2021Q3 Reports: Sponsorship Director

This is the first year that ACL has had a Sponsorship Director position. The position was created in July of 2020, and official began in Jan 2021. The position is currently filled by Prof. Chris Callison-Burch from the University of Pennsylvania, who previous served in several positions for the ACL: he was the General Chair for ACL 2017, Program Co-Chair for EMNLP 2015, Chair of the NAACL Executive Board 2012-2013 and a Board Member for NAACL Executive Board 2010-2011. When he was the General Chair for ACL 2017 he recruited several new sponsors, including Apple and Alibaba, in order to ensure that the conference was financially viable, because he wanted to do an D&I outreach effort to provide childcare at the conference to allow parents with younger children to attend more easily. Based on that experience, Priscilla Rasmussen recommended him to the ACL Exec for the new position. Chris will serve as Sponsorship Director until the end of 2023.

The responsibilities of the Sponsorship Director are still being defined. These are the current responsibilities:

• Coordinate the ACL Sponsorship Committee, which consists of the Sponsorship Director, the ACL Business Manager, 2 regional representatives from each chapter, 2 representatives from SIGDAT. Here are more details about the Sponsorship Committee Procedures.
• Coordinate with the ACL Business Manager to set the sponsorship rates for the conferences, and benefits for each sponsorship level
• Produce a sponsorship booklet which is distributed to potential sponsors, and which outlines the costs and benefits for each sponsorship level
• Coordinate with the web admins of each conference to post the sponsorship booklet on the conference website
• Help recruit new sponsors to the conference, and direct new sponsors to the Business Manager for invoicing once they've joined
• Coordinate with the general chairs of the conferences to let them know about sponsor benefits like exhibition space (which needs to be replicated in online conferences)
• Coordinate with web admins fo each conference to post logos/URLs of sponsors when they agree to sponsor the conference
• Maintain an organized list of current sponsors and of potential sponsorship leads
• Help establish policies relating to sponsorship and streamline the process of sponsorship
• Currently the Sponsorship Director helps oversee sponsorship for *ACL conferences only. In the future, it may be useful to help provide guidance for workshops or SIGs as well.

The ACL Sponsorship Committee currently consists of:

• Chris Callison-Burch <ccb@cis.upenn.edu> - ACL Sponsorship Director
• Priscilla Rasmussen <acl.rasmussen@gmail.com> - ACL Business Manager
• Chin-Yew Lin <cyl@microsoft.com> - Sponsorship Chair for SIGDAT
• Raffaella Bernardi <raffaella.bernardi@unitn.it> - Sponsorship Chair for EACL chapter
• Kenneth Heafield <kheafiel@inf.ed.ac.uk> - Sponshorship Chair for EACL chapter starting in Jan 2021
• Wanxiang Che <wanxiang@gmail.com> - Sponsorship Chair for AACL chapter
• Yusuke Miyao <yusuke@is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp> - Sponsorship Chair for AACL chapter
• Mohit Bansal <mbansal@cs.unc.edu> - Sponsorship Chair for NAACL chapter
• Ves Stoyanov <ves@fb.com> - Sponsorship Chair for NAACL chapter

Sponsorship Rates for 2021 Conferences

In the earlier report, we described the process for setting the sponsorship rates for 2021 Conferences.

Current Sponsors for 2021 Conferences

EACL and NAACL had the following sponsors:

• EACL:
  • Platinum: Facebook, Grammarly
  • Gold: Bloomberg
  • Silver: Duolingo
  • Bronze: Babelscape, LegalForce
  • Supporter: Celi, Samsung
  • Diversity and Inclusion Champion: Microsoft
  • Diversity and Inclusion Ally: Adobe, Google

• NAACL:
  • Diamond: Google
  • Platinum: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Megagon, Microsoft
  • Gold: Bloomberg, Grammarly, IBM, Vanguard
  • Silver: Duolingo
  • Bronze: Adobe, Babelscape, HLTCOE, LegalForce
  • Supporter: Celi, Samsung
  • Diversity and Inclusion Champion: Microsoft, Google

