Creating world-class elearning for an era-defining sporting event: the Women’s Rugby World Cup England 2025
For Dynamic, this was a real opportunity to create outstanding elearning for one of the year’s biggest events in the world of sport. For World Rugby, the Women’s Rugby World Cup England was an era-defining moment. Not only because it set out to be the most successful women’s tournament in history, but also because it transformed the Rugby World Cup delivery model, creating a new blueprint for all World Rugby events to follow in the future. And a big part of this was the engagement, training and support provided to paid staff, contractors and over 1,500 volunteers who staffed the tournament.
World Rugby partnered with Dynamic to provide a user-friendly platform and digital material that didn’t just prepare a diverse workforce for the tournament, but also provided a scaleable model for how sporting bodies can deliver engaging and inclusive elearning for a sport on the world stage.
Together, we achieved:
We created:
What was the aim?
World Rugby wanted to deliver a world-class event experience for workforce, athletes and spectators.
Their ambition is to reinforce their position as a world leader in the delivery of international sporting events, increasing rugby audiences, global participation in the sport and the standards of competition at all levels. The performance of tournament workforce is key to this success—so we wanted to provide them with the support and training they needed to feel confident and capable, and contribute to the success of every tournament in future.
Our partnership—and everything we created together—was therefore rooted in several principles. We prioritised:
Accessibility & inclusivity
… ensuring everyone, regardless of background or experience was supported and able to participate.
Personalisation
… providing hyper-relevant training pathways across functional areas, levels of experience and varying expectations.
Scalability & sustainability
… creating resources that can be shared, grown and refined across multiple years and events.
Data-driven design
… listening to feedback, comparing data and making recommendations based on real insights, successes and shortcomings.
Inspirational messaging
… creating not only a useful experience, but one that inspires performance, accountability and passion.
Alignment is always really important when starting a new project … but even more so when setting out on a multi-year partnership with such scale, global reach and opportunity for impact. Right from the word go we set clear design principles and priorities to hold everyone involved to account—which meant we never lost track of what we were trying to achieve.
How did we solve World Rugby’s challenges?
We began by working with World Rugby to define what successful tournament delivery needed to look like in practice. Through a series of creative workshops and ideation sessions, we explored the behaviours, knowledge and skills the workforce would need before arriving on site—as well as the functional areas, role expectations and performance moments that mattered most.
That discovery work shaped the learning strategy. It helped us separate essential preparation from useful value-add content, identify where people needed shared knowledge versus role-specific support, and design a programme that could flex across different functions, venues and levels of experience.
Right from the start, we knew this programme would reach people all over the world—with different job roles, experience in delivering sporting events, knowledge of rugby and expectations of training and support.
To meet this challenge, we collaboratively developed six personas—from the enthusiastic rugby fan volunteers to the time-pressed contractors to the rugby advocates working directly for World Rugby—and considered how best we could meet all their needs.
These personas were key for the human-centred design process that followed, ensuring that learners could take ownership of their own training experience, while also addressing critical knowledge and skills gaps across the workforce.
With the aims, principles and audience in mind, we set out to design an elearning programme that could flex—engaging, inspiring and educating across personas and various sporting events.
We ran a series of content workshops, designing a core and spoke approach made up of chunked micro-resources that covered both recommended and optional areas of training, interest and performance … all built into a functional LMS experience.
Let’s talk numbers
In terms of sheer size, this programme was immense!
Together, we created:
unique learning activities—from informative one-pagers and PDFs to engaging quizzes and minigames.
presenter-led videos and enriching animation delivered by engaging, leading sports personalities.
of bespoke graphics, thumbnails and course headers, to bring learning to life and increase transfer.
digital badges to drive update and engagement through LMS-level gamification and nudges.
Across the programme, we were thoughtful about how each learning moment should land. We used minigames where interaction would help people practise, recall or apply information; delivered clear, direct content when learners simply needed the right information at the right time; and varied the experience across videos, quizzes, one-pagers and digital resources to keep people engaged without adding unnecessary complexity.
What was the impact?
We achieved a 91% completion rate on the introductory course, with 1000s more completions spread out across the other role-specific and optional courses on offer.
As none of this experience was made mandatory for this tournament, this is a real win in terms of engagement and uptake.
The majority of participants rated the materials and either good or excellent, with many praising its clarity, structure and usefulness, as well as how it complemented the F2F training they received in the stadium itself.
Feedback from course participant:
What did people like?
Overwhelmingly, users found the programme informative, fun, engaging and easy to use.
found it informative
found it fun
said it was engaging
found it easy to use
Feedback from course participant:
Even when a team member embarks on an elearning programme for an event, it can be a daunting experience, knowing how popular the sport is and how much exposure the event will receive. Thankfully, participants said they felt ready to make an impact right from their first shift. While training was only one part of the wider workforce experience, this is a strong indicator that the programme helped build role clarity, confidence and readiness ahead of live tournament delivery.
Feedback from course participants:
The quotes in this section are genuine user feedback, taken from hundreds of responses collected through the training feedback survey.
How did training support World Cup delivery?
The impact data points to a clear relationship between workforce preparation and the wider tournament experience. By giving people accessible, role-relevant training before they arrived on site, the programme helped create a more confident and informed workforce—one better equipped to support smooth operations, positive fan interactions and the overall delivery of a record-breaking event.
And that contribution shows up in the wider experience data from the tournament:
of attendees would recommend the Women’s Rugby World Cup to a friend.*
of players rated their overall RWC 2025 experience as excellent or good.*
*Data from World Rugby’s tournament performance and player satisfaction reporting.
Partnership in action
“The depth of industry-specific knowledge (in our case, sporting events) across the team from all the different projects Dynamic have worked on is hugely valuable. Together, we delivered a clear, engaging and informative training programme that underpinned the successful delivery of a record-breaking Women’s Rugby World Cup.”
“It’s fair to say that the partnership with World Rugby to create elearning resources for volunteers, contractors and staff is one of the most exciting projects I’ve been involved in, not just in sport, but during all my years at Dynamic. Knowing that we played a significant part in the overall success of the 2025 Women’s World Cup makes me extremely proud … and I’m excited to see how we can use this experience to deliver another successful tournament in 2027.”
What’s next?
This project set a strong foundation for delivering digital learning at scale for major global sporting events. It supported a diverse workforce, helped people feel prepared and contributed to an altogether positive event experience for workforce, fans and athletes alike.
The partnership between World Rugby and Dynamic has shown what’s possible when deep event expertise and learning design come together with a shared ambition for excellence and just a dash of fun … it’s one for the history books.
All that’s left to say is:
Bring on RWC Australia 2027!
