Data Analytics and Reporting Dashboards for UK Charities (2026)

Most UK charities collect far more data than they realise. Attendance registers, referral forms, survey responses, case notes, donation records — it all adds up. The problem is rarely a lack of data. It is a lack of tools, skills, and time to turn that data into decisions. In a sector where over 170,000 registered charities share a combined income of just over 103 billion pounds, the organisations that can read their own numbers clearly are the ones best placed to survive tightening funding and growing demand.

This guide explains how UK charities can use data analytics and reporting dashboards to make better decisions, report confidently to trustees, and demonstrate impact to funders — without needing a data science team.

TL;DR: Data analytics helps charities move from guesswork to evidence. Plinth combines case management, surveys, outcome tracking, and AI-powered impact reporting in a single platform — meaning your analytics sit on top of your day-to-day operational data. For organisations already using a standalone CRM, Power BI, Makerble, or Salesforce with Tableau can add reporting layers. The right choice depends on your data maturity, team size, and reporting requirements.

What you'll learn: Why data analytics matters for charities, the most common data challenges, what good analytics looks like in practice, how to report to trustees and funders, and which platforms are available in 2026.

Who this is for: Charity managers, operations leads, programme directors, trustees, and anyone responsible for reporting, monitoring, or demonstrating impact.

Why Data Analytics Matters for Charities

Definition: Data analytics in the charity context means systematically collecting, organising, and interpreting information about your services, beneficiaries, finances, and outcomes to inform decisions, improve programmes, and satisfy reporting obligations. A reporting dashboard is a visual interface — typically web-based — that presents key metrics in real time using charts, tables, and summary figures.

Charities have always reported on what they do. Annual reports, funder returns, Charity Commission filings — these are not new. What has changed is the expectation that reporting should be timely, evidence-based, and tied to outcomes rather than just outputs.

According to the 2025 Charity Digital Skills Report, over 75% of UK charities report low data literacy across their organisations, and 39% say they do not make effective use of their website or analytics data. At the same time, 69% cite organisational finances as the primary barrier to digital progress — meaning most charities cannot simply hire analysts to solve the problem.

The shift matters for three reasons. First, funders increasingly require outcome-level data rather than simple activity counts. Second, trustees have a legal responsibility under the Charities Act to ensure resources are used effectively, and data is how they verify that. Third, charities that understand their own data can spot problems earlier, allocate resources more efficiently, and design better services.

Data Orchard's State of the Sector report, drawing on almost 12,000 respondents from over 1,000 organisations, found that the average data maturity score for nonprofits has only shifted from 2.7 to 3.0 out of 5 over four years. Progress is happening, but it is slow — and charities that invest now gain a genuine competitive advantage.

Common Data Challenges for UK Charities

Data silos

The most common problem is not a lack of data — it is data trapped in disconnected systems. Donations sit in one database. Case records live in another. Survey results are stored in a third platform, or worse, on someone's laptop. When data cannot be joined together, it is nearly impossible to answer questions like "which of our services produces the best outcomes for the least cost?" or "are the beneficiaries we reach through outreach different from those who self-refer?"

Spreadsheet dependency

Spreadsheets are powerful, flexible, and nearly universal. They are also fragile, error-prone, and impossible to scale. A single misplaced formula can silently corrupt months of reporting data. Version control is practically non-existent — "FinalReport_v3_FINAL_Tom_edits.xlsx" is a reality in most charities. Yet the 2025 Charity Digital Skills Report found that 50% of charities say they are either poor at, or not engaging at all with, investing in digital tools effectively. Spreadsheets persist because the alternatives have historically been expensive or complicated.

The Charity Commission's 2024-25 annual report noted that the sector now employs over 1.28 million people and has more than 924,000 trustee positions. The administrative burden of manual data management at this scale is significant — and avoidable.

Low data literacy

Even when charities have decent tools, staff often lack the confidence to use them. Data literacy — the ability to read, interpret, and communicate with data — is a skill gap across the sector. This is not about advanced statistics. It is about knowing how to filter a dashboard, interpret a trend line, or frame a finding for a board report.

The 2025 Charity Digital Skills Report found that 50% of charities say funding for staff and volunteer training on digital or data is needed, up from 43% the previous year. Demand for data skills is rising, but investment in building those skills is not keeping pace.

Reporting as an afterthought

Too many charities treat data collection as something that happens at the end of a project, rather than building it into service delivery from day one. When a funder asks for an end-of-year report and the charity has to spend three weeks hunting through emails and paper forms to assemble the numbers, the cost is not just time — it is credibility.

What Good Charity Analytics Looks Like

Good analytics in a charity context is not about complex machine learning models or data science PhDs. It is about four things done consistently well.