As of July 15, 2021 we have secured the following sponsors for ACL-IJCNLP and EMNLP:

• ACL-IJCNLP:
  • Diamond: Apple, Bloomberg, Facebook, Google
  • Platinum: Amazon, Baidu, ByteDance, DeepMind, Megagon, Microsoft, Tencent
  • Gold: Alibaba, IBM
  • Silver: Duolingo, Naver, Naver Labs Europe
  • Bronze: Adobe, Babelscape, Bosch, ETS, LegalForce
  • Diversity and Inclusion Champion: Deepmind, Google, Microsoft
  • Diversity and Inclusion Supporter: Adobe

• EMNLP:
  • Diamond: Apple, Bloomberg, Facebook, Google
  • Platinum: Amazon, Baidu, ByteDance, DeepMind, Megagon
  • Gold: Grammarly, Microsoft,
  • Silver: Duolingo, Naver, Naver Labs Europe
  • Bronze: Adobe, Babelscape, HLTCOE, LegalForce
  • Diversity and Inclusion Champion: Amazon, DeepMind, Google, Microsoft
  • Diversity and Inclusion Ally: Morgan Stanley
  • Diversity and Inclusion Supporter: Adobe, IBM

Recommendations

Sponsorship Policy

Jon May suggested that we adopt a Sponsorship Policy similar to the ACM FAccT conference's Sponsorship Policy. Colin Cherry will ask that the ACL Exec vote on adopting a similarly worded sponsorship policy. I encourage the Exec to adopt it, since it essentially formalizes what we have already been doing and since it helps clarify things to people unfamiliar with our practices.

EACL Sponsorship Dates

Shuly Winter suggested the following to me and David Yarowsky:

I'm writing to initiate a discussion of an issue that came up as a result of EACL-2021. It's a simple matter that I hope we can sort out effectively.

As you know, EACL conferences are typically held in April, before all other *ACL events. Also, sponsorship contracts are mainly centralized these days, and sponsors purchase packages that often include several ACL events. Consequently, sponsorship income for EACL conferences is sometimes obtained after the conference has taken place. I propose to evaluate the contribution of a given EACL conference in terms of sponsorship funding at the end of each calendar year (in which EACL takes place), and use this sum for the next EACL conference. In other words, I propose to establish a buffer to channel sponsorship funds from one EACL conference to the next.

Clarifying the duties of conference-level sponsorship chairs

The role of the conference-level sponsorship chairs has been somewhat unclear, given that duties of recruiting new sponsors and contacting old sponsors often fall to the International Sponsorship committee and to Priscilla. I recommend that the duties of the conference-level sponsorship chairs be amended to include these items (which currently don't have a clear leader, esp. during virtual conferences):

• Familiarizing themselves with the benefits that the sponsors get, which are:
  • exhibition space (complementary at higher levels),
  • complementary registration for a small number of company employees (plus extras for staffing exhibition space),
  • (currently unadvertised) a list of conference goers who have opted-in to have their info shared.
• Determining how the exhibition space should be handled for hybrid and virtual conferences. This should include:
  • working with the online chair to figure out what platform will be used.
  • working with the program co-chairs or general chair to set a fixed number hours each day for the booths to be staffed, and advertising these hours to conference goers.
• Acting as the POC for companies to communicate that info, and to help them get their complementary registration, etc. For this step it would be good to
  • maintaining a mailing list of company contacts who will be attending the conference, and regularly communicating with them as the date of the conference approaches.

Potential successor for the Sponsorship Director

Raffaella Bernardi is a member of the ACL Sponsorship Committee as a representative of EACL. She has been actively involved in helping with sponsorship this year, and has spearheaded activities like researching the sponsorship rates at peer conferences, contacting new sponsors, and helping keep the committee, at the sponsorship director and the business manager organized. I recommend that the ACL consider nominating her to new the Sponsorship Director beginning in January of 2024.

Action item for regional chapters, SIGDAT

At the start of each year, please pick a representative for your chapter to serve a 2 year term. Ideally we'll have 2 reps from each group serving staggered 2 year terms.