International Sponsorship Committee (ISC)

Regional Chairs of the ACL International Sponsorship Committee

The ACL International Sponsorship Committee (ISC) has two regional chairs from each of the following regions, namely, Asia/Pacific Rim, Europe/Africa/Mid-East, and Americas. The term for each regional chair is usually 2 years. The chairs of each region should be more active when the main ACL conferences, such as ACL, NAACL, EACL and EMNLP, are in that region.

Here are (briefly) the duties of the regional chairs:

• In coordination with the other chairs, seek sponsorships from their region for all ACL conferences being held that year. Conference General Chair also appoints a Local Sponsorship Chair who would focus specifically on the city/country where the conference is held and the main ISC chairs would focus on the rest of the entire region. And, since Priscilla has been working with many of the big, long term sponsors, she contacts places like Adobe, Amazon, Baidu, ebay, Facebook, IBM, Google, Microsoft, Maluuba, Nuance and Yandex. The main reason for having these separate chairs is to avoid duplication of different people approaching the same companies.
• The regional chairs might look for smaller and startup companies, publishers and universities as well as large-but-not-our-usual companies.
• Priscilla updates the Sponsorship Booklet every year, which is used as the guide for the regional chairs to use. It gives the pricing and benefits at the various option levels.
• Each region works together and more-or-less independently from the others but, where there may be offices in the US and Asia such as Microsoft, it is then good to coordinate to be sure we maximize funding and, at the same time, do not have multiple people approaching the same group.
• Once a commitment is made by a company, the regional chairs should tell Priscilla what the level of commitment is, and who the contact person is. Priscilla will then make an invoice and add the company to the specific conference's list of sponsors. The chair who got the commitment would get the logo from the company and forward that to the conference webmaster and Priscilla for posting and using in publications.