By Erin Eady, Digital Director at Wrapped Agency
Artificial intelligence is changing the way organisations approach marketing. From creating content and analysing data to researching audiences and improving digital experiences, the opportunities are difficult to ignore.
And the charity sector is embracing them.
According to the 2026 Charity Digital Skills Report, 79% of charities are now exploring or using AI in some capacity. Yet only 28% have a digital strategy in place.
That’s an interesting contrast.
It suggests that while charities are increasingly willing to experiment with new technology, strategic digital planning isn’t necessarily keeping pace.
And I think this raises an important question for anyone responsible for charity marketing.
Are we adopting AI because we’ve identified where it can make a meaningful difference, or because we feel we need to keep up?
AI has enormous potential to help charities achieve more with their resources. But in a sector built around supporting people, inspiring action and communicating important information, success can’t simply be measured by how much faster we can do things.
It needs to be measured by what we’re actually achieving.
AI is an opportunity, not a marketing strategy
It’s easy to understand why AI is generating so much interest across the charity sector.
Marketing teams are often balancing ambitious objectives with limited budgets, small teams and growing demands on their time. Tools that can support content creation, research, reporting and administrative tasks offer genuine opportunities to work more efficiently.
But there’s a difference between using AI to complete tasks and using it to improve marketing performance.
The same report found that while 79% of charities are exploring or using AI, only 38% are using it actively or strategically. Just 4% describe AI as widely used and part of their strategy or future plans. For me, that distinction is important.
Before introducing another platform or automating another process, charities need to understand what they’re trying to achieve.
Is the priority to increase awareness of an under-recognised cause? Reach audiences who aren’t currently engaging? Or make support services easier to discover?
Each objective requires a different approach.
AI might help identify patterns in audience behaviour, support content development or make campaign analysis more efficient. But the technology itself won’t determine which audiences matter, what messages will resonate or where marketing investment can make the greatest difference.
That’s where a clear digital strategy comes in.
When I’m looking at where AI could support a digital marketing strategy, I’d start with three questions. What’s taking up time without adding much value? Where are we missing useful information about our audiences or campaign performance? And which activities would benefit most from having more time for human input?
The answers will be different for every charity. For one organisation, AI might help make reporting more efficient. For another, it could support research into the questions people are asking or help identify gaps in existing website content. The important thing is choosing the application because it solves a problem, rather than finding a problem to justify using the technology.
The opportunity isn’t to do more marketing simply because AI makes it possible. It’s to do more effective marketing because we understand where AI can add value.
More content doesn’t automatically mean more impact
One of AI’s most immediate benefits is the ability to produce content at speed.
For charities communicating across websites, social media, email and fundraising campaigns, that can be incredibly useful. But producing more content doesn’t necessarily mean reaching more people, building stronger relationships or encouraging more meaningful action.
In fact, as AI makes content creation increasingly accessible, I think the value of genuine expertise, original thinking and audience understanding will become even more important.
Charities have something particularly valuable here.
They have first-hand knowledge of the issues they support, direct experience of the communities they work with and access to specialist perspectives that generic AI-generated content cannot independently replicate.
Those are the things that make their communications distinctive.
AI can help communicate that expertise more efficiently. It can support research, identify content opportunities, suggest different ways to explain complex subjects and help adapt messaging for different audiences.
But it shouldn’t replace the insight, experience and human understanding behind the message.
I’d also be careful about treating AI-generated audience insights as research in their own right. AI can help organise information, identify themes and explore possible questions, but it doesn’t automatically tell you what a community needs or how people feel about a particular issue. For charities working with vulnerable or underrepresented audiences, direct research, listening to the people they support and drawing on the knowledge of frontline teams remain essential.
This matters especially when charities are communicating about sensitive issues such as physical health, mental health, financial hardship or personal welfare.
Getting the message right isn’t simply a matter of tone of voice. People may use that information to make important decisions about their lives.
For charities, accurate and responsible communication isn’t an additional consideration. It’s fundamental to the work they do.
The changing search landscape creates another opportunity
AI isn’t just changing how organisations create content. It’s also changing how people discover information. Search behaviour is evolving as AI-powered tools increasingly provide answers, recommendations and summaries, sometimes before someone visits a website.
For charities, this introduces another dimension to digital visibility.
The 2026 Charity Digital Skills Report found that 29% of charities are prioritising content that improves their visibility in AI search tools, rising to 45% among larger charities.
