for digital”.

This report arrives a few months after the Charities Aid Foundation UK Giving Report 2025, which reports major downturns in donations, and volume of donors. Six million donors lost over a decade, a 10% fall in total giving (the first drop in five years) and 2.8 million regular donations cancelled. This absence of digital strategy is concerning to see given the importance of strategy in responding to these challenges. Another layer to this challenge arrives when we consider how dynamic the digital landscape is. This year’s M+R Benchmarks highlights how channel mechanics are shifting fast and globally. Organic website traffic declined month-by-month through 2025, driven by AI summaries and chatbot queries replacing legacy “searches”. Twitter/X usage is in what looks like terminal decline, with 51% of UK charities having either left or cut back usage. This is all happening at once. Digital strategy has never been more important, and so absent at the same time, and with only 44% of charities seeing the development of a digital strategy as important, this leaves the sector at risk of staying on top of these shifts.

Adoption of AI is broadly following expected paths, but senior leaders need to engage their teams

When asked how charities are using AI, the report shows increased uptake across all areas. 60% use it for everyday tasks like emails and meeting notes. 47% for research and information gathering, and 43% for creative thinking and generating ideas. This last stat is the most positive — using AI for tasks beyond the mundane is it will deliver most value, and the sector should push further here. Ethan Mollick recently described “deweirdification” — the trend where “companies [race] to de-weird AI […] squandering what makes it transformative”. Rather than confine AI to existing workflows, we’d love to see the sector think ambitiously about what AI might unlock — from new fundraising products to transformed service delivery through LLM-powered tooling (only 9% of charities currently use AI for this kind of work). Despite the significant, non-trivial barriers to adoption, there is a chance to reach for the moon, not just polish the spaceship in its landing dock.

There is a significant issue around seniority here too. 74% of CEOs and leaders are excited about AI’s potential to make their work more efficient and impactful, compared to 60% of staff and managers. This gap really matters: senior leaders must understand why staff are less enthused than they are — getting back onto the shop floor to work with staff to see beyond fears of job replacement and start visualling the art of the possible is a role that leaders must adopt immediately.

Data and analytics is gaining importance, but the brakes need to stay off, and the skillset needs to increase

“51% say that collecting, managing and analysing data is a priority” for the next 12 months. This is a significant, heartening year-on-year improvement from 37% in 2025. For larger charities, this rises to 65% in larger charities. Charities must continue to focus on the health and maturity of their data — at a recent Torchbox-hosted breakfast event, one CEO told me that “data and intelligence are the beating heart of our charity but much of it is inaccessible, siloed and spread across 500 different spreadsheets”. Data fragmentation repeatedly came up in conversation as a barrier to AI adoption. However, when asked about the biggest barriers to AI success, this wasn’t surfaced in the report, which indicates a connection yet to be made in the sector between data maturity and progress in AI.

While it’s great to see this renewed focus on data moving in the right direction, now’s the time to accelerate — if 51% of the sector see this as an important area of focus, the other half of the sector need to push harder in this space.

Furthermore, there’s a growing gap between the importance charities are placing on analytics and data, and their reported skillset. The report flags that “using website and analytics data has the highest ‘poor’ rating of any engagement skill, with 30% saying they are poor at this and a further 13% not doing it at all”. More concerningly still, “51% say they are either fair or poor at using data to inform decision making or strategy”.

Final thoughts

This year’s report is about as holistic as one could possibly hope for. It covers every angle, and this blog would have to have been three times as long to cover all of its salient points — there are further fascinating insights into the uptake of user research internally, the role of websites for charities, the CRM challenges staff are facing, and the AI policy deficit that exists in the sector.

Torchbox is proud to sponsor this year’s report for the second year running. On behalf of both the sector as a whole, and all of us at Torchbox, thank you to Zoe and Nissa for producing the absolute bellwether report for skills in the charity.

Read this year's report.