How trustees can encourage digital

Charities across the UK are facing tighter budgets, rising demand in services, and growing expectations from funders, volunteers, and the people they support.

 

Digital tools can make your charity more efficient, accessible, and sustainable. But real progress starts with culture and leadership. And that’s where trustees come in.

 

Trustees have a legal duty to ensure their charity remains effective, relevant, and financially secure, and encouraging a digital culture across the charity is one of the most powerful ways to do that.

 

Here are seven ways that trustees can encourage and champion digital within their charity.

 

 

Recruit or co-opt a digital trustee

 

A board of trustees should bring a range of skills, such as HR, financial, communications, fundraising, and more, to help the charity in achieving its mission. Having a trustee with digital skills and knowledge is vital and will help build confidence in digital across the board and the organisation.

 

Use a skills audit to identify what skills gaps are missing on your board or a digital skills audit to identify specific gaps in digital. Once those skills gaps have been identified, put together a job description to recruit a digital trustee to help fill those gaps and take the organisation forward.

 

 

Build digital confidence at board level

 

The Charity Digital Skills Report 2025 found that digital trustees are lacking in the sector. More than 40% of the charities surveyed said that they do not have digital trustees – a figure that has remained stagnant since 2024. Three in five charities say their trustees’ digital skills are low or could be improved and 28% say their boards have poor digital skills.

 

This lack of digital expertise at board level hinders a charity’s ability to fully embrace digital transformation and use it to accelerate their mission. Charities without digital trustees or trustees with digital skills risk falling behind.

 

Having a dedicated digital trustee will help the board to feel more confident, but upskilling together is key. Identify free or paid training that the board can take part in together or engage an external digital expert to provide bespoke training and coaching.

 

 

Understand where you are now

 

It can be tempting to dive in and invest in new tools or platforms but it’s important to understand how digitally mature your charity is right now. NCVO’s Digital Maturity Matrix is a free diagnostic tool to help you assess your charity’s digital strengths and weaknesses and how you can improve.

 

Whatever your score, whether it’s low or high, remember that the goal is progress. Understanding your starting point helps you invest time and resources where they’ll have the biggest impact.

 

 

Set the tone and scope for digital ambition

 

Trustees don’t need to understand every technical detail, but they do need to set the tone and the scope for digital appetite and ambition. When boards show curiosity and openness about digital, staff feel empowered to experiment, test ideas, and learn from what works – and what doesn’t.

 

Encourage honest conversations at board. Questions to consider, include:

• What’s working well with our digital approach?
• Where are the gaps or barriers?
• What quick wins could make a difference this year?
• What didn’t work and what can we learn from that?

 

Embed digital into governance and culture

 

Like fundraising or communications, digital shouldn’t sit in a silo. It’s the common thread that should run through your charity’s strategy, governance, and risk management.

 

Digital should be embedded in organisational strategy, included in the risk register (for example, cyber security and GDPR) and be added as a standing item on the board agenda.

 

Embedding digital in your governance and culture helps ensure your charity can keep up with the pace of change.

 

 

Approve digital skills training in the annual budget

 

Digital moves at such a fast pace.

 

Right now, artificial intelligence (AI) is a hot topic and charities are grappling with whether to embrace it, how to use it, and the ethics surrounding it. To help charities stay abreast of digital advances, trustees should approve an annual budget to be used for digital skills training – for staff and trustees.

 

 

Support a culture of test and learn

 

Trustees play a key role in shaping culture, and supporting a “test and learn” mindset is one of the best ways to help move digital forward.

 

This approach encourages small, low-risk experiments, such as trying new tools, testing ideas, and learning quickly from results. It can also reduce risk, because issues are spotted early and there is time to adapt before significant time or money is invested.

 

When boards value learning over perfection, staff feel empowered to innovate and share what they’ve learned. Over time, that builds confidence, leads to smarter decisions and a culture of continuous improvement grounded in evidence, not guesswork.