Webinar Recap: How AIIM Rebuilt Its Annual Meeting Around Peer Cohorts

On November 4, 2026, RallyBoard hosted a webinar with Tori Miller Liu, President and CEO of the Association for Intelligent Information Management (AIIM). Alongside RallyBoard co-founder and CEO Jackson Boyar, she walked through one of the more ambitious event redesigns in the association world: capping registration, cutting the expo hall, and rebuilding a two-and-a-half-day annual meeting around small, facilitated peer cohorts that meet before, during, and after the event.

AIIM has served the information management profession since 1944. Its members are software providers and end users working with unstructured and semi-structured data, the emails, contracts, records, and engineering schematics that sit outside the database, typically inside highly regulated industries like government, higher education, oil and gas, finance, and legal.

The redesign produced numbers most associations would take: a 158% increase in net event profitability, six figures of profit in each of the first two years, and 84% of attendees saying they are likely or very likely to return. What follows is how AIIM got there, what broke along the way, and what Liu is changing for 2027.

Why AIIM rethought the annual meeting

The pressure was familiar. Registration numbers were falling. Costs to host were rising. Sponsors still wanted to participate, but not at historical levels. AIIM saw the decline in 2022 and began a formal redesign with its board and staff in 2024.

What made the exercise different was the question Liu’s team asked. Instead of trimming costs or chasing a bigger keynote, they ran a blank-slate exercise around what the industry actually needed from an annual gathering.

“We know we want an annual gathering, but what purpose does it need to serve to our community? And also how does it advance our overarching strategy? It shouldn’t just be one and done, two days and then we all go home.” — Tori Miller Liu, AIIM

That reframing pulled the event out of the events budget and into the membership strategy, which is where the cohort idea came from.

What “community” usually gets reduced to

Liu’s team went looking for research while they redesigned. The U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory on social connection described loneliness and isolation as a public health epidemic, with about half of U.S. adults reporting measurable levels of loneliness. Research from the ASAE Association Insights Center found that 90% of association executives consider community essential to their mission, while only about 30% have dedicated staff for community building and 86% lack metrics to measure its impact. Liu also pointed to data showing that associations with the strongest retention rates, roughly 80% and above, are more likely to say their members join for community. Industry benchmarking from Marketing General Incorporated has consistently placed networking and peer connection among the top reasons members join and renew.

The research pushed Liu toward a harder question about what associations mean when they use the word.

“A community is not just a group of people. It’s a group of people who share mutual concern for one another’s welfare.” — Tori Miller Liu, AIIM, paraphrasing Charles Vogl’s The Art of Community

Measured that way, most association community is really access. A member directory is access. A discussion forum is access. An annual meeting is access, concentrated into two to four days out of 365. Liu was blunt about where AIIM’s own discussion board had landed, with much of the real conversation having migrated to LinkedIn.

“It’s basically like a bulletin board in a rec center.” — Tori Miller Liu, AIIM

Boyar made a related point from the technology side. Having spent roughly 15 years building community and mentoring software, including as founder and CEO of Mentor Collective, he has watched platform after platform launch beautifully and go quiet.

“Building a platform does not result in real sustained belonging and connection, because it tends to be passive. It is a place you can go, which requires new behavior.” — Jackson Boyar, RallyBoard

The experiences that actually produce belonging, a freshman cohort, a sports team, a first job cohort, share three traits: a defined group, a shared schedule, and someone responsible for helping the group cohere.

The redesign: cap the room, cut the trade show, keep the sponsors

AIIM rebuilt the 2025 event around cohort-based learning, which meant decisions that land in the upper-right corner of most risk matrices.

• Attendance was capped at 400. Cohorts only work at a size where a facilitated table conversation is possible, so growth in headcount stopped being the goal.

• The trade show was eliminated. Sponsors stayed, but moved into the general hub where the cohorts meet, with smaller tabletops inside the community space rather than a separate expo hall.

• Cohorts became the structure of the event, not a feature of it. Ten or so specific people were invited into a specific conversation, with a designed agenda and an assigned facilitator, meeting multiple times across the event.

