RallyBoard
What Three Association Pilots Taught Us About Scaling Peer Engagement
Reflections on RallyBoard's first cohort of partners—and what their pilots reveal about where member engagement is heading.
Jackson Boyar
Co-Founder and CEO
Mar 31, 2026
·
6 min read
In 2025, three associations—PMI, HFMA, and NACU—launched cohort-based peer engagement pilots with RallyBoard. All three have since expanded their work with us.
This article is a reflection on what those pilots actually taught us—about member behavior, program design, and what it takes to build engagement infrastructure that scales. The most important lesson didn't come from the metrics. It came from watching how members showed up when the experience changed.
Members don't engage the same way they did five or ten years ago. The associations that treat that as a problem to manage will keep losing ground. The ones that treat it as a hypothesis to test will find something better on the other side.
The Evidence of Impact: Three Association Pilots
PMI: The Largest-Scale Mentoring Program in PMI History
The Project Management Institute serves over 700,000 members across 190+ countries. Despite that scale, delivering mentoring had remained a boutique experience—limited by the manual effort of recruiting mentors, coordinating schedules, and managing matching across time zones and career stages.
In late 2025, PMI partnered with RallyBoard to launch a group mentoring pilot across its Learning and Community divisions. Each group included two experienced mentors serving as co-chairs and six to seven mentee participants. RallyBoard's AI matching handled group formation from intake survey data; automated scheduling eliminated the coordination burden that had historically limited program reach.
What the numbers showed: In just 1.5 months, the pilot generated 62 group meetings, more than 16,500 minutes on Zoom, and a 57% average attendance rate across groups of 7–9 members. By its conclusion, the pilot represented the largest-scale mentoring program in PMI's history.
More significantly, the pilot established a replicable framework. PMI's Community and Learning teams now have a blueprint they can apply across their 700,000-member base—rather than running one-off volunteer-led programs that don't compound.
As Amal Giknis, Engagement Specialist III at PMI, put it: thoughtful matching strengthens real peer connections, and reduced administrative effort makes high-quality mentorship easier to scale.
Read the full PMI case study →
HFMA: Turning Volunteer Support Into a Strategic Asset
The Healthcare Financial Management Association supports more than 140,000 healthcare finance professionals. Like many large associations, HFMA had built deep value through its annual conference and online content—but struggled to deliver high-touch experiences year-round across its distributed volunteer network and member segments.
HFMA's leadership had already experienced cohort-based peer learning firsthand through participation in Chief, an executive network built around structured small-group dialogue. They understood the model's power. The challenge was delivering it at association scale.
RallyBoard launched three distinct program designs with HFMA between September 2025 and January 2026, serving two audiences:
Volunteer support cohorts for Regional Executive Council members and Chapter Leaders—matched by organizational type, geography, and strategic focus, meeting monthly or biweekly
Emerging Leaders cohorts for early- to mid-career healthcare finance professionals within their first ten years in the field—matched by career stage, functional focus, and self-identified development goals
What the numbers showed: Across 16 unique cohorts, HFMA generated 60+ Zoom meetings, 278 agenda topics, and more than 18,000 minutes of peer conversation. Critically, RallyBoard's Engagement Digest and Signals tools surfaced anonymized trends from across those conversations—giving HFMA's program and strategy teams real-time intelligence about what members are actually discussing.
The insight is significant: cohort conversations don't just create member value. They generate organizational intelligence that informs programming, advocacy priorities, and strategic planning.
HFMA's Chief Member Value Officer Stephanie Denvir noted that members come for education and insights—but peer connection is what creates lasting value.
Read the full HFMA case study →
NACU: From Dormant Communities to Self-Sustaining Cohorts
The New American Colleges and Universities serves a network of around 30 smaller comprehensive institutions. NACU had built 20+ learning communities representing every major role in higher education administration—from advancement professionals to chiefs of staff, library directors to nursing faculty.
But "built" is the operative word. Several of these communities had gone dormant. Others had never gained traction. The bottleneck was operational: recruiting volunteer chairs consumed significant staff time, manual scheduling created friction, and distributing agendas and meeting notes required coordination the team simply couldn't sustain.
In February 2025, NACU launched a strategic pilot with RallyBoard across eight communities, including a mix of established groups that had stalled and newly formed ones that had never activated. The platform handled smart matching, automated scheduling, integrated Zoom hosting, AI-generated meeting summaries, and behavioral nudges to maintain momentum.
