What we learned from the 2026 Charity Digital Skills Report
The Charity Digital Skills Report landed last week, and if you work in fundraising or operations, it's really worth reading - it puts numbers to all those things you already know and feel in your bones. 807 charities took part this year, a record. And the headline is good news:
81% of charities made digital progress this year, up from around 6 in 10 last year. That's despite 63% saying squeezed finances are their single biggest barrier, and 51% saying they simply don't have the headspace or capacity to move things forward. Charities are managing to move ahead while genuinely stretched - that’s a testament to everyone making good things happen.
Where CRMs actually show up in the data
22% of charities say their CRM is a significant barrier to progress, whether that's poor reporting, a system that's hard to use, or one that doesn't talk to their other tools. For large charities, that figure jumps to 38%. Nearly a quarter of all charities (24%) say they'd like external support to choose or review their CRM, and among neurodivergent-led charities, that rises to 42%.
If you've been wondering whether your spreadsheets-and-sticky-notes setup, or an ageing system you inherited from someone who left two years ago, counts as a "real" barrier worth doing something about: the data says you're far from alone.
The AI trust gap
79% of charities are now using AI day to day but 56% say they're worried about relying on it, specifically because they don't have the skills to judge whether what it's telling them is actually right.
That matters if you're thinking about using AI to help you choose new software, including a CRM. Asking a chatbot "what CRM should my charity use?" will get you a confident sounding answer. Whether it's a right answer for your organisation, your team's skills, your budget, and the way you actually work, is a different question entirely, and one an AI tool has no way of checking.
What we'd suggest instead
Training staff, volunteers and leaders is the single biggest funding need for charities identified this year (44%). That's not a coincidence alongside the AI trust gap. The sector needs people who understand both the technology and the reality of running a small organisation, sitting down and working through it properly.
That's the gap we've tried to build a resource for: not another list of "prompts to compare CRM vendors," but a structured way to work out, with AI as a thinking tool rather than an oracle, what's actually going wrong with your current setup before you start shopping for a replacement. You can find it here.
And also - if you'd rather just talk it through with someone who's spent 15 years on the fundraising side of this exact problem before joining a CRM company, that's what we're here for too - book in for a chat with Dana.