The difference between this and a roundtable track matters. A roundtable is an open invitation. A cohort is a deliberate assignment with a facilitator, a question set, and continuity across sessions.

“If you’re an information management professional, how many other places other than AIIM can you find nine other people that look like you, are going through a shared experience, and want to stay in touch? You’re not finding that on LinkedIn. You’re not finding that on Reddit.” — Jackson Boyar, RallyBoard

Extending the event: before, during, and after

In 2026, AIIM partnered with RallyBoard to stretch the cohort experience beyond the conference dates, the same pattern we have written about in turning three days of connection into 365 days of member value.

Before the event. Members were matched into cohorts by industry, interest, and schedule, then introduced over Zoom before arriving on site. AIIM’s attendees are often teams of one, and a first-timers happy hour does little for someone with no existing network in the room. Getting the introductions and small talk out of the way in advance meant the first on-site conversation could start at substance.

During the event. Cohorts met every day of the conference, with structured prompts rather than open tables. Facilitators asked what patterns people were noticing and what actions they might take when they got home.

After the event. Every cohort had a meeting scheduled 30 days out, where facilitators walked members through what actually changed. Did you take the action? Did you share the information? What was the outcome?

That last meeting is where the value proposition gets tested. Liu’s redesign was built on the premise that solving a member’s problem is not the same as improving their career, and the retrospective is where an association finds out which one it delivered.

“Your problems being solved doesn’t mean much if it doesn’t actually help you be more successful with your project, or if it doesn’t actually improve your career, or if it doesn’t actually make you feel like you have a peer group that you can go to for support.” — Tori Miller Liu, AIIM

What the numbers looked like

Event performance. Net event profitability increased 158%. AIIM, a small association, generated six figures in profit in each of the first two years of the redesigned format. 84% of attendees said they were likely or very likely to return, and cohorts were repeatedly cited in post-event feedback as the thing that distinguishes the event from other industry conferences.

Cohort participation in 2026. Roughly 300 of the 400 attendees were placed into virtual cohorts, with the gap driven largely by late registrations. Those members formed 34 cohorts, logged more than 10,000 minutes of member-to-member conversation on Zoom, and created and voted on nearly 400 discussion topics. Virtual cohort meetings regularly saw more than half the group attend, which is notable for a format members had not encountered before signing up. We covered the matching side of this program in more detail in how AIIM used AI member matching to extend its annual meeting.

Liu also described a moment that explains why the model holds. A longtime AIIM fellow with four decades in the industry, and a vocal skeptic of the cohort program, sat down at a table in April and watched two members from adjacent industries discover a shared problem and start solving it together on the spot.

“The big risk here, and what people are most skeptical about, is that people weren’t going to actually want to talk. It doesn’t matter what generalizations are made about a group of people. At the end of the day, most humans want relationships and want connections with other people.” — Tori Miller Liu, AIIM

Three lessons from two years of running it

1. Script the conversations. AIIM gives facilitators a detailed guide: how to open the meeting, how to establish context, which questions to ask, how the session should flow. Liu wants to experiment with more organic structures in 2027, but the structured guide is what has made the conversations consistently good.

2. Facilitators make or break the program. Year one used volunteer facilitators with comped registrations. Year two shifted to a heavy discount and brought sponsors in as facilitators as part of the sponsorship package. Some sponsors excelled and added real value. Others sent a marketing or sales person who found out late, had no facilitation experience, and no time to prepare. In one case a facilitator did not show up at all, and cohort satisfaction scores fell accordingly. For 2027, AIIM has returned to fully volunteer facilitators, vetted for facilitation experience, interest level, and familiarity with the industry.

Liu was careful not to make this a criticism of sponsors, whose budgets are smaller and whose teams are stretched across more events than ever. The fix is to simplify the sponsor’s job rather than add to it. Boyar, who has sponsored many association events, argued that participating as a peer inside a cohort is more valuable than standing at a booth for eight hours, as long as the right person is in the seat.

