2023Q3 Reports: Sponsorship Director

This is the third year that ACL has had a Sponsorship Director position. The position was created in July of 2020, and it officially started 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.

Duties of the Sponsorship Director

Since it is a relatively new position, the responsibilities of the Sponsorship Director are still being defined. Last year I defined this as the set of responsibilities:

• Coordinate the ACL Sponsorship Committee, which currently consists of the Sponsorship Director, the ACL Business Manager, 2 regional representatives from each chapter, 2 representatives from SIGDAT. (See proposal below).
• 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
• Contact recurring sponsors to solicit sponsorship of upcoming conferences.
• Maintain an organized list of current sponsors and of potential sponsorship leads
• Help recruit new sponsors to the conference
• Invoice sponsors once they have picked a sponsorship level, and decided which conferences to sponsor.
• Coordinate with the general chairs of the conferences to let them know about sponsor benefits like exhibition space, printed ads in the handbook and flyers in the conference handbag
• Coordinate the efforts of the conference sponsorship chairs
• Liaising between sponsors and relevant conference organizers in order to ensure that we give the sponsors the promised benefits

Since Priscilla Rasmussen retired, I picked up many of the sponsorship-related duties that she previously handled, and I have been closely coordinating with Jennifer Rachford and David Yarowsky to formalize many processes related to sponsorship, including things like processing reimbursement for workshops that bring in sponsorships.

In order to help manage the invoices, I asked permission from both the ACL Treasurer and my own university department to hire my admin at the University of Pennsylvania to help with issuing the invoices. Her name and email is Lily Hoot <lhoot@seas.upenn.edu>. She has been serving in the role for longer than a year, and has been quite valuable in handling the invoicing duties. We will bill the ACL $40/hour for her time to reimburse the University for time taken away from her normal responsibilities. I recommend that the ACL Exec budget for administrative help for future Sponsorship Directors as well.

Pain Points from Last Year

There were several pain points for my role as Sponsorship Director last year.

• There was no way for me to confirm sponsors had paid their invoices, since I don’t have ability to view bank account
• For workshops that raised sponsorship funds, it took the ACL a very long time to reimburse the organizers for any expenses that they incurred. We should develop a procedure for how to process reimbursements.
• For SIGs that raised sponsorship funds, we weren't able to communicate whether they had a balance in their shadow account. The ACL should track their balances.
• Only Priscilla was able to process credit card payments. It would be good if we could transition this to Jenn and/or to Lily Hoot.
• Several companies asked for a Sponsorship agreement. It would be good for the ACL to draft a standard sponsorship agreement.

Proposal: Reconfigure the ACL Sponsorship Committee

The ACL Sponsorship Committee is supposed to consist of the ACL Sponsorship Director, the ACL Business Manager, two representatives from each local chapter, and two from SIGDAT. I suggest that the ACL Exec changes this to be a more conference-centric model. I recommend that the ACL Sponsorship Committee be changed to be:

• The ACL Sponsorship Director
• The ACL Business Manager
• 2 Sponsorship Chair for each conference, appointed by the general chair in consolation with the chapter boards and SIGDAT

I recommend that the sponsorship chairs be a 2-conference cycle, with each chair serving for 2 instance of the conference, once as the junior chair and once as the senior chair (who trains the next junior chair).

Here are details about the current Sponsorship Committee Procedures.

This composition of the sponsorship committee would make it clearer what the duties of the committee members are. Currently, the ACL Sponsorship Committee members aside from the sponsorship director and business manager play very little role. Here are my suggestions for the conference sponsorship chairs duties.

Sponsorship rates for 2023 Conferences

In late 2023, Jennifer Rachford and I met the sponsorship rates. We kept the ACL sponsorship rate fixed from last year, and set the sponsorship rates for the other conferences for this year (EMNLP, and EACL) to be roughly proportional ACL based on what fraction of attendees we expected. This means that EMNLP's sponsorship rates are equal to ACL, and EACL's sponsorship rates are 40% of ACL's.

