Report: Digital service delivery in the UK charity sector

Charities are used to achieving a lot with a little. Digital, especially since the pandemic, has proved instrumental in helping charities to be more efficient with their resources, reaching more people and boosting productivity to focus on what really matters: the communities they serve. 

But while in recent years digital has transformed most areas of charity work, digital service delivery has not experienced the same widespread shifts. In 2024, Charity Digital’s report Digital inclusion in the UK charity sector revealed that nine in ten charities use digital tools to deliver services, but more than half (56%) struggle to reach service users due to problems with technology. 

We’re seeing demand rising for services, along with increasing costs to deliver them, leaving charities across the UK stretched. That means little time to re-evaluate and reimagine their service delivery. And that’s why we decided to conduct a survey: to explore how charities deliver services and consider ways in which they could improve. The report explores our findings.  

DOWNLOAD THE REPORT 

Key findings from the digital service delivery report 

Our survey looked at five different areas:  

And the findings have proved fascinating. To start, 8 out of 10 charity professionals are personally driven by impact, a welcome statistic. It confirmed our suspicions: belief in charity service delivery is one of the main reasons people work in the charity sector. It’s precisely because they want to deliver impact, precisely because they want to help. But they report, too, a number of barriers to making a difference.  

The report shows a lack of confidence, or perhaps ability, when it comes to delivering digital services. Charity professionals rated their overall service delivery, on average, at just higher than 7 out of 10 (7.09). But digital service delivery was rated at a lower level, not even 6 out of 10 (5.83).  

Charities generally rate their in-person delivery higher than digital. That’s not particularly surprising, considering the barriers respondents cited in our survey. The main barrier to service delivery is the absence of staff and volunteers, cited by 60%. But, importantly, nearly half of respondents (49%) directly cited that being unable to efficiently use digital is a barrier to effective service delivery.  

The biggest challenge when it comes to using digital for service delivery was cost, cited by nearly three in five (56%) people. This group said they were unable to afford the necessary hardware, software, or technology infrastructure. Just behind that was not having time for a digital strategy (54%) and the struggle to keep up with key developments such as AI and data analysis (53%). 

The report explored the concepts of co-design and co-production. Perhaps unsurprisingly, at least based on our experience in the sector, just over a third of charities (34%) work with service users to design and deliver services. And more than a quarter (27%) did not work with service users in any way for the delivery of services. That’s a high number, but not a surprising one.  

Our experience over the course of our Reimagining Services campaign, and discussions with so many charities, reaffirms an obvious reality: not enough charities work with service users.  

We’ve advocated easy interactions with service users to improve your services, particularly around beneficiary feedback mechanisms (BFMs), and we hope charities in the future are more willing to engage service users with the design – and ideally the delivery – of their services.  

The report, finally, explored the impact and ethics of AI. We found that 58% of charities are not using AI in service delivery and do not plan to do so in the future. That’s huge. The reason for the low take-up is risk, with many charities aware that service delivery often involves vulnerable people. In simple terms, charities are using AI but typically in areas of low risk.  

Concerns around data privacy, lack of security, misinformation, and introduced bias all prevent charities from using AI for service delivery.  Only 3 in 10 (30%) said they planned to use AI in the future for service delivery and only 12% actually use AI at present. That presents a huge discord from other areas of charity work. The Charity Skills Report 2025 suggests, for example, that 76% of charities are using AI in their organisations and 89% of large charities are using AI. 

That means that, while charities are using AI, they’re largely reserving the tech for other, low risk areas of charity operations. Charities are mainly using it to draft or structure documents and reports, to conduct administrative tasks, and to generate ideas. Perhaps that’s welcome, as service delivery requires a greater degree of human oversight than the other areas of charity work.