3. Keep the story simple. The 2026 matching allowed cohorts to form across 14 project areas and a dozen or more industries. Technically it worked. Operationally it was very hard to explain to attendees.

“It’s not because of any limitations with the technology, but because we have limitations as humans to what we’re willing to absorb.” — Tori Miller Liu, AIIM

For 2027, cohorts are formed on industry alone. Precision can increase later, when the event is large enough that a single industry needs to be broken into multiple groups.

One more thing changed between years one and two. In 2025, AIIM matched 400 people into cohorts by hand. Beyond the hours it consumed, the manual process introduced bias: Liu and one colleague knew who was friends with whom, and ended up seating people with people they already knew. Structured matching removed that, which was the point of the exercise in the first place.

Where this goes next: cohorts beyond the annual meeting

AIIM did not start with the event. Its Women in Information Management group was the first cohort pilot, and its fellows, BIPOC, and legal groups have followed. The committees are running on the same model, which also offloads administrative work from a small staff: agendas, minutes, reminders, and follow-up on action items.

Liu’s longer-term vision is a membership journey where cohorts are the entry point rather than the annual reward.

“I want it to be a membership journey where when someone joins, they’re invited into a hotel lobby, which is essentially our website and online community. But shortly thereafter, I want them to receive an invite that’s personalized to them that invites them to audit a cohort and find their place. I don’t want them to have to wait for the annual event.” — Tori Miller Liu, AIIM

The 2027 plan includes selecting a handful of cohorts to continue year-round on an opt-in basis, requiring both a facilitator who wants to lead and at least five or six members who want to continue. Non-members who sit in a cohort at the event become a clear conversion path into membership, and year-round cohorts give members who skip the conference a reason to show up in person and meet the people they have been talking to on Zoom. The committee and special interest group version of this is a pattern we have covered before in why association committees are failing and how to fix them.

AIIM is also formalizing facilitator development for 2027: a 60 to 90 minute orientation, a certificate, and a cohort of facilitators who experience the format themselves before leading one.

“Guess who has to facilitate really quality cohorts? The chair of every one of your committees, the chair of your board. If we can get really good at training facilitators, we are absolutely training our leaders of tomorrow.” — Tori Miller Liu, AIIM

Dividing the work between humans and AI

Boyar closed with a framework for where AI belongs in a program like this and where it does not. AI flags facilitator candidates based on participation across member activities and prior cohorts, but staff decide who is qualified to lead. AI removes the spreadsheet work and the bias in manual matching, but humans make the final call on the recommendations. AI recommends agenda topics based on what the cohort discussed last time, but the facilitator sets the agenda. AI nudges, reminds, and schedules across time zones, but members are the ones who show up and build psychological safety. AI ingests conversation data and surfaces signals, but the association sets the goals and the benchmarks.

For 2027, AIIM is taking this further than most. Liu is handing cohort conversation data to a third-party auditor to assess the health of the discussions, including where members did not get a chance to speak and where sentiment dropped. It is the retrospective an association would run on any facilitated meeting, applied at the scale of 34 cohorts at once.

What to do Monday morning

1. Audit what you are actually offering. Liu’s closing question is the right diagnostic: are you giving your members access to community, or are you helping them build relationships? A directory, a forum, and a conference are access. Count how many of your programs put a specific group of members in a room with a facilitator and a reason to return.

2. Pick one small group to pilot, not the whole organization. AIIM tested cohorts with a single special interest group before taking the risk at the annual meeting. The pilot is where you learn that facilitators matter more than software and that simple beats precise.

3. Invest in facilitators before you invest in features. The single clearest variable in AIIM’s two years of data was facilitator quality. Vet for facilitation experience, train formally, and treat the facilitator bench as your leadership pipeline, because it is.

Watch the full conversation

The complete webinar recording is embedded below. For a closer look at how another association built this model, read the HFMA case study, see how cohorts compare to traditional one-to-one programs in mentorship vs. cohorts, and to explore what this could look like for your association, book a call with the RallyBoard team.