Dee Dee Becker - President, Becker Communications

Dee Dee is a parent of a Virginia Tech Hokie alum and serves as lead admin for the Virginia Tech Parents Facebook group and founder of University Parent Group Admins for community managers like her who run university parent groups. With 28K members, Virginia Tech Parents is the largest parent-only university parent group in the US. University Parent Group Admins has 672 members representing nearly 300 university parent groups across the US, UK, and Canada. With a background in marketing, PR, and crisis management, I helped manage multiple communities through several crises: an active shooter incident, the pandemic, student suicides, and more. Through these tragedies, Dee Dee saw the superpower of community come to life as her admin team and members came together to create meaningful impact on each other’s lives. It continuously stirs her passion for community management, bringing her back to it day after day. At the same time, she has authored several case studies and spoken about crisis management at Meta’s global headquarters. She is a Meta Certified Community Manager and was hired as a full-time contingent worker on Meta’s Community Management Team. For more than 15 years now, she has also managed online health communities for hospitals and health systems, crafting and telling the stories of healthcare heroes and other brands “doing good” for the communities they serve. Ask her about the time a Navy jet crashed in Virginia Beach (all survived), or when a hospital patient caused a shocking stir with a fake bomb threat and how she managed that active shooter incident she mentioned, as well as ongoing critical global health discussions in several official Meta-managed online communities.