A weekly-ish roundup of what’s changing in digital advertising, curated for UK charity advertisers. | Estimated read time: 7 minutes.
In this week’s feed
- 🤖 AI use in charities has nearly doubled, but digital strategy is going backwards
- 🎯 What Google’s transparency crackdown means for your Ad Grant
- 💙 Why your donation tracking data matters more to Meta than ever
- 💡 The behavioural science case for owning your charity’s setbacks in ads
- 📌 Quick notes
AI use in charities has nearly doubled, but digital strategy is going backwards
The Charity Digital Skills Report 2026 launched this week, and it’s the clearest picture yet of where the sector actually stands on AI and digital, not where vendors say it stands.
The headline number: 88% of charities now use AI tools in their day-to-day work, up from 76% in 2025 and 61% in 2024. Active or strategic use of AI has nearly doubled too, from 25% to 46% of charities. And the gap that separated small and large charities last year, 72% versus 89% adoption, has closed. Small charities are no longer behind on this.
But the report also has a warning buried in it. Only 44% of charities now have a digital strategy in place, down from 50% a year ago. Half of charities rate themselves as poor at, or not engaging at all with, investing in digital effectively. 69% point to organisational finances as the main barrier.
Put together, that’s charities picking up AI tools faster than they’re building the strategic foundations to use them well. The biggest barriers to further AI adoption are limited skills and technical expertise (55%, up from 43% last year) and concerns about the accuracy of AI-generated output (49%). On a more reassuring note, 60% of charities now have, or are developing, an AI policy, up from 48%.
What to do:
- If you don’t have an AI policy yet, you’re now in the minority rather than the norm. A short, practical one beats none; Torchbox’s free Charity AI Policy Builder is a reasonable starting point.
- If your team has picked up AI tools informally over the past year, it’s worth a quick, honest conversation with your board or leadership about whether that use is coordinated or ad hoc.
- Read the full report for the sector breakdowns; it’s worth 20 minutes if you’re making a case internally for more digital investment.
(Source: Charity Digital Skills Report 2026, Zoe Amar Digital · Torchbox)
What Google’s transparency crackdown means for your Ad Grant
Google’s Limited Ad Serving policy, rolling out since June and phasing in through to 2028, is placing much more weight on whether someone can immediately tell who’s behind an ad before they click. For Ad Grants accounts, that has a specific, practical consequence: if your landing page doesn’t make it obvious which charity someone has landed on, your campaigns risk fewer impressions and reduced visibility, even when the ad itself is fully compliant.
This is squarely aimed at exactly the kind of account most UK charities run their Grant through, so it’s worth a proper check rather than a passing glance.
What to do:
- Check your top 5 landing pages by traffic: is your charity’s name and what you do visible above the fold, not buried in a footer or behind a logo with no text?
- Make sure your registered charity name matches what’s shown in your ad text, so there’s no mismatch between what someone reads in the ad and what they land on.
(Source: Daily Bread Consultancy)
Why your donation tracking data matters more to Meta than ever
Meta is retiring the old “off-platform activity” opt-out, the control that let someone limit how their activity on other websites was used, and replacing it with a broader one called “Activity from other businesses.” The practical effect: the same data your website already sends Meta (a completed donation, a newsletter sign-up, an add-to-basket on a shop) can now shape a person’s Facebook and Instagram Feed and what Meta AI says to them, not just which ads they’re shown. Previously that data only fed ad targeting; now it feeds three things instead of one.
Meta says it isn’t collecting anything new here, it’s using the signals you already send for more purposes than before. The rollout started in July across the UK, US, Brazil and other markets (the EU is handled separately under GDPR).
There’s one detail that matters more to you than the privacy framing. The new control only stops Meta from using someone’s data to personalise their own Feed, ads and AI answers. It does not stop your website from sending that data to Meta in the first place. The pipeline stays exactly as it was, regardless of what any individual supporter toggles. So the real story isn’t a compliance change you need to react to, it’s a reminder that Meta is now leaning on the quality of your data harder than before, across more of its systems.
That matters because most organisations’ tracking is quietly incomplete. Ad blockers stop the pixel loading, iOS restrictions strip identifiers, cookie banners block events before they fire. Combined, browser-only pixel tracking commonly misses 30 to 60% of real conversions before they ever reach Meta. If more of Meta’s systems, not just ads but Feed and AI too, are now learning from that data, a patchy donation tracking setup costs you more than it used to.
What to do:
- If you’re not already using Meta’s Conversions API (CAPI) alongside your pixel for donation tracking, this is a good prompt to set it up. It sends conversion events from your server, so they still arrive even when the pixel is blocked.
(I can recommend an excellent contact who both knows and understands charities and is sensibly priced – drop me a line on ka******@************co.uk and I will introduce you.) - Check your Event Match Quality (EMQ) score in Meta Events Manager for your donate or purchase event. It’s scored out of 10 and shows how well your events are matching to real accounts. Below about 6 means Meta is struggling to match your conversions properly, which limits how well it can optimise, now across more than just ads.
- Make sure donation value, not just “a donation happened,” is flowing through with each event, so Meta learns about value, not only volume.
(Source: Meta Newsroom · TrackBee)
The behavioural science case for owning your charity’s setbacks in ads
A 2025 study covered by the Nudge Newsletter tested ads for the same business with two versions of copy: one admitting a flaw, one defensively denying it. The ad that owned the flaw got a 26.7% higher click-through rate than the one that denied it.
The theory (the “pratfall effect”) is that a little visible imperfection makes a message feel more human and more trustworthy, not less. For charity advertisers, that’s a useful nudge against always defaulting to the polished, everything-is-fine version of a story. A supporter’s setback before their fundraising win, or an honest line about how far a campaign still has to go, might do more work than a purely positive framing, and it fits neatly with the general shift towards donors wanting transparency over polish that’s been showing up across the sector this year.
What to do:
- If you’re testing new ad creative, try one version that includes an honest, small imperfection or setback alongside the usual positive framing, and see how it performs against your control.
- Keep sensitive content policies and your beneficiaries’ dignity in mind; this is about honesty, not manufacturing hardship for clicks.
(Source: Nudge Newsletter, Phill Agnew)
📌 Quick notes
- Google’s Ads Terms of Service quietly changed on 1 July. AI now has explicit authority to generate, select and optimise parts of your campaigns, and what you type into tools like Ask Advisor can be reused elsewhere in your account. No action needed. Applies to standard paid and Ad Grants accounts alike. (Source: Search Engine Land)