August 11, 2014 | Read Time: 2 minutes
When the international aid group PSI decided to run a contest last spring to capture the names of new people to solicit, the charity’s officials knew that just any kind of sweepstakes wouldn’t do. It decided instead to offer a prize that only people with a real love for international development would get excited about—a paid trip to Washington to meet with the charity’s staff members and other development experts.
“If your prize is a new car, you might get a lot of entries, but very few, if any, would likely be qualified leads,” says Margaret Cohen, senior manager of online engagement at the charity. “We learned that if we want to grow a donor base of people likely to support PSI, we want to target effective altruists.”
“Effective altruism” is a growing movement of donors who aim to do the most good with their money by giving to what they consider the top groups dealing with the world’s most pressing problems.
PSI is well known in global-health and international-development circles but not necessarily elsewhere. In recent years it has gotten more attention than usual from donors because one guru of the movement, the ethicist Peter Singer, has cited it as being particularly effective.
An online-giving campaign got a boost at the end of last year, for example, after Mr. Singer mentioned PSI during a talk-show interview in November.
That helped the group’s annual giving campaign increase from $198,000 from 280 donors in 2012 to $383,000 from 1,000 donors in 2013.
PSI’s annual budget exceeds a half-billion dollars, but almost all of the money comes from governments and large foundations.
The contest is one way PSI has started to reach out to individuals, promoting the group in large part to readers of publications like Mother Jones, whose subscribers include plenty of self-described effective altruists. More than 1,700 people entered the contest, almost all of them new to PSI’s prospects list.
“There are a lot of list-generation strategies, like petitions or any kind of contests,” Ms. Cohen says, “but those are not necessarily a good fit for us. This day in D.C. is what can attract the kind of people it makes sense to have on our list.”