1. Structured data capture at the point of delivery. Information about beneficiaries, activities, and outcomes is recorded in a consistent format as services are delivered — not reconstructed afterwards. This means using digital forms, case management systems, or survey tools that feed into a central data store.

2. Live dashboards that answer operational questions. Programme managers should be able to open a dashboard and immediately see how many people they have served this quarter, what the demographic breakdown looks like, which sessions are fully booked, and where waiting lists are growing. This is not about vanity metrics. It is about managing services in real time.

3. Outcome tracking tied to frameworks. Whether you use Outcomes Star, WEMWBS, the Theory of Change model, or a bespoke framework, your analytics should show progress against defined outcome indicators — not just how many people walked through the door.

Street League, a UK sport-for-employment charity, created what was described as the first monthly-updated online impact dashboard in the charity sector, allowing stakeholders to interact with real-time outcome data rather than waiting for annual reports.

4. Narrative reporting that tells the story. Numbers alone do not persuade. Good analytics combines quantitative data with qualitative insight — case studies, quotes, and context — to produce reports that trustees and funders can actually use to make decisions.

Trustee Reporting: What Boards Need to See

Trustees have a legal duty to act in the charity's best interests and to ensure funds are used appropriately. The Charity Commission's guidance on the trustees' annual report (SORP FRS 102) requires charities to report on their objectives, activities, achievements, performance, and financial position.

In practice, this means trustees need to see:

• Financial dashboards showing income versus expenditure, restricted versus unrestricted funds, and cash flow forecasts
• Service delivery metrics covering beneficiary numbers, demographics, and geographic reach
• Outcome data demonstrating whether programmes are achieving their intended impact
• Risk indicators highlighting safeguarding concerns, compliance issues, or operational risks
• Trend data showing performance over time, not just a snapshot

Research published by GOV.UK in 2025 on public trust in charities found that transparency and accountability remain central to maintaining donor and public confidence. Trustees who can point to data-backed decisions are better positioned to demonstrate good governance.

The challenge for most charities is producing this information without drowning staff in reporting work. A well-configured dashboard that pulls from operational data — case management records, financial systems, survey responses — can automate the majority of trustee reporting, freeing staff to focus on analysis and action rather than data compilation.

Funder Reporting: Meeting Requirements Without Burnout

Funder reporting requirements vary enormously. Some funders want a simple narrative with headline figures. Others require detailed outcome frameworks, demographic breakdowns, and financial reconciliation. Many charities manage grants from five, ten, or more funders simultaneously — each with different reporting formats, timelines, and expectations.

The key to managing this without overwhelming your team is having a single source of truth for your data. If all your service delivery, outcome, and financial data flows into one platform, generating funder reports becomes a matter of filtering and exporting — not a three-week manual exercise.

According to the Charity Digital Skills Report 2025, 68% of small charities are still in the early stages of digital adoption. For these organisations, even basic dashboard reporting represents a significant step forward from the current reality of manually compiled spreadsheets and emailed Word documents.

AI-powered reporting tools are increasingly relevant here. Rather than asking staff to write narrative summaries of their data, some platforms can generate draft reports automatically — highlighting key trends, flagging anomalies, and structuring findings in a format suitable for specific funders.

Impact Dashboards: Proving Your Worth

An impact dashboard is distinct from a standard operational dashboard. While operational dashboards focus on activity and throughput (sessions delivered, people seen, hours logged), impact dashboards focus on change — what difference your work has made to the people you serve.

Effective impact dashboards typically include:

• Pre/post outcome scores (e.g. wellbeing measures, confidence scales, employment status)
• Distance travelled — showing how far beneficiaries have progressed against defined indicators
• Demographic analysis — showing whether your impact is equitable across different groups
• Benchmarking — comparing your results against sector averages where data is available
• Longitudinal tracking — following outcomes over months or years, not just at the point of service exit

Buttle UK, a charity supporting children and young people, publishes live data dashboards showing real-time information about who they are helping and where, setting a transparency standard that more charities are beginning to follow.

Platform Comparison: Data Analytics Tools for UK Charities

Plinth

Plinth is designed so that analytics are a natural output of the work charities already do. Because case management, surveys, and outcome tracking all live in one platform, dashboards and reports draw on a single, consistent data set.

• Impact Reporting — Agent Pippin lets you ask questions about your data in plain English and receive narrative answers with supporting tables and charts. Instead of building queries or pivot tables, you type "How many young people improved their wellbeing score by two or more points this quarter?" and get an answer.
• Monitoring & Reporting — live KPI dashboards covering demographics, outcomes, service utilisation, and geographic reach. Dashboards update in real time as caseworkers record activities and outcomes.
• Surveys — built-in survey tools for collecting beneficiary feedback, outcome measures, and evaluation data. Responses feed directly into your analytics without manual export or import steps.
• Case Management — structured data capture at the point of service delivery, ensuring your analytics are only as good as the data underneath them.

