Community Boost, a digital marketing agency for nonprofits, was swamped with admin work. “Everything was so disconnected and manual,” said Shannon Hill, the company’s Director of People and Talent. “I was one human. I had strategic initiatives to accomplish but I was getting buried in day-to-day tactician work and it wasn’t sustainable. I could’ve worked 24 hours a day and never gotten ahead.”

Like many fast-moving ad agencies, Community Boost ran into the drag of a disjointed back office—payroll in one platform, benefits in another, devices managed manually. In a billable-hour, scaling business, even small onboarding delays can disrupt project staffing and timelines—putting client delivery and key milestones at risk.

The result of all this busywork: Community Boost struggled with an inconsistent onboarding process, which led to high voluntary turnover. New hires were often stuck waiting weeks for device access and app logins—slowing time-to-productivity and hurting the agency’s internal brand.

That lost ramp-up time wasn’t just an internal issue—it impacted delivery schedules and jeopardized campaign deadlines. Every week a new hire sat idle waiting for systems access or gear was another week of lost billable time—and a hit to delivery timelines for clients. 

”It was sink or swim,” Shannon said. “New hires weren’t set up to succeed and there was a lot of justified frustration. Some hires survived it, some didn’t. But it wasn’t strategic at all.” Turnover was higher than industry average. 

If Community Boost wanted to minimize onboarding times and improve retention, it needed a better HR solution. Shannon’s mission: “stop the chaos, get our foundational systems laid, then start thinking more strategically.”

In July of 2023, Community Boost transitioned to Rippling—an all-in-one solution that helped the agency save time, spare headaches, and enhance the employee experience.

“I’m a huge Rippling evangelist,” Shannon said. “It’s life-changing. I don’t think people understand the power of workflows when they’re considering these platforms.” In a client-services agency, where people ops teams juggle recruiting, delivery timelines, and team bandwidth at once, automating admin tasks is critical to staying nimble.

If you could hear the state of affairs before we were on Rippling to what it’s like now, it’s a great case study in how to eliminate so much of that tactical work.

Shannon Hill

Director of People and Talent at Community Boost

Shannon used Rippling’s deep well of automations and third-party integrations to eliminate ops drag—freeing her from the tactical grind and giving her time back to build career ladders, manager playbooks, and a stronger culture to keep top performers.

With Gusto, payroll used to be a three or four day process. With Rippling, she wraps it up in under a day. New hire employment verification used to face long delays, which opened the agency to compliance risks. Now, it’s done before an employee’s first day. 

With Rippling, there are no more months-long, drawn-out onboarding processes. Now, Shannon gets new hires up and running 12 times faster and puts device management on autopilot. That means new strategists and creatives can join project teams on day one, not day 21—keeping delivery smooth and clients happy. 

Rippling also integrates with all the tools in Community Boost’s tech stack, including its benefits and 401(k) providers—allowing Shannon to handle each process four times faster. “We know now that we have one clean source of data,” she said. “We feed from Rippling into every other system that we use, so there are never any data integrity issues.”

The result of all this freed up time? Shannon can focus on opening up 360-degree feedback loops, upskilling managers, and creating new career development pathways. “I’m able to sit down and take the time to come up with really robust, dynamic trainings. Before I was so bogged down in being a tactician every day that I didn’t have space or time to dive into strategic initiatives,” Shannon said. “If you could hear the state of affairs before we were on Rippling to what it’s like now, it’s a great case study in how to eliminate so much of that tactical work.” 

The strategizing paid off. Post Rippling, engagement is up and voluntary turnover is down 19 percentage points.

Whenever Community Boost ran an engagement survey, the lowest-scoring question used to always be about employees understanding how the company determines compensation. That’s mostly because the agency did its comp planning manually, out of spreadsheets. The leadership team wanted a 10-point improvement in that question. 

With Rippling’s compensation bands tool, Community Boost got a 16-point improvement—all while making the once hours-long endeavor fully automated. In the competitive agency talent market, where recruiters are constantly poaching specialists and managers, clarity around pay bands helps prevent churn.

“Now our client leads and team managers can instantly pull pay band reports and submit raise requests with clear guidelines. It’s helped us increase transparency and improve retention,” Shannon said. She added that the Rippling tool empowers managers to better understand pay ranges and gives employees more transparency into what kind of compensation they can expect along their career path. 

For advertising agencies operating on tight margins and headcount plans, clear and automated comp workflows keep decisions fast — and defensible.

When you’re in client delivery mode, you don’t have time to wait three days for a support ticket. Shannon appreciated that Rippling moved as fast as her team.

Community Boost had had a hard time getting quick, personalized support from Gusto. And after years of using different HR solutions across different, smaller-sized agencies, Shannon wasn’t exactly used to white glove customer service. 

“With Rippling, we get real answers—fast. It feels like we matter,” Shannon said. She loves that she can immediately hop on a chat or call with an expert whenever she runs into issues. 

Shannon also appreciated speaking to a Rippling VP of Product at a Rippling U Live event. “When you're in a Paychex, PeopleSoft, or ADP, you’re scratching tooth and nail for customer service if you’re not a big enterprise keeping their lights on. It’s exhausting and extremely frustrating,” Shannon said. “Rippling’s VP of Product sat down with me, a tiny little client, for an hour and listened to what I thought could be better about the system. That was just awesome.”

Shannon also said Rippling helps Community Boost develop its leaders in the fast-paced, client-first world of agency life. 

“Rippling has really empowered our managers to have workflows and data at their fingertips to stay on target with their KPIs,” she said, adding that the system automatically reminds supervisors to approve time cards and expenses—critical in a billable-hour environment where every delay impacts margin and delivery timelines.

For managers balancing team oversight with client deadlines, campaign launches, and performance reporting, these nudges help them stay on top of admin without dropping the ball.

Rippling also gives employees the ability to self-serve—whether they’re requesting leave, updating their address, or pulling tax documents—without needing to go through HR.

“We’ve enabled the team to operate more self-sufficiently,” Shannon said. That autonomy matters when your team is heads-down on client work and needs answers now, not later.

With Rippling, Community Boost reduced churn, improved onboarding speed, and gave managers tools to lead more effectively—so the business could scale talent without breaking delivery.

• Turnover dropped from 48% to under 20%
• Payroll, benefits administration, and 401(k) processing run 4x faster
• Managers now lead with data, not guesswork
• Employees are more engaged and empowered to self-serve
• HR has time to focus on strategy, not spreadsheets

Rippling helped us eliminate so much manual work and created a more self-sufficient, empowered team. It’s a case study in how to operationalize and streamline every HR function from one source.