2014Q3 Reports: Sponsorship Committee
The sponsorship activity is typically divided in two subtasks to make the entire process more efficient: (1) search for local sponsors, i.e., roughly, those who have location and specific interests in the area of the conference and (2) global sponsors, who typically are all the others. The latter can be in turn subdivided in recurrent sponsors, i.e., those who have had a continuous relation with ACL and other sponsors. Given such subgroups, we assigned our team composed by local sponsorship co-chairs, Priscilla (ACL business manager), (E)ACL co-chairs, to the three types above, respectively.
The global sponsors for EACL, ACL, NAACL and Asia conferences constitute a similar topic for ACL. Thus, there were preliminary email exchanges between the sponsorship co-chairs of the regions above to define: a common sponsorship booklet, a common document listing potential sponsors (who were successfully contacted in the previous years along with new ones) and a common invitation letter. Although, this activity was beneficial for producing common sponsorship material is not completely suitable for EACL co-chairs as their sponsorship activities must start before, given its earlier schedule. The overall suggestion for the future co-chairs is to adopt a basic booklet version and a deadline for discussing it. If such deadline has passed, the EACL co-chairs can start to utilize the current version. One interesting outcome of the overall discussion is the availability of a booklet document in Google docs.
To gain efficiency, we created a specific spreadsheet for EACL, which keeps track of candidate organizations, people inside these organizations responsible for marketing or sponsorships. We populated the table with some organizations that have been (E)ACL sponsors in the past, e.g., search engine companies, NLP OEM vendors and solution providers and some academic institutions. In the future, we recommend reaching out beyond these (e.g., car companies nowadays have internal dialog systems groups). We used the table to track the status of the various sponsorship leads as well as to avoid multiple people approaching the same company. Since the global sponsor team for (E)ACL was composed by three members, we could efficiently subdivided the different sponsors among us. We also expect this table to act as a means to preserve knowledge about successful approaches and contact details for the benefit of our successors in subsequent years.
In general, it was not easy to obtain commitments for sponsorships. Nevertheless, we were able to have an increase of 40% over the largest money amount raised with global sponsors by any previous EACL conference. A final remark regards the role of the two-packet sponsorship option (including ACL and EACL). This has benefit more ACL: our main explanation is that it can be more attractive for sponsors than EACL. However, it would be surely worthwhile to stress the double packet option more.