We launched the 2026 Charity Digital Skills Report on 9 July. With 807 charities responding, this was our biggest turnout since we started the report in 2017. Thank you to our report partners, Corndel, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, Manifesto, Media Trust, Microsoft and Torchbox, for making this year’s report possible and for pushing us to ask harder questions of the data. A few weeks later, I keep coming back to the same question: how did we get here?
A support ecosystem that hasn’t shown up
We’ve seen huge levels of digital and AI change before. During lockdown, charities went through a significant shift in how they worked as everything went online. In response, a support ecosystem grew up around them with emergency digital funding, free training, sector bodies and tech companies all mobilising together. There was co-ordinated support for charities; a shared commitment to no-one having to work it out alone.
6 years later there is no such ecosystem in place, despite the level of change now being, in many ways, even more significant.
Adoption is up, but skills and trust aren’t
79% of charities are now using AI, up from 76% last year. And yet 56% say limited skills and technical expertise is their biggest barrier to progress, up from 43% last year.
We were also struck by our findings on trust. 35% say they don’t trust AI tools, up from just 15% last year. Charities are using these tools more than ever, and trusting them less than before.
Governance and funding are under strain
The backbone of the charity sector is governance, and yet this is also being tested under the weight of AI disruption. Just over half of charities (51%) have no AI policy at all. Only 15% have updated their risk register this year, down from 23% in 2025. Charities are having to move fast and manage risk responsibly at the same time, and this is yet another reason why digital and AI support and funding are now mission critical for our sector.
Speaking of funding, squeezed finances are the single biggest barrier to digital progress for 63% of charities. Training staff, volunteers, leaders and boards is the top funding need in the whole report. Yet the number of charities accessing digital funding from grantmaking trusts and foundations has fallen to 17%, down from 30% last year.
Will Ranjan-Churchill, Technology Lead at Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, one of our report partners, put it better than I could: “If, as a sector, we’d introduced any other kind of tool with the metrics the report is showing us, 79% uptake in AI, but 1 in 3 unable to effectively use it, we’d, for sure, have done something about it by now. As funders, it’s clear that we must do more, about the tensions involved in AI and trust, the gaps in digital funding, and the need for more considered training across the board. This report should be a wake up call that there is a real need for more core, infrastructure, and digital funding options for charities.”
Those on the margins are bearing the brunt
He’s right, and it’s those on the margins bearing the brunt of it. 62% of global majority-led charities lean on AI for grant writing support, more than any other group in the report, and yet nearly half of those same charities don’t trust the tools they’re relying on. Charities supporting specific marginalised groups have more concerns about trust, cited by 43% of those working with global majority communities and with LGBTQIA+ groups. If funders and support organisations don’t close that gap, it’s the largest and best-resourced charities that keep pulling further ahead: only 24% of small charities are using AI actively or strategically, against 49% of large charities.
What’s stopping us building that support again?
None of this is charities’ failure to rise to the moment. 81% made digital progress this year, up from 60% in 2025, against funding cuts and rising service demand. Use of AI for research and information gathering nearly doubled. The appetite and the effort are both there. What’s missing is the infrastructure around charities.
Funders and support organisations came together to build that infrastructure once, in 2020, when charities needed it. We’re on the brink of a bigger shift now than anything lockdown asked of us. So what’s stopping us doing it again?