Sponsorships chairs’ report for COLING/ACL 2006 
Dominique Estival / Steven Krauwer 

Overview
For Coling/ACL 2006, we started to contact potential 
sponsors mid-2005.  As a result, we collected AU$79,000 
in combined sponsorships, exhibits and paid advertising, 
which is the amount we had been aiming for.  The list 
of sponsors is as follows:

- HCSNet (Platinum). 
- Macquarie University (Gold)
- CSIRO (Gold)
- Microsoft Research (Gold, incl. wireless)
- Appen (Silver, Student Volunteers)
- Google (Silver, Cocktail reception)
- XRCE (Bronze)
- AFNLP (Student Support Fund)
- ELRA (Student Support Fund)
- DSTO (Glass)
- ACS (Supporter)
- NSF (student support for the Student Research Workshop)
In addition, MSR and AFNLP provided funding for two best 
paper awards and 5 best reviewer awards.  

Following the recommendations from 2005, the responsibility 
for sponsoring activities was shared between Dominique Estival 
(local) and Steven Krauwer (international). While it is a good idea 
to involve more than one person for this task, the division of 
labour between “international” and “local” chairs did not work 
as well as had been hoped for.  This was in part because the local 
organisation had been in place before the international chair was 
appointed. Although there was quite a lot of interaction and 
collaboration, there were also a few misunderstandings about 
decisions which had been made earlier, especially concerning 
the range of possibilities for sponsorships and how it was 
conveyed to potential sponsors.

Following the 2005 recommendations, this year the student research 
workshop chair applied for and received NSF funding for the SRW.  
However, the grant application to the local government agency 
was not successful. We would still recommend trying to get funding 
from such sources, but to be prepared for disappointment.

General remarks and recommendations
Even though we were quite pleased by the generous contributions 
from a number of local and international organizations and companies, 
we were somewhat disappointed by our failure to attract 
many industrial sponsors. Some observations are in place here:

- Some (potential) sponsors were disappointed to see that part of 
their contribution would be redefined as a donation to the 
Australian tax authorities.  It is difficult to give recommendations 
on how to deal with this issue, as the situation will be 
different in different countries.

- One issue probably specific to Australia was that many of the 
companies in the US and Europe found Australia too far away from 
their own markets to see any potential benefit from sponsoring.  
Similarly, it was very difficult to attract publishers to exhibit 
at this event. Recommendation: We have no specific recommendations 
here, other than either not to set our expectations too high in such 
cases, or to find convincing arguments that distance is not 
necessarily a problem.

- In many cases our best contacts are with the research labs of 
major companies. It turns out that their available budgets for 
sponsoring are minimal or absent. In some cases they tried 
to contact their commercial departments, but with no success, 
most probably because an audience of researchers is not interesting 
enough for them. Recommendation: Again we have no other recommendation 
than to be realistic in our expectations

- From discussions with Ken Church (Microsoft) at an early stage 
of our acquisition activities, it appeared that what we had on offer 
would not offer potential industrial sponsors the right 
type or the right amount of visibility.  Unfortunately these 
discussions took place at a stage when it was too late to design a 
new and more effective sponsoring model. Recommendation: We 
recommend to have better coordination between the various sponsorship 
chairs and the conference organisers at an early stage, so a common 
strategy can be put in place. 

- One potential sponsor withdrew a few weeks before the conference, 
after having had their logo on the web site for several months.  
This was noticed by several people and caused other sponsors 
to complain about the “free” advertising that had been obained 
in that way. Recommendation: Only advertise sponsorships when 
they have actually been received.

- We used a number of lists of potential sponsors from earlier 
conferences and other events. As could be expected many of the companies 
listed there did no longer exist and  even if the company still existed 
many of the named contacts we had were no longer there. At the same 
time it should be noted that nearly all successful sponsorship requests 
were based on personal contacts. Recommendation:  We should try to clean 
up the existing list of potential sponsors, and (this is the hardest bit) 
to keep it up to date. Has anyone ever tried a Wiki style approach to this, 
where ACL officials and conference organizers could enter their 
corrections, findings, tips, etc? 
 
In summary, our advice to future sponsorships chairs is:
* Appoint all the chairs, and ensure a common understanding of the 
strategy, earlier.
* Start contacting sponsors early the previous year (mid-year was good).
* The student workshop chair should continue applying for NSF funding.
* Only advertise sponsorships that have actually been received.
* Clean up the list of potential sponsors and make it available.