The Long-term Case Study Series: London Business School & ResourceSpace

With campuses in both London and Dubai, London Business School is recognised around the world for the standard of its education—but its work goes beyond building academic courses preparing the next generation of business leaders.

The school conducts important research that sits behind the latest business insights and theory. This work requires the production of a lot of content, but with a small internal team working with a number of external partners, London Business School relies on ResourceSpace to manage this process effectively. We spoke with Bhavna Patel, Head of Content Operations at London Business School, to discuss how ResourceSpace has supported the institution’s efforts for almost 10 years.

READ MORE: Why academic institutions need a DAM system

“It’s so important that we have this one stop shop for everything.”

Bhavna’s role is focused on maintaining and evolving the school’s brand identity, working within a small four-person team overseeing Digital Asset Management (DAM) workflows that involve external creative agencies, suppliers and contractors. 

Pre-Covid, the school previously had a much larger internal creative team, but they were relying on older DAM processes.

“We were working off File Explorer and Dropbox, so it was obviously quite difficult for the team to manage” recalls Bhavna.

“It was a bit all over the place, particularly when it came to brand assets. Dropbox was used by our designers to save final files, but a formalised process for finding and storing brand assets hadn’t been fully figured out at that stage.”

READ MORE: DAM vs. Dropbox - What's the difference?

Fortunately, this wasn’t a problem Bhavna had to contend with for long, as the school’s ResourceSpace instance, known internally as ‘Brand Hub’, was launched just a year after she started with the institution.

“After I joined we moved to an outsourced model for a lot of our creative needs, and this makes it even more important that we have this one-stop-shop where everything can be held and it's accessible,” says Bhavna.

Quite early on in London Business School’s Digital Asset Management journey a rebrand was undertaken, which was where ‘ResourceSpace really came into its own’.

“More recently we’ve also been making some refinements to the brand, and being able to direct everyone to this central location where you can find everything has been really valuable.”

“At first it only stored logo files, but that’s definitely changed a lot.”

When ResourceSpace was first introduced at London Business School, its role was relatively simple. Initially, the platform primarily stored logos, brand guidelines and a limited number of approved visual assets, but in the nine years since, its role has expanded as the institution’s needs have evolved.

This included supporting the refresh of the brand as mentioned above, but the scale of the platform has also grown significantly, evolving from a small logo repository into a large, searchable library of approved brand assets used across the institution.

“We started off not housing many images,” says Bhavna.

“It’s known as Brand Hub internally, and at first it only stored logo files, but that’s definitely changed a lot over the years. 

“Last year we celebrated the 60th anniversary of the school, and we created a lot of assets and collateral as part of the visual identity of that campaign, including a film, and all of this was stored on ResourceSpace for the duration of the year.”

It’s not just that the London Business School is now using ResourceSpace to store much more brand content, but they’re also benefiting from the advanced DAM functionality that’s been released over the years, particularly AI Smart Search.

“We’ve been playing around with AI Smart Search over the past few months, and I think that’s really going to help,” says Bhavna.

“One of the things that we struggle with sometimes is photography. A lot of our photo content is commissioned in perpetuity, but we still might have some images where somebody says, ‘I don’t want my photo to be used anymore’.”

“In this instance we of course remove it from ResourceSpace, but it’s also probably been on our website, which means we have to replace it with something. Now, we can put that old image into AI Smart Search and find something similar to replace it with. That’s been really, really helpful in supporting the governance side of things.”

“One of our governance challenges is that we’ve got multiple platforms.”

As an academic institution, governance and consent are key challenges for London Business School.

“One of our governance challenges is that we’ve got multiple platforms,” says Bhavna.

“We have a platform where we manage photography commissions, and that’s where we make sure we’ve got the right permissions and consent from everybody.

“The way ResourceSpace helps with this is identifying how old an image is. Does it still adhere to what we stand for, do we have the diversity that we need?

However, the school has seen efficiencies across the whole institution, not just the creative and brand department.

“We commission a lot of brand photography, and sometimes departments will commission it themselves and they’ll say ‘Can you put this on Brand Hub?’, but sometimes those images aren’t aligned with our brand. Maybe they’re not of great quality, are poorly lit or not vibrant, or they don’t showcase anything we’d want to portray within the brand pillars.

“Having ResourceSpace in place means everybody at the school can be singing from the same hymn sheet, ensuring we’re putting across a consistent brand identity on all of our touchpoints, not just marketing channels.”

“It is so easy to use, it’s user friendly, easy to navigate.”

Over the decade London Business School has been using ResourceSpace, a number of other features have also become invaluable to Bhavna and the wider creative team.

For Bhavna, the most indispensable aspect of ResourceSpace is its usability. Despite managing a complex and growing asset library, she describes the platform as intuitive and easy for both end users and administrators to navigate.

This ease of use has helped ResourceSpace become embedded within day-to-day operations at London Business School, with new starters quickly learning how to locate approved assets, while the brand team can manage the platform internally without relying heavily on technical support.

“It is so easy to use, it’s user friendly and easy to navigate, and you can become an expert on this platform much quicker than you can on most others, which I think is one of the main reasons we’ve stuck with it all these years” says Bhavna.

“One of the things I say to my team is that you can’t break it, and being able to make changes yourself, rather than having to always get in touch with our Customer Success Manager at Montala, makes a big difference. It also allows us to spend the time we do have with him much more strategically. 

The Single Sign-On (SSO) functionality is key to this usability, as well as being able to easily grant restricted access to their various external partners.

“There are over 700 people that need to be able to access the DAM really quickly, and being able to add external users is also really valuable.”

READ MORE: Why ResourceSpace is perfect for... academic institutions

As well as London Business School, ResourceSpace is trusted by a number of leading academic institutions, including Kent School, University of Washington, Juilliard and University of Oxford.

To find out more about how ResourceSpace makes it easy to share files and images with students, staff and parents—all while building an A+ communications network for your academic community—get in touch with us and book your free DAM consultation with one of our experts below.