If your membership is large I suggest not surveying everyone, but break membership into subsets and manage last survey dates. Then you can get information and support your members, but not badger your membership and cause dissatisfaction.

Some organizations can get away with surveying their members more often, but I don’t know how your response rates have been in the past to comment here.

There is a definite threshold and you don’t want to go over the line.

The key is to understand their appetite for research, look at the size of your membership to determine if you can segment out and only survey a portion of membership and still get the statistical significance necessary for a quality study, and look at the incentives you give to members who participate.

Having a study on a website many times doesn’t work as well and typically an email with the link is the way to go if you want higher response rates, reminder management, tracing. E-newsletters with a link may work, but it may compromise the data or cause box stuffing.

If you can share the results of the research it would help as well. We have found that if a member filling out a research study sees value in the results and will get a copy of the report free, they are more apt to participate in more studies. In one association they go to members just about every 90 days with a study, get high response rates, but always share the report with anyone participating. Others pay for the published study.

They pick the right studies and put out a quality report so members look forward to them. Members see value in participating and the research has become a membership benefit! In this case the research studies got the #1 rating on satisfaction of all the services offered to membership. That is what may want to strive for.

Hope this helps. Good luck.