I think this is an area charity marketing teams should be paying close attention to.
Consider someone looking for information about a medical condition, financial support or help with a difficult personal situation. They might previously have started with a traditional Google search, exploring different websites to find the information they needed.
Now, their journey might begin with a question to an AI-powered search tool.
For charities providing specialist advice and support, there’s an important opportunity to make sure their expertise is discoverable wherever those questions are being asked.
But that doesn’t mean abandoning established SEO principles or chasing every new approach to generative engine optimisation.
The fundamentals of good content remain essential.
Clear, accurate information. Demonstrable expertise. Well-structured websites. Content that answers genuine audience questions. And a strong understanding of what people are looking for.
For charities working in areas that can affect people’s health, financial security or wellbeing, this also connects closely with Google’s approach to Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) content, where trustworthiness and accuracy are particularly important.
AI search may be changing the way information is presented, but the need for reliable, useful and authoritative information hasn’t disappeared. If anything, it gives charities another reason to invest in the quality of the content they already produce.
For charity marketing teams, I’d start by reviewing the questions people are already asking through website search, organic search data, support enquiries and conversations with frontline colleagues. Does your website answer those questions clearly? Is specialist information attributed to people with relevant expertise? Are important pages kept up to date, easy to navigate and accessible?
These are sensible improvements whether someone discovers your organisation through Google, an AI-generated answer or a recommendation from another source. And they’re a more useful starting point than trying to optimise content for an AI tool without understanding what your audience actually needs.
Trust shouldn’t become a casualty of efficiency
Of course, the increasing use of AI brings important considerations around accuracy, transparency and data.
The 2026 Charity Digital Skills Report found that 47% of charities either have an AI policy or are developing one, meaning many organisations are still establishing how they want the technology to be used.
For marketing teams, this needs to be a practical conversation rather than something left entirely to IT or governance.
What information are we comfortable using within AI tools? Who is responsible for checking AI-assisted content? When do we need specialist review? And how do we maintain an authentic voice when more of the content creation process can be automated?
For example, there’s a big difference between using AI to help structure a fundraising campaign report and entering identifiable information about the people a charity supports into a tool without appropriate safeguards. Marketing teams need to understand their organisation’s data protection requirements, which tools are approved for use and what information should never be shared. They also need clear responsibility for checking facts, statistics and sensitive claims before anything is published.
These questions are particularly relevant when communications involve sensitive personal experiences or specialist advice. But I don’t think they should discourage charities from embracing AI.
Instead, clear guidance and appropriate human oversight can give teams the confidence to experiment, learn and develop better ways of working.
Technology and human expertise shouldn’t be competing priorities. The strongest approach brings them together.
Measuring what matters
Perhaps the biggest opportunity is to rethink what successful AI adoption actually looks like.
It’s tempting to focus on efficiency metrics. How much time has been saved? How quickly can content be produced? How many tasks can be automated?
Those measures have their place, especially when resources are stretched. But for marketing leaders, I think we need to look further.
If AI helps a charity improve the quality of its website content, are more people finding the information they need?
If it helps analyse campaign performance, are those insights leading to better decisions about budgets and audiences?
If it frees up time within a marketing team, is that capacity being reinvested into more creative thinking, stronger campaigns or better relationships with supporters?
And if it’s supporting fundraising communications, is it helping to create more relevant and meaningful engagement rather than simply increasing the volume of messages being sent?
These are the outcomes that matter.
At Wrapped, our approach to digital starts with understanding audiences, defining objectives and connecting the different elements of marketing strategy.
Our work with Crohn’s & Colitis UK is a useful example of why audience-first thinking matters. By combining research, accessible creative, search insights and targeted media activity, the campaign helped people find resources designed to support them in understanding gut health concerns.
This wasn’t an AI-led campaign, but the principle is directly relevant. We started with what people needed to understand and how best to reach them, then developed the marketing approach around those needs.
That’s how I’d encourage charities to think about AI too. Start with the audience and the objective, then decide whether the technology can help you deliver a better outcome.
AI should support that thinking, not replace it.
The future belongs to charities that use AI with purpose
AI presents exciting opportunities for charities to work smarter, understand their audiences and make a greater impact.
But success won’t come from adopting the most tools or producing the most content. It will come from using technology strategically, with clear objectives and the right human expertise behind it.
For charity leaders, the question isn’t simply whether to embrace AI. It’s what they want AI to help them achieve.
