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There is a trend, among people who write begging letters for charities, to frame their appeal for dosh in the form of a survey. Presumably they think it makes people more willing to start reading it, and that the cause they represent is so shocking that people will be much more likely to continue reading and to give money afterwards.

Perhaps you've not seen any of these letters yet, so you might have trouble imagining how you can make a begging letter into a survey. It is something like the following. On the envelope will be “Free the Mallocs Fund National Survey 2008” in big letters. After a note explaining that “the purpose of this survey is to estimate public opinion on what the Fund should be doing to improve software reliability by freeing the mallocs,” the questions are along the lines of:

A recent report has shown that nearly one computer crash in six is caused by improper memory deallocation. Is this figure more or less than you expected?

The Free the Mallocs Fund campaigns against all forms of memory allocation error. Please place these issues in order of importance to you:
Ensuring that memory allocation errors receive the same level of compiler support as other classes of programming error;
Fighting to change the way that memory allocation is represented by language implementers;
Working to bring about garbage collection in future languages.

The Free the Mallocs Fund sits on nearly 50 committees in national and international standardisation boards helping programmers and their users all over the world. Is this more or less than you expected?

The Free the Mallocs Fund publishes books on software reliability, software efficiency, compiler implementation, and language design. Would you be interested in hearing more about Free the Mallocs Fund books?

Before taking this survey, were you aware that the Free the Mallocs Fund runs these services for programmers and users?
A static analysis tool for detecting likely sources of error;
Runtime instrumentation to detect memory leaks;
Workshops and courses to help programmers write reliable code.

As a charity, the Free the Mallocs Fund relies on donations from the public to continue to operate our vital services. Would you be willing to give ten pounds a month — less than the price of the ISO C++ specification — to help us continue our work?

And then it has a thing at the bottom to fill in your credit card number. If you've ever watched that Yes Prime Minister sketch where Sir Humphrey shows how they carefully word the questions in surveys to get the answers they want, you'll see the parallel immediately, and you'll find this kind of ‘survey’ hilarious. On the other hand, I also find it patronising and unsubtle, and now I've seen a few of the things I put them straight in the recycling pile without reading them.