RallyBoard vs. Art of Mentoring

Overview

When association leaders evaluate mentoring technology, they're often navigating a more fundamental question: What kind of mentoring do we actually want to offer our members? The answer to that question largely determines which platform belongs in your tech stack.

Art of Mentoring is an Australia-based company with over two decades of experience designing and delivering mentoring programs for associations, corporations, and government agencies. Their platform is built around the 1:1 mentoring relationship — pairing a more experienced mentor with a mentee — and wraps that core functionality with training content, facilitation support, and program management tooling. For associations that want to offer a structured, evidence-based individual mentoring program, Art of Mentoring is among the most purpose-built solutions available.

RallyBoard is a cohort-based peer learning platform for associations, built to operationalize synchronous small-group engagement at scale. Where Art of Mentoring specializes in pairing two people, RallyBoard specializes in forming and sustaining groups of 5–15 members who meet regularly over Zoom — whether that's a group mentoring cohort, a committee, a shared interest group, or a certification prep cohort. RallyBoard was founded by Jackson Boyar, who spent 10+ years as CEO and Chairman of Mentor Collective — a platform that scaled 1:1 mentoring programs to hundreds of colleges and employers including JPMorgan Chase, Amazon, and Harvard University. That background directly informed RallyBoard's design: Boyar understood both the power of structured mentoring and the operational limits of the 1:1 model at association scale, which is why RallyBoard is built around the group cohort as its core unit.

The two platforms are not direct competitors. Many associations will find value in both: Art of Mentoring to power a traditional paired mentoring track, and RallyBoard to run group mentoring cohorts, peer learning communities, and other programs that require structured small-group synchronous engagement. Early RallyBoard customers like HFMA are running cohort-based programs alongside — not instead of — their existing member engagement infrastructure.

👥 Group Mentoring vs. 1:1 Mentoring

The most important distinction between these platforms is the mentoring model they're designed to support.

Art of Mentoring is built around the dyadic mentoring relationship. Their matching algorithm connects individual mentors and mentees based on goals, experience, and preferences. The platform then supports the ongoing relationship with milestone guidance, resource libraries, surveys, and progress tracking. This model works particularly well when:

• Senior members have capacity to give focused, individualized attention

• Mentees benefit from deep 1:1 relationships with a single guide

• The association wants to create a formal, credential-adjacent development track

RallyBoard is built around the group cohort. Groups of 5–15 members are matched by the platform's AI, auto-scheduled for recurring Zoom meetings, and given the tools to self-organize — including a volunteer chair, agenda-setting, topic voting, and AI-generated meeting summaries. This model works particularly well when:

• The association has more mentee demand than available 1:1 mentor capacity

• Peer-to-peer learning (not just mentor-to-mentee transfer) is the primary goal

• The association wants to run multiple concurrent programs across different member segments

PMI's group mentoring pilot with RallyBoard — structured as 2 mentors and 6-7 mentees per cohort — became the largest mentoring program in PMI's history precisely because the group model allowed them to serve far more members with the same number of volunteer mentors.

🤝 Complementary Positioning

These platforms can coexist in an association's member engagement strategy. An association might use Art of Mentoring to run a formal 1:1 mentoring program for a defined member segment (e.g., early-career professionals paired with senior practitioners) while using RallyBoard to run group mentoring cohorts, peer learning communities, and committee engagement for a broader membership. The two programs serve different member needs and different engagement goals — they aren't redundant.

💰 Pricing

Art of Mentoring prices by the matched pair, starting at approximately $6,800/year for 20 pairs, with the ability to add unlimited additional pairs. This structure is well-suited for associations running a bounded, curated mentoring program with a known cohort size.

RallyBoard pricing is not publicly listed and is customized based on program scope, number of cohorts, and member volume. Associations interested in RallyBoard should book a demo to discuss pricing based on their specific use case.

Feature Comparison

Common Use Cases

When To Choose RallyBoard

• 🧩 Your mentoring demand exceeds your mentor supply. The group model lets 2 mentors serve 8–10 mentees simultaneously, dramatically expanding reach without recruiting more volunteer time.

• 🔁 You want members to meet synchronously and repeatedly. RallyBoard automates recurring Zoom scheduling, attendance tracking, and nudging — eliminating the coordination overhead that causes programs to go dormant.

• 📊 You need insight into what members are actually discussing. RallyBoard's AI Engagement Digest surfaces anonymized keyword trends from cohort meetings, giving program teams a real-time window into member sentiment — as HFMA demonstrated across 16 cohorts and 18K+ minutes on Zoom.

• 🏗️ You want to run programs beyond mentoring. If group mentoring is one of several programs you want to operationalize — alongside committees, shared interest groups, certification prep, or annual meeting networking — RallyBoard handles all of them on a single platform.

• 🤖 You want to reduce staff overhead at scale. NACU doubled its active learning communities without adding staff by automating chair recruitment, scheduling, and meeting logistics through RallyBoard.

Bottom Line

Art of Mentoring is a mature, well-supported platform for associations that want to run structured 1:1 mentoring programs — particularly those that value training content, facilitation resources, and a high-touch approach to program design. If your primary goal is pairing individual mentors and mentees with a proven methodology behind it, Art of Mentoring has a strong track record and deep association expertise. RallyBoard is the better fit for associations that want to scale synchronous group engagement — whether that's group mentoring, peer learning communities, committee support, or any program where small groups of members meeting regularly is the model. If you're already running or considering 1:1 mentoring and want to add a group learning layer for broader member reach, both platforms can coexist in your stack.