The 2026 Charity Digital Skills Report: the sector is all in on AI, and still stuck on fundraising

The Charity Digital Skills Report is the closest thing our sector has to an annual health check, and the 2026 edition is the biggest yet: 807 organisations, surveyed by Zoe Amar Digital and Think Social Tech this spring. If you only read one sector report this year, read this one. Below is what stood out to me, and what I think it means for anyone trying to raise more money online.

AI is no longer coming. It arrived.

The headline is stark. 79% of charities now use AI in some way, rising to 92% of large charities. Only one in five use it not at all. More telling than the raw adoption number is the depth: 38% are now active or strategic users, up from 25% a year ago. In grant fundraising specifically, 45% now use AI, up from 36%, and that climbs to over half of small charities. A technology that felt experimental eighteen months ago is now doing real work in the average fundraising office, mostly on admin, drafting, research and bids.

And people are, on the whole, glad of it. 63% say they are excited about AI’s potential, and the most cited benefit by a distance is simple: it hands time back. The charity worker quoted in the report who says first drafts now “take minutes rather than hours, so staff can focus more on relationships” is describing the whole opportunity in one sentence.

The paradox: everyone is using AI, and almost nobody feels ready

Here is where it gets uncomfortable. Alongside near-universal adoption sits a striking lack of readiness.

• 51% of charities have no AI policy, and 44% are taking no action at all to manage AI risk.
• Only 7% have any board-level review of AI, even though four in five organisations use it daily.
• Lack of trust in AI has more than doubled as a barrier, from 15% to 35%, and worries about accuracy and “hallucinations” are rising fast.
• A third of boards and a quarter of CEOs are rated poor at AI skills by their own teams.

So the sector has adopted AI faster than it has learned to govern it, resource it or lead it. That is not a criticism, it is just what a genuine technology shift looks like from the inside. But it does mean the gap that matters in 2026 is not adoption. It is confidence, skills and safe practice.

The quiet finding: digital fundraising is still the weakest link

The finding I cannot stop thinking about has nothing to do with AI. Across every measure, digital fundraising is the skill charities are worst at. A combined 58% are either poor at it or do not do it at all, rising to 64% among small charities. Even among large, well-resourced organisations, only 23% rate themselves as good or excellent at digital fundraising. And despite that, improving digital fundraising is a priority for fewer than half of charities, and the ambition to grow online income has actually slipped since last year.

Read those two things together and you get the real story of 2026. The sector is pouring energy and enthusiasm into AI for admin and bid writing, while the core engine, raising money from supporters online, remains underpowered and under-prioritised. Meanwhile squeezed finances (the top barrier for 63%) and one-person digital teams mean most organisations have neither the money nor the headspace to fix it from scratch.

What this means for fundraisers

If you lead fundraising, I would take three things from this report.

First, do not let AI become a distraction from income. Using AI to write a newsletter faster is useful. It is not the same as building a fundraising programme that actually grows. The organisations that win the next few years will use the time AI frees up to spend more time with donors, not just to produce more content.

Second, treat responsible AI as a fundraising asset, not a compliance chore. Donors, funders and trustees are all becoming more alert to how you use AI. 13% of funders now ask about it, and 41% of charities want AI tools built by and for the sector rather than generic tools bolted on. A clear, human-in-the-loop approach to AI is quickly becoming a trust signal, and trust is the whole game in fundraising.

Third, buy the outcome where you lack the skill. If digital fundraising is the weakest skill in the sector, the answer for most teams is not to spend two years hiring and training their way to expertise. It is to use platforms and partners that let them run sophisticated campaigns now, and build the skill alongside.

Where Hubbub sits in all this

I will be honest about why this report matters to us. Hubbub exists in exactly the overlap the data exposes: the sector’s weakest, least-prioritised skill is digital fundraising, and its loudest unmet ask is AI built by and for the sector. That is the gap we get up in the morning to close.

Our giving days, crowdfunding and telephone campaign tools are designed so a small, stretched team can run a genuinely good campaign without needing to become digital-fundraising experts first. And our AI, from Iris coaching fundraisers through a campaign to FundCoach letting callers rehearse real conversations, is deliberately fundraising-native and human-in-the-loop. It is built to give fundraisers more time with donors, not to replace the human warmth that makes fundraising work. The report is full of people worried about losing exactly that. We think that worry is right, and we build accordingly.

The sector’s appetite is clearly there. The skills, the confidence and the money to act on it, mostly, are not. Closing that distance, with tools that are safe, sector-built and genuinely easy to use, is the work. This report is a useful reminder of how much of it there is to do.

The full Charity Digital Skills Report 2026 is published by Zoe Amar Digital and Think Social Tech. All figures above are drawn from it.

Image: “Artificial Intelligence & AI & Machine Learning” by Mike MacKenzie (mikemacmarketing), via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY 2.0.