What happened: Within months, NACU reached 650+ active member users across 24 active cohorts, doubled its number of active volunteer chairs, and saw feature adoption above 50%. More meaningfully, for the first time, members began self-selecting as chairs without staff prompting—and some started independently initiating communication with their communities.
That behavioral shift matters. It signals the difference between a program staff maintains and a community that sustains itself. NACU expanded the program to all learning communities within months.
As Michelle Apuzzio, VP of Programs and Communications at NACU, described it: what used to be a coordination nightmare became a seamless experience. Staff could focus on deepening engagement instead of managing logistics.
Read the full NACU case study →
What Three Pilots Have in Common
Across associations that differ significantly in size, sector, and mission—700,000-member global associations, a 140,000-member healthcare network, a 30-institution higher education consortium—the same pattern emerged.
The barrier was never member desire. In every case, members were ready to connect. The obstacle was staff capacity and operational infrastructure, not program demand.
Automation unlocks new models. When scheduling, matching, reminders, and note-taking are handled by technology, program teams stop being coordinators and start being strategists. The shift isn't incremental—it's categorical. Staff that once spent full days on logistics can now focus on program quality, facilitator development, and member insights.
Small groups create outsized returns. Groups of 7–15 members, meeting monthly or biweekly over six or more months, consistently generated engagement that broad-reach programs—webinars, newsletters, discussion boards—cannot replicate. The mechanism is accountability: when eight colleagues are expecting you, you show up.
Cohort conversations generate strategic intelligence. At both HFMA and PMI, the data generated by active cohorts provided leadership with a real-time window into member sentiment, emerging challenges, and unmet needs. Programs that deliver member value are simultaneously delivering organizational insight.
Volume scales without staff. PMI launched the largest mentoring program in its history. NACU doubled its volunteer chair base. HFMA served three distinct member segments simultaneously. None of these outcomes required proportionally scaling staff.
The Real Lesson: Test, Iterate, Don't Assume
The most consistent finding across these three pilots wasn't about technology or staffing ratios. It was about member behavior.
In each case, associations entered the pilot with assumptions about how their members would engage—and the pilots quietly challenged those assumptions. NACU discovered that members would voluntarily step into leadership roles without being asked, once the infrastructure made it easy. HFMA discovered that volunteers who donated significant time to the organization were hungry for peer connection themselves, not just tools to serve others. PMI discovered that members spread across multiple time zones and career stages could build genuine professional relationships in six weeks, given the right structure.
None of these outcomes were guaranteed. They were discovered through pilots designed to learn.
This is the principle that matters most: don't assume members want to engage the same way they did five or ten years ago. The associations that ran these pilots weren't certain cohort-based peer learning would work for their members. They were curious enough to find out.
The engagement habits of members have shifted—shaped by remote work, AI tools, shrinking attention, and rising expectations for personalized experiences. Associations that design programs around how members engaged in 2015 will keep seeing declining participation. Associations that treat member engagement as a live hypothesis—something to test, learn from, and iterate on—will keep finding new ways to deliver genuine value.
That's a harder operating posture than running the same programs year after year. It requires being willing to launch something small, measure honestly, and change course based on what members actually do—not what they say they'll do in a survey.
The three associations in these pilots modeled that posture. That's why the results were worth writing about.
What Association Leaders Can Do Now
The question these pilots raise isn't whether peer engagement works. It's whether your association is willing to test it seriously—with a real member segment, real metrics, and genuine openness to what you find.
A practical starting point:
Pick one member segment and one program hypothesis. Don't try to redesign your entire engagement strategy. Choose a specific group—emerging leaders, committee volunteers, recent conference attendees—and a specific question you want to answer.
Run a single pilot cohort. Select 8–15 members, assign a volunteer chair, and run one structured cycle of four to six monthly meetings. Measure attendance, satisfaction, and renewal outcomes.
Separate the logistics from the program. Identify which elements require human judgment (facilitator support, program design, member outreach) and which can be automated (scheduling, reminders, matching, meeting notes). Don't let logistics be the reason a pilot fails.
Let the data tell you something. Every meeting is a window into what members are actually thinking about. Treat that as intelligence, not just program output.
The associations in these pilots didn't wait for certainty before starting. They started in order to create it.
