The Charity Digital Skills Report 2025: 76% of charities now using AI

The headline numbers

The 2025 Charity Digital Skills Report landed with a striking top line: 76% of charities are now using AI tools, up from 61% in 2024. AI use in fundraising jumped from 57% to 77% in a single year. And 48% of charities have developed an AI policy, tripled from 16% the year before.

Charities have clearly gotten started. But the headline numbers need context, and in places the picture underneath is more complicated than it first appears.

Adoption without strategy

Only 8% use AI in service delivery. The vast majority of charity AI use is internal: drafting communications, summarising documents, administrative tasks. Almost nobody is using AI in the work that actually defines their mission. That's partly appropriate caution and partly a sign that the harder use cases haven't been figured out yet.

Board digital skills are getting worse: 28% of respondents say their boards have poor digital skills, up 11 percentage points from 2024. Trustees are being asked to govern AI adoption at exactly the moment their digital confidence is falling. 68% of small charities are still in early digital adoption stages, and the gap between large charities with data teams and small charities still figuring out cloud storage is getting wider.

Only 44% of charities have a digital strategy, down from 50% the previous year. More organisations are using AI without a broader digital plan. That's adoption without strategy, and it creates problems when you need to scale, govern, or change course.

What's going well

The tripling of AI policies (16% to 48%) is real progress. It suggests that the "just use ChatGPT and figure it out" phase is maturing into something more structured, at least for some organisations. AI in fundraising at 77% is also notable. Fundraising teams tend to be pragmatic about tools that save time, and AI is well-suited to the content generation, donor analysis, and bid support work that fundraisers do daily. And basic AI literacy is spreading: the jump from 61% to 76% means more charity professionals have first-hand experience, which is the best foundation for informed decision-making.

If you have an AI policy, review it. Does it cover more than data protection? Does it address accuracy, bias, transparency, and the specific risks of your work? If you don't have one, this is the year. Two pages covering what AI your organisation uses, what data can and can't go into it, who checks outputs, and when you'll review the policy. If your board has poor digital skills, address it directly. Trustees don't need technical training. They need enough understanding to ask good questions.

The 76% headline is encouraging but misleading. Charities adopted AI faster than they developed the governance, strategy, and capability to use it well. That's not a crisis, but it is a gap that needs closing before something goes wrong in a way that erodes public trust. The organisations in the best position aren't the ones using AI the most. They're the ones who know what they're using it for, have thought about the risks, and have told their staff and beneficiaries about it.