Plan Your Survey:
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Be as clear and specific as possible about what it is that you are looking for. Write it down. Run it by coworkers. If you don’t, you risk creating vague questions and meandering surveys that generate useless data.

Be prepared to offer an incentive for completion of the survey, e.g., a white paper download, or a raffle entry for a larger prize to ensure that you hear from as wide a spectrum of your audience as possible.

Be conscious of length: if you go beyond three pages, you’ll get fewer responses, many of which will be incomplete.

To be sure the questions you ask will give you the data you want, you need to ask them in the right format. The goal is 1) to get your respondents to answer on topic, and 2) to collect answers in a way that allows as much summarization and analysis as possible.

A closed question type is one where the respondent clicks an answer visible on their screen. Because it’s quicker and easier both for the respondents to answer these questions, and for the preparer to graph, total, and manipulate the results, closed questions get used more often than open-ended questions. For multiple-choice questions, be sure to include options like "don't know," "N/A," and/or "other" as appropriate.

On the other hand, open-ended questions generally allow richer detail in areas that you couldn’t have anticipated, and can convey to the respondent that their true opinions are being recorded and heard. They’re more difficult to process, however.

Pulling It All Together:
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Write your survey on paper first. Do not design your survey within the web interface of your survey software. Revisions and reordering will be frustratingly slow and awkward.

Test the email message. This includes the subject line, text, and links. Make sure that a link to the survey itself shows in the first screen of email text.

Be careful about sending reminder emails. If your survey software has an option to send reminder emails only to people who haven’t responded yet, use it. In any case, don’t send more than two reminders, or you’ll alienate your constituents.

On the final page, next to any demographic questions, give respondents the opportunity to get more involved in your organization, for example, with a checkbox allowing them to subscribe to an e-newsletter.

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Summarized by the WOUGNET TechSupport team from an article by: Arthur Prokosch, Online Services Manager at Third Sector New Sector http://www.massnonprofit.org/expert.php?artid=815&catid=67