USA Today/Gannett had ambitious goals for providing unconscious bias training to its roughly 10,000 employees over a period of just a few weeks. Increasing the magnitude of the project was the requirement for a new learning management system platform for the initiative.

Illumina worked closely with its partner, IBIS Consulting Group, and the USA Today/Gannett team to identify and select key content areas, drawing from IBIS’s Unconscious Bias e-learning module series, to create a tailored version for USA Today incorporating client branding. A major aspect of the initiative was the need to provide a platform to rapidly deploy the on-line course. Illumina set up and maintained an instance on Epignosis’ TalentLMS cloud-based learning management system, first to conduct a pilot test with several hundred users in the late spring, and then to launch the enterprise-wide training for the entire target employee group in just 6 weeks over the summer. The implementation included Single Sign-On (SSO) to USA/Gannett’s employee information system, email reminder notifications, and customized reporting to accomplish the rapid deployment to USA Today/Gannett employees. The project was extremely successful, leading USA Today/Gannett to undertake and complete a similar training effort a few months later, this time with another IBIS/Illumina diversity, equity and inclusion-oriented course entitled “Becoming an Ally.” Allyship helps to advance inclusion, mitigate biases, support diversity, and attain equity for individuals and the organization that they are part of.