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At the London Community Cricket Association (LCCA), a small charity that has been using cricket to do some good in London's more difficult communities for more than 20 years, we are also trying to do our bit. We are offering to send our entire specialist coaching staff to cricket-mad Sri Lanka to organise some games in the orphanages for free. In order to do this we need about £5000 for travel and subsistence, a paltry sum by DEC standards but still difficult for a small charity to raise at short notice.

Which brings me to my point. How can small, successful, tightly defined charities with no promotional budget attract cash for their valuable work, when so much money is being siphoned off by the big boys? It mirrors the problems in many markets, where a few big brands dominate and smaller, specialist firms struggle to hurdle the barriers to entry or, more likely, have to find clever ways round them.

The Marketing Society ran a splendid seminar last year on the charity market and how it interfaces with companies' corporate social responsibility policies. But it was dominated by the big charities and the big companies, and so offered no answers to the hard-pressed smaller charities.

Yet these smaller organisations have an enormous amount to offer. With these charities you know exactly what has happened to your money. This is a major worry, particularly in relation to a lot of overseas work, and has already been raised as a potential problem the DEC will have to address. There is also no time for politics in small charities, and administration costs are low.

An LCCA sponsor last year could have witnessed the England blind cricket team, which we coach and manage, thrash the Aussies 3-2 in the first ever Blind Ashes series. Or it could have presented the trophy to the winners of the first ever London Youth Inner-City World Cup, which we organised, where 12 teams from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe fought it out at Lord's. Or it could have seen first-hand how cricket can improve social and physical skills among children in special-needs schools throughout London.

At present, this work is funded largely by donations from other charities, such as the wonderful Lord's Taverners, with occasional help from local and national government. But attracting money from the corporate sector, which tends to be conservative in its charity and CSR policies, is difficult.

I would encourage the corporate sector not to ignore the pleas of small, committed, cost-effective, tightly defined charities when drawing up these policies. Remember, charity begins at home.