Hi Russ,
that are quite a few questions... So there is a section at the website for downloading surveys shared by others:
www.limesurvey.org/downloads/category/13-surveys
But I am not sure if you will find something useful there. Maybe there is some more advice available at the forums.
At
survey-consulting.com/survey-design-tips-tricks/
and
survey-consulting.com/survey-design-tips-tricks-part-2/
there are some more hints about how to create "good" surveys.
Determining if a survey was successful based on the response rate can be tricky. Most surveys will differ a lot and thus that is not a reliable measure.
From our experience at > 1000 Limesurvey projects there are three things which are important:
1. Address your users carefully. You should outline what the survey is about, how long it will take and what the benefit of the survey is.
2. Keep your survey/questions simple. The shorter the texts, the better.
3. Only aks the really important questions. Of those, only mark some very few as mandatory.
That would be a first start for raising the response rate.