AI Member Matching: How AIIM Extended Its Annual Meeting

I have flown home from a conference with a stack of business cards and followed up with exactly none of them. Not because the people were forgettable. Because by Tuesday the inbox had won, and I could no longer remember which conversation went with which card.

Most associations treat that as weather: unfortunate, cyclical, nobody's fault. The Association for Intelligent Information Management decided it was an infrastructure problem instead, and rebuilt its 2026 AI+IM Global Summit so that the three days sat in the middle of a year-long arc rather than standing alone as the whole program.

AIIM is not a large shop. Founded in 1944, it serves information and data professionals in more than 67 countries on five staff and roughly $2M in annual revenue. What it lacks in headcount it makes up for in willingness to run the experiment.

Why do connections made at an annual meeting disappear?

They disappear because nothing was built on either side of the event to carry them. The decay starts inside the conference itself. Mathieu Genois and colleagues at GESIS put RFID sensors on the attendees of two academic conferences, held in 2016 and 2017, and tracked who physically spoke to whom. Fewer than half the connections formed on the first day were still active on the second: 46% at one conference, 39% at the other. That is attrition measured in hours, before anyone has packed a bag.

Appetite for connection, meanwhile, keeps climbing. Freeman's July 2025 Trends Report found 51% of attendees consider effective networking reason enough to return to an event, while 40% of attendees aged 23 to 46 say networking feels awkward and 30% struggle to start conversations. Roughly half of that group want curated recommendations for who to meet before the event.

The constraint is not appetite. Members want the room, and they want someone to tell them where to sit in it, with enough notice to prepare.

What is member matching?

Member matching is the practice of using member-supplied data, scheduling availability, topic interests, role and industry, to place people into small peer groups deliberately rather than leaving the pairing to chance, proximity or whoever happened to be in line for coffee. Applied to an annual meeting, it does two jobs: it gives attendees a group before they travel, and it gives the association a unit that still exists after they leave. AI-powered matching does both at a scale a staff of five cannot reach by hand.

AIIM's first attempt at cohorts was manual and lived almost entirely inside the event. Two full-time staff spent the season matching hundreds of attendees, recruiting facilitators, scheduling meetings and trying to observe what happened inside the groups.

In our first year of cohorts, matching people manually was slow and error-prone, and we had no way to keep them connected once the Summit ended. RallyBoard fixed both.

Georgina Clelland, CIP, COO, AIIM

For 2026, every attendee was matched into a cohort ahead of the Summit, each group was activated before the doors opened, and the same groups kept meeting virtually afterward. Members landed with a facilitated chair, a named set of peers and a shared space already waiting for them.

One meeting, three phases:

Each row makes the next one cheaper. A group that met twice online walks into the ballroom with something to continue, and a group that spent three days together has an obvious reason to put a date on the calendar for April.

Why does meeting beforehand make the in-person days better?

Because trust is a function of repetition, and three days supply almost none of it. Harry Reis and colleagues, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2011, ran previously unacquainted people through varying numbers of prior interactions and then measured how much they wanted to keep talking. Participants who had eight short online chats were almost four times more likely to want further contact than participants who had one, an effect that ran through perceived responsiveness and comfort.

One meeting produces a business card. Four produce a group that has already argued about something.

That is roughly what AIIM members described. One said having a cohort was like having a friend group on site. Another group invented its own chant. The first in-person conversation started where a second conversation normally would, which is also why the groups had enough momentum to survive the trip home.

How do you match attendees when registration runs for months?

You stop treating matching as a deadline and start treating it as a cadence. Pre-event matching only survives contact with a real registration curve if it runs more than once.

AIIM ran matching in three batches timed to ticket sales: an initial run once roughly 70% of intake forms were in, a second about five weeks out, and a final run in the weeks before the Summit. New registrants flowed into the next batch instead of waiting on a single cutoff. Stragglers who came in after the last run were placed into existing cohorts by time zone and core profile, and one cohort assembled entirely from last-minute sign-ups turned out to be among the most engaged of the week, on the strength of its chair.

Publishing those matching milestones gave AIIM a second set of urgency dates, an accident the team intends to keep: the deadlines helped drive sign-ups.

The weighting mattered as much as the timing. Each match was weighted on scheduling availability first, because a group that cannot find a shared hour will not meet before the event or after it, then on preferred content and topic tracks, then industry and job function, while honoring sponsor constraints and keeping direct competitors apart. A majority of AIIM members preferred topic-based grouping over industry-based grouping, which is worth knowing before you build your intake form around job titles.

What did it produce?

301 members matched into 34 cohorts, which held 63 Zoom meetings covering 384 agenda topics and 7,830 minutes of conversation. The majority of cohorts saw better than 50% meeting attendance, and members rated the experience 4 out of 5 in a post-Summit survey.

