DPA Organization reiterates its strategic use of social media forums for multiple purposes.

In a piece shared with its forum members, the organization differentiates itself from other popular social media groups. The piece titled “DPA does not measure membership participation by comments to posts” which was posted on the organization’s Facebook reads as follows:

DPA DOES NOT MEASURE MEMBERSHIP PARTICIPATION BY COMMENTS TO POSTS

December 15, 2019

Once in a while, you come across critics who try to measure DPA Forum membership engagement by the number of comments to our posts. But that is a very wrong approach that reflects ignorance of what DPA is and how this forum works. Such critics are basically comparing DPA to Igboist or Rants Headquarters and such other groups.

In those other groups, their goal is to excite reactions from as many as possible members. They do so based on the type of topics they discuss. For instance, a member of Igboist may make a post of just one sentence such as: “Have you ever been disappointed by someone you loved?” If you publish that as a post, everybody has something to say. So you can expect 90% of their group members to have an opinion or experience to share on the subject.

However, it is different in DPA. For instance, if a law professor posts a professional or scholarly article on Prenuptial Agreements, you don’t expect a lot of people to have experience or opinions to share on the subject. Yet 99% of the group members learned something from the post. DPA aims to discuss serious subjects and to teach law and related subjects to our members. Indeed, it will be abnormal for us if 2000 people were to express an opinion on any of our posts. The reason is that we take time to go through people’s reactions to our posts in order to address any issues and clarify points raised by them.

What we expect from our members most of the time are questions, not their own opinions on the subject matter of the post. And to minimize the questions, we try to use simple language and straightforward illustrations to discuss the subject matter. Take for instance the first post yesterday on prenuptial. We deliberately used the illustration of a tailor, custom-made or ready-made clothes in order to make easy for an average person to reason along as he reads the post. We were just trying to reduce the number of people who would have questions based on the fact that they did not understand the post.

When we make a post, we measure participation in three different ways:

(1) How many people learned something new from the post? We estimate that 99% of members who read a typical post would have learned one thing new or the other from it.

(2) How many people had questions on the post based on comments received? We are disappointed when many people have questions based on comments because it means we did not explain the subject thoroughly.

(3) How many people came to us inbox with requests for our help with the personal problems they have had on related issues? For instance, over 20 people have contacted us privately with personal questions on prenuptial, after reading our post yesterday.

Another thing to bear in mind is that over 75% of DPA posts are done by professionals who have formal training on the subject of the post. So, most of the time if you react to a post on DPA, you are reacting to a post by a professional. It is not like in the other groups where anybody can post on any subject. In those groups, a shoemaker can post his views on constitutional law and all the shoemakers in the world will join with their own opinions on constitutional law.

Yes, certainly we encourage more engagements from our forum members. But bear in mind that we are not like other groups that measure progress by the number of people they have talking at the same time. We prefer that our members read 50 quality comments than to have to wade through a thousand comments that are meaningless beyond their comic value.