I'm not a stats saviour, but I have some experience in this area. You can approach this in a couple of ways -- the statistical approach is to determine your confidence interval and then send out an appropriate number of surveys to achieve that result based on an expected response rate (e.g. 1% for unsolicited surveys, maybe 10-25% for professional associations). Just by eyeballing the numbers, if you want a high confidence interval (say 95%), you'll probably have to send a survey to almost everyone... And this may be the only option if you will be publishing your results, running a study, etc.
However, if you're approaching it from a business point-of-view, perhaps the first thing to consider is your resources (your budget, the logistics of sending & receiving 1000+ surveys, etc.) What's the maximum number of surveys that you can send? If it's an electronic survey, is there an issue with sending one to each member?
The biggest problem you'll face is estimating your response rate -- and from experience, be conservative. Have similar surveys been done in the past? If so, that can help. Is there a number of completed surveys that would make you comfortable with the results?
I've found that it is very difficult to survey customers/stakeholders with an expectation that you'll receive a statistically significant, evenly distributed response. The approach that many companies use is to survey as many people as possible... and hope for the best. Is that an option?
|