Those 63 meetings are the number I would put in front of a board. They are not Summit sessions. They are hours of member conversation that happened on either side of a three-day event, generated by groups the association formed on purpose, and measured without sending a single staff member to sit in on a peer conversation.

Roughly a third of members said the cohort program actively improved their Summit experience, and another third said it made no difference. AIIM counts that second third as a win, on the theory that good infrastructure should be quiet. I think that is right, and I also think it is the honest ceiling of a first full year: a third moved, a third neutral, and a program worth running again on those terms.

The qualitative signal was less ambiguous. "Often in our positions, we're islands, so it's so incredible to meet with so many people that face the same challenges," one 2026 attendee said. A committee member with three decades in the field put it more bluntly:

Where I get my learning is from all of you, from sitting at the table during the cohort meetings. That's the learning I get out of a conference like this, and I find it incredibly valuable, way more than what's on the agenda.

AIIM committee member, Summit 2026

Freeman's July 2026 report, fielded with more than 3,300 attendees and exhibitors, found the same pattern at scale: attendees would ideally spend 54% of their learning time outside traditional session rooms.

What actually determines whether a small group works?

The chair. Not the matching, not the platform, not the room.

AIIM's own retrospective landed on facilitator quality and commitment as the single biggest driver of a cohort's success. Where a chair arrived prepared and engaged, the cohort thrived. Where a chair was absent or unprepared, even a well-matched group struggled. The academic literature agrees: Burgess and colleagues in BMC Medical Education (2020) put the ideal small group at five to eight people, with six often considered optimal, and describe the facilitator's role as crucial to whether learners engage with the content and with each other.

AIIM's chairs were Summit sponsors, a first-of-its-kind arrangement that gave partners a substantive role inside the member experience rather than a table in the exhibit hall. It is the part of this model I would steal. Attendees tolerate sponsor presence better than most association staff assume: Freeman's 2026 research found 84% of attendees view sponsored sessions neutrally or positively when the sponsorship is clearly disclosed. A sponsor who hosts a peer group for two months before the event and six months after is worth more to both sides than a sponsor who rents a booth for three days.

Two changes are going into next year: matching data collected inside the registration flow instead of a separate intake form, and a more deliberate chair bench equipped with ready-made discussion prompts. AIIM is also leaning toward making cohorts opt-in, on the evidence that the attendees who bothered to complete intake forms were consistently the most engaged.

What this does to the membership value proposition

The share of associations reporting membership increases fell from 45% to 38% between the 2025 and 2026 editions of Marketing General's Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report, with median renewal holding at 82%. Associations are justifying dues against a benefit list that, for most members, comes down to one event a year and a library they rarely open.

A cohort that forms eight weeks before the Summit and is still meeting the following spring changes what is being sold. The annual meeting stops being a product a member buys once and becomes the anchor of a relationship the association maintains year-round, which is a different line item on a renewal decision.

The association business model is shifting. Information and access used to be our value proposition, and they're not anymore, which is pushing us back to our real reason for being: community.

Tori Miller Liu, MBA, FASAE, CAE, CIP, President and CEO, AIIM

AIIM is now extending the model past the Summit entirely, into industry verticals, Oil & Gas, Legal and Higher Ed, into committees and special interest groups, and toward embedding cohorts in the membership lifecycle through AMS integration. The annual meeting was the proof point rather than the destination.

Start this quarter

If you want your next annual meeting to run longer than its own agenda, four things have to be true before you touch a platform.

• Put the matching questions inside registration.A separate intake form is a second ask, and AIIM found it confused some attendees. Scheduling availability, two topic interests, role and industry is enough. Four fields, collected at ticket purchase, while the member is already paying attention.

• Pick your matching milestones now and publish them.Three batches off the registration curve: one when most intake is in, one about five weeks out, one in the final weeks. The dates do double duty as registration urgency.

• Book two meetings before the event and three after it.Put all five on the calendar at the same time, before anyone travels, so continuing is the default and stopping takes a decision.

• Recruit chairs before you recruit members.Budget 5 to 10 chairs for every 50 to 80 attendees you expect to match, brief them, and hand each one a written set of discussion prompts. If a sponsor wants the role, let them have it and disclose it.

The full AIIM story, including the matching weights, the engagement numbers and what the team is changing next year, is in the AIIM case study. The structural argument sits in Beyond the Annual Meeting, the operating model in the small-staff playbook, and the use case in our annual meeting solution.

You already spend a year planning three days. Spend eight weeks on either side of them and the three days stop being the thing you sell, which means next year's registration starts the day this year's cohorts keep meeting.