Overview
Rippleworks partnered with Hone to bring live and AI-powered learning to its growing global team, giving every employee access to high-quality development to build essential leadership and workplace skills.Ā
Through Honeās expert-led classes and always-on AI-powered experiences, Rippleworks was able to:
- Expand development access across 10 countries, giving employees the flexibility to join live classes that fit their time zones and receive personalized, on-demand support through AI-powered coaching.
- Create personalized pathways for growth by mapping Hone classes directly to Rippleworksā internal competency framework.
- Support employee-led and manager development at scale, including the launch of Making Waves, a four-month cohort program for new people managers.
"With Hone, our people can learn and select the things that they care about on their own. And it's so cool to be in a live class and have someone you don't really know learning alongside you. It can make it easier to share and talk openly through things."
The company
Rippleworks is a nonprofit foundation dedicated to helping social ventures scale their impact. The organization provides financial capital, expert consulting, leader development and on-demand support to ventures doing impactful work around the world.Ā
Rippleworks operates as a learning forward organizationĀ and holds a genuine commitment to developing every employee, not just those at the top. Rippleworks leans into the belief that learning is aboutĀ improving everything, not proving anything!
The challenge
Before partnering with Hone, much of Rippleworksā learning and development content was built internally. Jeanine Mowbray, Director of Employee Experience, developed programming around the needs and themes she could identify, but the approach had its limits.
It was difficult to know whether the programming captured the full range of development needs across the organization. Building and managing each training also placed a significant burden on an already lean Learning and Development functionĀ
At the same time, Rippleworksā team was growing globally. What had started as a mostly US-based organization now had employees spread across 10 countries, and finding a solution that could reach everyone equitably became increasingly important. Rippleworks kept returning to the same question: How could it give every team member access to learning at the right time, focused on the skills most critical to their individual growth areas?
The solution
Rippleworks chose Hone to give employees access to live, expert-led classes and AI-powered coaching without requiring the People team to build, schedule, and facilitate every learning experience.
The partnership gave employees the flexibility to choose learning based on their individual goals while also helping the People team create structured pathways around the skills that mattered most to the organization.
With Hone, Rippleworks could provide:
- Global accessibility. Employees in 10 countries can choose from multiple class times, making it easier for the entire workforce to access the same high-quality development no matter where they live.Ā Ā
- Learning alongside people outside the organization. Honeās interactive classes and breakout rooms connect Rippleworks employees with learners from other organizations, making it easy to open up, think out loud, and engage with the content in a way that can feel harder when you're surrounded by your own colleagues in a smaller organization.
Beyond giving employees more ownership over their development, Hone also partnered closely with Jeanine to create more structured learning experiences for Rippleworks:
- Clear pathways tied to Rippleworks competencies. Honeās learning strategy team mapped relevant classes to Rippleworksā internal competencies, giving employees a simple way to identify the skills they want to strengthen and find learning that supports them.
- A dedicated development journey for newer managers. Rippleworks launched Making Waves, a four-month program for new people managers. The cohort follows a curated set of classes aligned with the organizationās leadership competencies while allowing managers to build skills at their own pace. Manager participants also come together once a month to discuss and apply the key takeaways they are learning in Honeās classes.Ā
- AI-powered support between live classes. Rippleworks managers can reinforce their learning through Honeās AI-powered experiences and use Honeās AI Coach to prepare for real workplace moments, like learning and performance check-ins and challenging conversations.
"We've been growing our own AI capabilities and use of AI. And I feel like Hone is making that possible in a really good way."
Conclusion
Now in its third year with Hone, Rippleworks has built a continuous learning culture that supports both employee-led development and more structured manager growth.
Through the partnership, Rippleworks has been able to:
- Expand access to high-quality development across a workforce spanning 10 countries.
- Equip the whole team with the skills that matter most through competency-aligned pathways and learning experiences that employees love with an average 4.8 class rating.
- Empower managers through the launch of Making Waves, a four-month cohort development program for newer managers.
