4 reasons Southbank Centre loves inrehearsal as an L&D partner

The Southbank Centre’s L&D team is small and mighty, having built the learning programme from the ground up.

Because of the size of the team and the scope of their work, they realised they wouldn’t be able to produce content quickly enough to respond to everything that’s going on in the world.

So they needed a digital learning partner to augment what they were doing in-house. It had to be flexible, it had to speak specifically to people in their sector, and it had to feel like a good fit.

They found all those things with inrehearsal, and we sat down with Luke Jackson (L&D Manager at Southbank Centre) to understand what they love about what we offer and the impact it’s had.

1. inrehearsal is “a very people-centred operation”

Luke explained that inrehearsal stood out because of the people-centred nature. With the videos and content he’d seen online, he’d noticed that “at the centre of the videos and content are people!”

And working with our people is often what helps our customers get the most from the library:

“The digital content soon becomes just an arrow in your quiver and you soon end up opening a door to a whole wealth of different ways to interact with the team.”

2. The content speaks for itself

Their approach to pushing inrehearsal out to people has been pretty agnostic, with Luke explaining that:

“Rather than saying, inrehearsal’s here, everyone go log in and spend four hours watching videos this week — which we knew wouldn’t land for people.

“We’ve tried to let the content and the subject matter expertise speak for itself.”

This natural, non-mandated approach has played a role in creating true advocates:

“It’s a really interesting thing that not everybody at Southbank Centre has used inrehearsal, but you can tell the ones that have because they become advocates for it.”

3. They can align content to use cases and internal goals

Luke explained that a key part of how he uses inrehearsal is to go hunting for use cases and align inrehearsal content to the context of what’s going on in the organisation.

For example, our Discover, Discuss, Do Guides which (as the name suggests) help customers build conversations and sessions around content in the library:

“Maybe a team is having a discussion about time or task management – and there’s one of inrehearsal’s Discover, Discuss, Do guides that we could use to take into a meeting and have a really high quality conversation with them about that issue.”

Luke shared another example, using inrehearsal content in their internal communications:

“Maybe I’m pulling together the monthly newsletter for people managers that we create as a team. And there’s a boxset that was released in the last six or eight weeks that really speaks to a theme that we want to communicate on, so that boxset will fit in there.”

4. The opportunity to work with the experts behind the library

inrehearsal customers can bring the library to life by working with experts for one-off events and internal learning festivals. 

This brings a sense of familiarity, trust and credibility — both for learners and for the L&D team running the events.

For Luke and the Southbank Centre L&D team, this meant working with a particular expert from a boxset that resonated.

“Maybe we want to delve deeper into one of the boxsets, and we end up working with one of inrehearsal’s SMEs. 

“We’ve run a number of sessions this year on inclusive communication with Etty Bailey King, and that all came from that partnership I mentioned. So we see this kind of patchwork of impact throughout the company.”

If you’re looking for a content library with people at its heart — expert-led, flexible, and designed to support real conversations — we’d love to talk.

A little more about the Southbank Centre

Who they are: They’re the UK’s largest centre for the arts. As a charity, they bring millions of people together by opening up the unique art spaces we care for on London’s South Bank

Their mission: To make a difference to the lives of artists, audiences and communities through the variety of their programming and spaces.