It is important to define your Target Population very specifically. This may sound simple, but very often it’s not. Your Target Population needs to be clearly defined so that:
- you know who to select / invite to participate in your survey
- the findings can be appropriately interpreted
- any changes in tracking data reflect real changes in respondent attitudes/behaviours, rather than an inadvertent change in target respondents
- you can make appropriate comparisons to findings from other surveys
- your survey sample can be weighted to match key known variables in the Target Population (e.g., gender proportions, company size, etc.)
Not so simple…
- Suppose you are conducting an employee satisfaction survey. The target population is “all employees”. Seems easy enough. But does “all employees” include part-time employees, contract employees, employees on leave, recent hires, how recent???
- Suppose you are conducting a survey of donors to your charity. Your Target Population is all donors. But does “all donors” include people who did not donate in the past 12 months, but donated in the 12 months prior? Does it include people who donated once in the past 5 years? Does it include those who made an in-kind donation?
- Suppose you are conducting a survey of all non-profit organizations in the state of California. Will you included unregistered non-profit organizations, like neighbourhood groups, music groups, gardening clubs, etc.? Will you include non-profit organization with zero revenue? Will you include non-profit organization with only volunteer staff?
It sounds easy to say who you’re going to survey. But when you start to get specific about your Target Audience, it can be tricky… and even contentious.
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Real World Example
The Ontario Nonprofit Network (ONN) conducts an annual State of the Sector survey.
ONN defines its survey Target Population as all nonprofit organisations based in Ontario, including:
- nonprofits
- charities
- grassroots groups with a mission to serve a public benefit
- volunteer-run organizations
- nonprofit social enterprises
- nonprofit cooperatives
Feasibility of Connecting with the Target Population
At first glance, this may appear to be a clearly articulated Target Population. Unfortunately, it is impossible to survey the organizations on this list and produce findings that reflect this Target Population. The issue here is not conceptual, but feasibility. How many ‘grassroots groups with a mission to serve a public benefit’ and how many ‘volunteer-run organizations’ there are in Ontario is unknown and unknowable. Therefore, it is unknown and unknowable what proportion of the Target Population is each organization type constitutes. It is also not possible to invite all members of these informal groups to participate in the survey.
ONN has no way of knowing whether its final survey sample of organisations reflects the Target Population or is highly skewed.
Unit of Analysis
There is another issue with the ONN survey methodology. While ONN defines the survey Target Population as organizations, the survey was completed by individuals. This is not unusualy, except that ONN assumes that each individual represents one unique non-profit organization, even though this is highly unlikely.
If the Target Population is organizations, then the respondents should be organizations with one designated person per organization, responses from all respondents from one organization averaged, or another approach so that each organization gets one ‘voice’ in the survey sample data.