The most valuable thing you can donate to charity...

I discovered the other day that my vow to not use this blog to rant appears not to have been very effective. It started in the snow, but recently I've talked ranted about the car industry, Starbucks, reality TV and mobile phones. I intend to do something about my negative tone with some lunchtime blogging that is most definitely not a rant...

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I believe that the most valuable thing you can donate to charity is time.

Take for example the sum of £50. To most people, it is a fairly substantive sum of money. Regardless of whether you earn £5 an hour or £100k a year, it is likely that you'll think twice before you spend £50.

Think about how long you (yes, you!) have to work to earn £50. If you donated £50 to a charity of your choice the chances are that the charity in question will be fairly chuffed. But consider this, what if you donated the same amount... in time?

Last time I checked, minimum wage was £6.08 per hour. This means that someone on minimum wage will take a little over 8 hours to earn £50. That's a lot of time. A long day's work.

Last year, there were 4 of us from Round Table collecting for Children in Need at Edinburgh Waverley station. Over the course of a 12 hour day, we were probably collecting for about 8 hours. We raised £1,720 in that day alone, and with manpower from Round Tables across the nation the combined total was tens of thousands of pounds. Our figure is a helluva lot more than £50 each, and we're hoping to raise even more this year with Pudsey in attendance.

And that's just fundraising; imagine what you could get done with a whole day of 'doing' things for charity! It might be on the phone at the other end of the samaritans, helping people through a low in their life. It might be a local charity who do fantastic work in your community (one thing which round table has opened my eyes to is that there are many local charities). Your time would make a difference to any number of wonderful organisations.

The next time you think about donating to a charity, stop and think for a second. Think about what else you could do instead of just paying over a bit of cash. Because even if you could give up a teeny tiny bit of your time, it would make a difference. THEN make your donation.