Some fund-raising organizations (including of course political parties) induce you to open their envelopes by telling you there’s a NATIONAL OPINION SURVEY enclosed. Please fill out our survey – we want to hear what YOU think – oh, and if you could send us a buck or two, that would be great!
Does this data actually go anywhere?
People who fill out the survey feel like they’ve made a personal connection and so are more likely to donate. That is their only function.
Next time you get some compare two different forms side by side. Look at the black & white bars on the edge of the form (they’re called ‘skunk marks’ BTW). These are what an optical scanner would use if the forms are indeed meant to be scanned.
If two different forms have identical skunk marks but are not similar in format I would suspect they’re fake (skunk marks) and are there to fool people into believing that they’ll actually be scanned (counted) when in fact the forms (but not the donations) are just being throw away.
We’ve had real surveys to our donors/constituents, but we’ve never combined them with an ask. I’d be very suspicious that they’d serve any useful purpose–self-selection bias, you know.
It’s definitely the primary function, but I’d be surprised if it was the only one. Groups like those can use those statistics in a number of ways. Often, it’s internally - one of my nonprofit clients pairs a survey with fundraising and the board looks at the results when making decisions about the group’s priorities and budgeting.
I can believe a targeted coherent group might be usefully surveyed. That has no connection that I can see to the type of surveying mentioned by the OP.
The responses, I concede, might be useful to future fund-raising if certain issues or phrases can be culled for those huge scary large-type THE WORLD IS FALLING headlines that are used to goad people into giving money now to stop the horrible people from taking over the world. But that is not data in any sense that I think the OP is using the word.
If we are talking about the same thing, then I challenge you to offer any proof that any “national opinion poll” is ever used for actual data gathering instead of future sucker-list purposes.