The Concordance Center for Communications sprung to life from a small project in which the group was tasked with comparing two university websites to better describe why one of the schools was getting more online inquiries from diverse candidates than the other. That simple exercise led the team to more quiet work on the study of content diversity, equity, and inclusiveness (DEI) across the world wide web for more than a decade.

The research and the methods devised in the process is now being put to use in helping organizations understand how they can better serve their audiences and the community by improving the manner in which DEI-related content is presented and updated.

This includes the introduction of the Concordance Web Equal™ validation, which identifies those organizations who are leading the way by developing and maintaining websites that are focused on assuring access, content representation and vital information specific to diverse users. The proprietary methodology used to derive scores in the validation process is multifactorial and is based on markers from website words and images, industry type, number of employees, organizational community demographics, and other relevant data.