Charity Digital: A year in review

When Charity Digital began its journey in 2001, our mission was to help other charities accelerate their missions with digital. Nearly twenty-five years later, as we approach 2026, that mission remains exactly the same.

We’ve helped millions of charity professionals learn how to use digital effectively. We’ve helped charities get to grips with digital inclusion, reimagine their services, think ethically about artificial intelligence, and so much more.

2025 has been a transformative year. We’ve launched new events, published content that challenges preconceptions, created impact campaigns that change mindsets, and extended training across the sector.

We wanted to take a quick moment to review some of our successes.  

The launch of the masterclass 

Charity Digital is a charity. Our ability to provide free content, resources, webinars, podcasts, and events is secured by donations, sponsorship, projects, and purchases for our training.  

In 2025 and 2026, we want to provide the charity sector with more meaningful and effective training, giving them in-depth and hands-on advice on core elements of charity operations at minimal cost.  

Our Masterclasses seek, in just one hour, to show charities how to master specific elements of charity work, from email marketing to AI, from grant-funding to using data to grow impact.  

The courses are run by experts, people who live and breathe their subjects. These are people we picked because they are best placed to help your charity.  

CHECK OUT OUR MASTERCLASSES 

Our AI Summit shifts the conversation

Our AI Summit 2025 was a resounding success, bringing together experts for an in-person event that helped charity professionals grasp AI. Held at the Microsoft offices, the Summit armed attendees with practical skills, explored the risks and opportunities posed by AI, discussed implications for the charity sector, and so much more.  

The sold-out event was inspirational. Our speakers brought loads of incredible topics to life. We heard about AI agents, emerging user needs in an AI world, retrieval augmented generation (or RAG), the application of AI in user journeys, evolving AI-powered solutions, the changing landscape of search engines, and so much more. 

The Summit was such a success, in fact, that we decided to do another one!

If you’re interested in attending, click below to find more details. 

Get your tickets 

Our Reimagining Services campaign challenges perceptions 

We launched our Reimagining Services campaign to reinvigorate service delivery. Service delivery is the reason charities exist, but it’s an area of charity life that we do not often talk about. We wanted to change that. We wanted to encourage charities to think of ways to improve, optimise, and streamline – all with service users at the centre.  

The campaign covered so many interesting areas. We explored the best ways to build inclusive digital projects, created a resource bank for service delivery, produced a video series on paternalism and deficit narratives, hosted a Reimagining Service Delivery Summit, demonstrated why service delivery should centre service users, produced a webinar on co-production, explored how to launch a charity service, and so much more. 

It’s been an incredibly rewarding campaign and the results are encouraging. We’ve had more than 27000 engagements across our content for Reimagining Services. And we plan to continue the campaign into next year, keeping the conversation going.  

CHECK OUT THE HUB 

The Code of Practice finds a new home 

Charity leaders developed the original Charity Digital Code of Practice (Code) to improve digital sustainability, efficiency, and decision-making. In 2025, Charity Digital became the official home of the Code and we made various ground-breaking improvements.  

The improvements took a lot of work. The Code has always been user-led, aiming to respond to issues facing the sector. We felt it necessary to contact charity leaders to discover digital opportunities, the core tech risks on the horizon, and any other areas that may require additional guidance. Extensive research came in the form of in-depth interviews and a comprehensive survey, depending on more than 60 charity leaders.  

We realised, based on user research, that AI must play a role throughout the Code, that charity leaders required best practice advice on tech procurement and integration, that data wasn’t prominent enough in the 2018 Code, and that leaders wanted advice on navigating the increasingly hostile world of social media.   

We took that research and used the expertise of our Review Board and the Steering Group to produce a much improved Code, one that helps charities more than ever.

The new Code has a new homepage, new ways to navigate the information, a chatbot to help you get right to the point, and so much more. And we’re already thinking of further improvements in 2026. 

Watch this space! 

CHECK OUT THE CODE 

Academy grows from strength to strength 

And, last but not least, it’s been a great year for our Academies. Originally devised in 2024, we expanded the Academy in 2025 because there seemed to be such a large appetite in the sector. 

New sessions added in 2025 include sessions on Google Analytics, Advanced Excel, social media, Google for Nonprofits, managing charity finances, and so much more.  

CHECK OUT OUR ACADEMY