Put your wallet away: your time is more valuable than money for charities. Charities have been advised that they would do better financially if they concentrated on encouraging people to volunteer their time rather than on donations.

An article published in this month's Harvard Business Review says companies should encourage senior executives to give time to the not-for-profit sector - this would benefit the charities, the companies and the executives.

Meanwhile, research by academics at Stanford Graduate School of Business and University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) shows that charities could raise more money if they stopped focusing on donations.

David Simmons and Wayne Luke, both partners at Bridgespan Group, a non-profit consultancy that advises non-profit organisations, write in HBR that “programs to help people move into non-profits or [work in] education can make restless managers more productive until their departure, further the corporation's CSR goals by aiding the community and benefit the company's image”. Such programmes would benefit charities too - in the United States alone non-profit organisations need to find at least 330,000 senior executives by 2016 to fill gaps created by retirements and growth in the sector.

This approach is one which is beginning to find favour in the UK. At PricewaterhouseCoopers, a two-day pre-retirement course called ‘Running The Rest Of Your Life' gave 58-year-old, Mohammed Amin, a PwC partner, the impetus to start networking within the Muslim community while still working. He wants to play an active role nationally in the Muslim community when he retires in two and half years. Mr Amin says being encouraged to volunteer while still at the firm makes sense: “It is easier to make contacts because you meet more people and can use the company name. But it also raises your profile at work and that of your company in a good way.”

He added: “I have no aspirations to earn more money. There is no point in working until the day you drop. This way I am giving back to the community in the form of time.”

This would please Jennifer Aaker from Stanford GSB and Wendy Liu of UCLA who say that charities should switch their focus from money to time. In a report published in the December edition of Stanford Knowledge Base they say: “When people are solicited for their time, they automatically think in terms of emotional meaning and fulfilment: will volunteering for this charity make me happy? When tapped for money they start thinking about the far more practical, boring, and sometimes painful matter of economic utility: Will making a donation make a dent in my wallet?”

They tested their hypothesis in a series of experiments and found that if people were asked first to donate time and then money - they were likely to give twice as much money on average than those asked first about money or those asked only about money. “The mere mention of money serves to distance people,” Ms Aaker said. Those asked to donate time first also volunteered more time than those asked for money first.

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