2012Q3 Reports: Sponsorship Committee

Sponsorship committee: Eiichiro Sumita, Haifeng Wang, Michael Gamon, Patrick Pantel, Massimiliano Ciaramita, Idan Szpektor

Sponsors: BaoBab, Appen Butler Hill, Rakuten Institute of Technology, ETS, IBM, Microsoft, Google, Baidu, SDL, Mixi, Preferred Infrastructure Inc., Elsevier, Ntrepid, Morgan Claypool Publishers, Nuance, University of Washington, AT&T

General remarks: Although economic problems have persisted globally, the ACL sponsorship committee has raised over $70K (as of this report date) for ACL/EACL/NAACL thanks to the resourcefulness of the local organization committee, the innovative and flexible solutions offered by Priscilla to prospective sponsors and the outreach enabled by the globally distributed sponsorship committee members. In addition to the usual large companies such as Microsoft, Google, IBM and AT&T, support could be secured from various local and smaller sources, and Baidu could be won as an ACL platinum sponsor for two consecutive years. The range of sponsorships varies from regular cash support to student best paper award and exhibitions.

What worked well: Personal connections and pleas, as in the past, worked best. The list of sponsors and emails is outdated and emailing “across the board” yielded little (if any) success. The flexibility in the various sponsorship options was appreciated by the sponsors, this is a strategy that should be continued in the future.

Suggestion: It would probably make sense to have a general sponsorship chair who can coordinate between the co-chairs as was the case in 2011.