Exhibition booths are included as part of the Diamond and Platinum sponsorship levels, and may be purchased as add-ons by other sponsorship. We increased the cost to purchase add-on exhibition booths this year.

In previous years we would offer a 20% discount for "multi-pack" sponsorships where a company would sponsor multiple conferences. This year we changed the discount to be 15% for sponsoring 2 conferences, and 20% for sponsoring 3 conferences.

This year we introduced two new options for a single company to sponsor the welcome event, and another to sponsor the social event, at each conferences. We hope that these will help defray the cost of catering that is typically included as a mandatory spending item in the ACL's contracts with conference venues. If companies join at these new higher sponsorship levels, it may help us lower the the cost to attend the in-person conferences.

So far, Grammarly has signed on as the Welcome Sponsor for the EACL conference, and Cohere has signed on as the Welcome Sponsor for the ACL conference. We are excited to feature these company at the welcome events! Jennifer Rachford worked with the companies for branding at the events.

Sponsorship Booklet for 2023 Conferences

I hired designer Kira Grennan <kira.grennan@gmail.com> to update | the sponsorship booklet again this year.

Sponsors for 2023 Conferences

Our 2023 conferences secured the following confirmed sponsors, as of July 1, 2023.

• EACL 2023 Sponsors:
  • Welcome Event Sponsor (new category): Grammarly
  • Diamond: LivePerson
  • Platinum: Amazon, Bloomberg
  • Gold: None
  • Silver: Duolingo
  • Bronze: Adobe, Babelscape
  • D&I: Amazon

• ACL 2023 Sponsors:
  • Welcome Event Sponsor (new category): Cohere
  • Diamond: Apple, Bloomberg, Google, IBM, LivePerson, Meta, Microsoft
  • Platinum: Amazon, Baidu, ByteDance, DeepMind, Flitto, Grammarly, Huawei, Kaust, Megagon Labs, Speechocean
  • Gold: Ant Group, Comcast, JP Morgan Chase, NEC, Tencent
  • Silver: aiXplain, Alibaba, Bosch, Duolingo, Translated
  • Bronze: Adobe, Babelscape, ServiceNow
  • D&I: Amazon, LivePerson, DeepMind

Note that Flitto withdrew after the sponsorship materials were printed. This miscommunication was in part my fault (CCB). Ways of rectifying it in the future would be: (1) re-confirm sponsorship commitments prior to printing conference materials, and (2) require payment prior to the conference (maybe for non-recurring sponsors).

• EMNLP 2023 Sponsors:
  • Diamond: Apple, Google, GTCOM, LivePerson
  • Platinum: Alibaba, Amazon, Baidu, ByteDance, Megagon Labs, NEC
  • Gold: Ant Group, JPMorgan JP Morgan Chase & Co.
  • Silver: aiXplain, Duolingo, Translated
  • Bronze: Adobe, Babelscape
  • D&I: Amazon

• AACL 2023 Sponsorship: Based on the arrangement between AACL and AFNLP (Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing), this year's joint conference, IJCNLP-AACL (2023), is organized by AFNLP. Therefore, the sponsorship fee goes directly to AFNLP, and I'm not tracking it in my role as the ACL Sponsorship Director.

The total sponsorship commitments for the ACL 2023 conferences was $832,740. Additionally, we have $64,115 for workshop sponsorships.

An approximate breakdown per conference was:

• EACL 2023: $53,340
• ACL 2023: $522,450
• EMNLP 2023: $256,950
• AACL 2023: N/A

I used | this spreadsheet to track sponsorship commitments.

Action items for ACL

1. Vote on the proposed reorganization of the ACL Sponsorship Committee. (This may have happened in the Exec meeting, but wasn't communicated to me.)

2. I believe that my term as Sponsorship Chair is officially done, since it was created as a three year position. I'd be happy to serve another term if you want to reappoint me. Also, you might consider appointing an understudy, so that we can hand it off to someone else. Alternately, this role might be something that you should hire someone to do.