Page 145 - Enabling National Initiatives to Take Democracy Beyond Elections

The primary emphasis here is on the physical addresses and not the names of the people who may reside or own the property. The aim is to simply get the invitation to the people that are there. When faced with insufficient response rates from specific demographics, you can add to your sample with specialised targeted databases.Trade schools,sports teams or a University are great to target youth response rates as an example. How many invitations do you need? The total number of invites is often between 20,000 to 30,000 for a population of approximately 500,000 and for a group size of 40-50. Population size and group size change how many invitations are required but, the key factor determining this number will be your expected response rate and the availability of demographics to draw from. It is much harder to get fresh RSVPs than it is to send out extra invitations at the outset. These invitations will be sent to random physical addresses with no name, so as to not discriminate between those who own or rent their property. From this round of invitations, an expected response rate of 3-5% will return a pool of approximately 500-1000. The size of this pool in combination with random selection reduces concerns of the narrowness of the reach and any skew that might entail. 143