Power BI

Microsoft Power BI is a general-purpose business intelligence tool that charities can use to build custom dashboards on top of existing data sources — CRMs, spreadsheets, financial systems, or databases. It is powerful and flexible, but requires technical skill to set up and maintain. Power BI Desktop is free; the Pro licence costs from 7.50 pounds per user per month, with charity discounts available through Microsoft's nonprofit programme.

Power BI works best for larger charities that already have a data warehouse or structured data sources and need a visualisation layer. It is not a data collection or case management tool.

Makerble

Makerble is a UK-based platform purpose-built for impact measurement. It combines CRM functionality with surveys, outcome tracking, and reporting dashboards. Makerble describes itself as the "Google Analytics of Impact" and is designed to be accessible for frontline workers and volunteers, with an interface modelled on familiar social media patterns.

Makerble is used by local authorities, charities, social enterprises, and funders. It is particularly strong for organisations that need to track participant journeys and generate impact reports for multiple stakeholders.

Salesforce + Tableau

Salesforce offers a Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) that adapts its CRM for charity use, and Tableau provides advanced data visualisation capabilities. Together, they form a powerful analytics stack — but one that comes with enterprise-level complexity and cost. This combination suits large charities with dedicated IT or data teams and the budget to support implementation and ongoing customisation.

The 2025 Charity Digital Skills Report found that 76% of charities reported using AI tools — up from 61% the previous year — but 64% still make limited or no use of AI in their day-to-day work. The gap between awareness and practical adoption remains wide.

Data Orchard

Data Orchard is not a software platform in the traditional sense. It is a specialist consultancy that helps nonprofits assess and improve their data maturity. Its Data Maturity Assessment tool — used by over 1,000 organisations — helps charities understand where they stand across seven dimensions: uses, data, analysis, leadership, culture, tools, and skills. For charities that are not yet ready for a full analytics platform, Data Orchard's framework provides a structured path to data readiness.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do small charities need data analytics tools, or are spreadsheets enough?

Spreadsheets work for very small, simple operations — but they become a liability as soon as you have more than one person entering data, more than one funder to report to, or any requirement for real-time visibility. The risk is not just inefficiency; it is inaccuracy. A single formula error in a spreadsheet can produce incorrect reports that go to trustees and funders without anyone noticing. Purpose-built tools like Plinth are designed to be affordable for small charities while eliminating the risks inherent in spreadsheet-based reporting. If your charity has more than about 50 active cases or beneficiaries, a structured system will save you time within months.

How do we improve data literacy across our team?

Start with the tools, not the training. Staff who can see their own data in a well-designed dashboard — and who understand how it connects to their work — develop data confidence organically. Complement this with practical, role-specific training rather than generic "data skills" workshops. Organisations like DataKind UK offer free community events and support programmes for charities looking to build data capability. Data Orchard's maturity framework can help you identify specific skill gaps. Most importantly, make data a regular part of team meetings and decision-making, not something that only happens at reporting time.

What should we look for when choosing a charity analytics platform?

Prioritise integration over features. The most powerful analytics tool in the world is useless if your data is stuck in a separate system. Look for platforms where data collection (case management, surveys, activity recording) and analytics (dashboards, reports) live in the same place. Beyond that, check for UK data hosting, GDPR compliance, charity-appropriate pricing, the ability to export your data if you leave, and — increasingly — AI-powered reporting that can generate narrative summaries alongside charts and tables. Ask for a demo with your actual use case, not just a generic walkthrough.

Can AI really write our funder reports?

AI can draft them. It cannot — and should not — replace human judgement about what to include, how to frame findings, and what context matters. Tools like Plinth's Agent Pippin generate narrative reports by analysing your underlying data and producing structured summaries. These drafts typically need light editing for tone, context, and emphasis, but they can reduce the time spent on report writing from days to hours. The key is that the AI is working from your real, structured data — not hallucinating statistics. This is why integrated platforms, where the AI has direct access to verified operational data, produce more reliable outputs than standalone AI writing tools.

Recommended Next Pages

• Impact Reporting — how Plinth's AI agent generates narrative impact reports from your data
• Monitoring & Reporting — live KPI dashboards, demographics, and outcome tracking
• Best Monitoring and Evaluation Software for UK Charities — a detailed comparison of M&E tools
• Case Management Software for Charities — how structured data capture improves your analytics
• Digital Transformation for Charities — the broader context for moving from spreadsheets to platforms
• Survey Tools for Charities — collecting the data that feeds your dashboards

Last updated: February 2026 Want better data insights? Book a demo or contact our team.