Erika Snider

One day while riding the bus to Belfast, Erika Snider found herself sitting next to Liam Neeson’s mom.

“People used to tell me, ‘Oh, Ireland’s so small. Everyone knows each other.’ And I was like, ‘No, it’s not like that.’ And then I go there and meet Liam Neeson’s mom. I realized I needed to update my frame of reference.”

That wasn’t the only revelation to come from that early life experience. Erika spent a whole year living in her mother’s hometown in Portlaoise, a small farming community on the trainline between Dublin and Cork — a far cry from her home in bustling Marin County. “Seeing how people lived there taught me the importance of looking at things from other points of view,” Erika says.

That empathy has followed Erika throughout her life, and it’s become her secret weapon. She has since devoted her career to helping others communicate in a more compassionate way.

She began her work at CNN, where she manned the assignment desk while pursuing a path in traditional journalism. Five years later, she left the world of news behind to pursue a business degree. After graduating, an opportunity at the U.S. General Services Administration came along, introducing her to internal comms, and she never looked back.

One of the early turning points came when she got to plan the groundbreaking for a new courthouse in Yuma, Arizona. The courthouse was being named for Judge John Roll, who was shot to death in 2011. Erika had the idea that, instead of having a separate section for senators and VIPs, the judge’s entire family should be seated alongside the dignitaries in attendance. “It became almost like a memorial service,” Erika recalls. “It was in that moment that I realized that journalism wasn’t the only place you can touch people’s lives.”

Erika spent three years at the GSA, then a couple more at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and the Crawford Group. Then in 2015 she joined First Republic Bank where she built the bank’s first ever internal comms program during a time of hypergrowth: she created an internal newsletter, helped develop the intranet, and even wrote the playbook that employees would use whenever a crisis struck. This became especially valuable when a series of devastating wildfires struck California, and customers began calling the bank with questions about their homes.

In the years since then, Erika has moved from finance to several other industries, including tech, renewables, pharmaceuticals, and travel. She’s lived in the Netherlands while supporting the Chief People Officer and Chief Legal Officer at Booking.com; consulted with companies across the Americas, Europe, and Asia on how to draft their return-to-work policies following the COVID-19 pandemic; and supported executive comms at Anaplan and, most recently, Aurora Solar.

In 2025, Erika joined ROI where she began supporting clients from our eBay and Waste Management accounts.

When she’s not using her powers of compassion, Erika can be found remodeling her condo in Benicia, walking her brother’s dog Trudy, or high up on the trails of Sugarloaf Ridge State Park with her hiking group. She has an M.B.A. from the University of San Francisco and a B.A. in political science from the University of California San Diego.