Somewhere in your charity, this morning, someone used AI. Maybe to draft a thank-you letter. Maybe to tidy up a funder report. Maybe to generate an image for social media. Nobody signed it off, because there was nothing to sign it off against.
That, in one sentence, is the state of our sector in 2026.
Two pieces of research landed on my desk this year, and they tell the same story from different ends. The Charity Digital Skills Report 2026, published this week, found that 79% of charities now use AI day to day. Yet fewer than one in five, 19%, have an AI strategy or are even developing one, and “developing” can mean anything from a working draft to an endless run of meetings.
Among larger charities the pattern is starker: 92% of charities over £1M have adopted AI, yet only 14% use it for strategy, planning or prediction. The bigger the organisation, the wider the gap between using AI and deciding what it’s for.
What’s more, only 36%, just over a third of charities, are using AI for their communications and fundraising.
The area with the most to gain is moving the slowest, and that number has barely shifted in a year.
Then there’s the question I put to nearly a hundred charity leaders at a seminar in June: do you have an AI strategy for your fundraising? 9 out of 10 said no, or “it’s in progress”.
We are adopting AI far faster than we are deciding what it’s for.
I don’t think that gap exists because charity leaders are slow. I think it exists because they are carrying three pressures at once, and AI has landed on top of all of them.
1. Budgets under pressure, targets going up
Costs keep rising and the board wants growth. Your finances are being squeezed and so every pound you spend now has to prove itself. The report shows this is by far the biggest issue affecting two-thirds of charities (63%). So the first instinct with AI is to use it to trim costs, which is why administration leads the adoption charts.
But here’s the thing I say to every leader I meet: an efficiency saving is invisible to a board. Income is not. The charities getting real value from AI are using it where the money is: who is most likely to give, what to say to them, when to ask.
2. Asking more from a shrinking pool of donors
Fewer people give to charity than a decade ago, so every charity is asking the loyal few for more. Growth now means getting more from each relationship, not just finding new supporters. Which makes one finding in this week’s report genuinely worrying: the share of charities who say using data to understand and engage their supporters is a priority has fallen from 54% to 43% in a single year.
Falling investment in understanding supporters, at the exact moment supporters are the scarce asset. That is the wrong direction, and AI makes it fixable: the insight most charities need is already sitting unread in their own CRM.
3. Leadership and staff not on the same page about AI
Some of your team use it quietly. Some are against it. Half the sector has no agreed rules at all. Most of the rest have a policy that covers what staff may do, and says nothing about what reaches a supporter.
The report shows just how far apart people inside the same charity can be. CEOs are the keenest group in the building, the most optimistic about what AI could do for their organisation, yet a quarter of them are rated poor at AI skills.
Trustees are in a different place again. A third of boards are rated poor at AI skills, and boards are naturally more cautious: their job is to protect the charity, so gaps in knowledge tend to harden into risk aversion. Meanwhile staff resistance to AI has risen from 20% to 34% in a year. Teams are nervous, often because nobody has told them what AI will mean for their role or their supporters.
So the CEO is keen but underskilled, the board is cautious and underinformed, and the team is nervous. Three groups pulling in different directions, and no shared plan to bring them together. This is not a technology gap, it is a leadership and decision gap.
I spoke with an experienced Head of Digital for a leading global NGO, Corinne Kemp, who agrees:
I see daily that successful AI transformation is not primarily a technology challenge. I believe it is primarily a leadership, management and governance challenge. The key to success, to enable a true digital and AI transformation, is having the right governance in place, establishing clear principles … and ensuring close alignment with executive leadership and between leaders, as well as with leaders and their team.
Here’s the encouraging part: charity leaders already know what matters most. When I asked those hundred leaders which human responsibility matters most in an AI future, two-thirds gave the same answer: connection. Not leadership, not data, but the relationships that hold charity work together.
That instinct deserves to be taken seriously, because charities exist for social good, and AI is a fast-moving space that raises a few ethical questions. For instance, AI does have an environmental impact (although smaller than you may think). No charity wants to achieve its mission in a way that quietly undermines it. The ends do not justify the means for charity professionals. This is why the answer is not to avoid AI, but for charity CEOs, trustees and other senior leaders to decide intentionally where it serves your mission and where it has no place, so that it empowers human teams and volunteers, rather than replacing them.
Before any tool, your leaders need to make three decisions: what AI is for in your charity, what it must never do in your name, and who owns it.
You are not behind, by the way. If 9 out of 10 leaders have no AI strategy, you are the norm. But the ones who decide first will spend the next three years pulling ahead while everyone else is still forming a working group.
I’ve put the ten most useful moves I’ve seen, drawn from those hundred conversations, into a free two-page guide: 10 ways charities are using AI to raise more money, without breaking trust. It’s where I’d start.
And if you would rather make those three decisions in a room with your leadership team, that is precisely what our AI Fundraising Strategy Day exists for.
Sources. Charity Digital Skills Report 2026: 79% of charities using AI; 19% have developed or are developing an AI strategy; squeezed organisational finances the biggest issue affecting 63% of charities; AI used for communications and fundraising by 36%; data as a priority 43% (54% in 2025); 25% of CEOs and 33% of boards rated poor at AI skills; staff resistance to AI 34% (20% in 2025). Charity AI Partners seminar polling, June 2026: 96 charity leaders; 51% no AI strategy and 39% in progress; 67% chose “Connect” as the human responsibility that matters most.
Darren Richards is the founder of Charity AI Partners and the ‘Charity AI Guy’. He is the author of The Plane Parable and host of the Someday Arrival podcast. @CharityAIGuy