As an artist, I have some issues with crowdsourcing labor. Those issues are diminished a bit when we're doing it for charity, where money isn't our primary motivator. But "contest" type jobs are becoming more and more common as a general practice and they devalue our labor. For it to actually be in our best interest, the contest prize needs to be proportional to the risk of not getting anything, but it almost always is, in fact, lower than the going rate. $295 is in the ballpark of a standard fee, but still on the lower end of the spectrum
I don't have a lot of logo design experience so I'm not personally invested in this particular job, but I'd rather the SIAI ask for samples of people's work, pick a candidate with a proven track record and just hire them to do the job. Grocery stores don't have contests to see who's the best cashier and only pay the best one, nor do law firms or corporations hiring a CEO.
Your enemy is not the client; your enemy is other artists. They're the ones glutting the market and driving the prices down.
The typical strategy for labor is to unionize to exclude competition, but I don't see that ever working out for artists. It's too difficult to fight scabs, and very few people go into art because they always wanted to own their own small business (and yet, they often find that's what art is), so the level of business sense seems to be lower than most fields.
Of my favorite artists, most of them work for $10 an hour or less most of the ...
If you have graphic design experience, check out the on-going logo design competition at 99designs for the Singularity Institute. There are still 6 days left to enter and be eligible to win the $295 prize if your design is selected. Tell your friends with graphic design experience too. There are very few submissions currently.
Note: This is a blind contest. Designers can only see their own entries. All designs will be revealed when the contest ends.
If you're interested at getting a peek at the designs, they will be online after the competition is over. This is standard practice in 99designs contests to prevent designers from contaminating each other and having all the designs drift in a certain direction.