2024Q3 Reports: Sponsorship Director

This is the 4th 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.

In 2023, the ACL Exec adopted a new sponsorship model for the ACL Sponsorship Committee which now consists of:

• 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 conference 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).

Duties of the Sponsorship Director

The responsibilities of the Sponsorship Director are to:

• Coordinate with the ACL Business Manager to set the sponsorship rates for the conferences, and benefits for each sponsorship level
• Coordinate the efforts of the conference sponsorship chairs
• 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
• Collecting logos and advertisements from sponsors for inclusion on the conference websites and conference handbooks
• Collecting resumes from conference participants who are seeking employment and who opt-in to sharing their information with sponsors
• Liaising between sponsors and relevant conference organizers in order to ensure that we give the sponsors the promised benefits

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 the Past Few Years

There are several pain points for my role as Sponsorship Director.

• 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
• Several companies asked for a Sponsorship agreement. It would be good for the ACL to draft a standard sponsorship agreement

There are several other improvements that could be made:

• Our business director, Jenn Rachford, has taken responsibility for coordinating the exhibition booths at each conference. She is working towards providing an exhibitors' guide to sponsors >1 month in advance of the conference.
• The production schedule for printed materials like the printed handbook is always difficult, since it needs to go to a printer ~6 weeks before each conference and requires inputs from many groups including the program co-chairs, workshop organizers, all sponsors (who provide logos and ads), etc.
• We recently dropped the sponsorship benefit of including literature in the conference handbag to try to try to streamline the conference prep work. We might consider dropping the printed handbook for similar reasons.

Sponsorship rates for 2024 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. We expected that the downturn in the technology sector would result in fewer sponsorships this year.

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 and required that exhibitors also purchase a sponsorship.

We offer a discount when a company sponsors multiple conferences. The discount is 15% for sponsoring 2 conferences, and 20% for sponsoring 3 conferences.

In 2023, we introduced a new (more costly) sponsorship level for Welcome Event / Social Event Sponsor. We had 2 welcome event sponsors in 2023: Grammarly and Cohere. In 2024, we didn't secure any sponsors at this level. We will keep the category available for 2025 conference. 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.

Sponsorship Booklet for 2024 Conferences

We hired designers Kira Grennan <kira.grennan@gmail.com> and Jake Gingert <jakegingert@gmail.com> to update the sponsorship booklet this year.

Sponsors for 2024 Conferences

Our 2024 conferences secured the following confirmed sponsors, as of August 8, 2024.

• EACL 2024 Sponsors:
  • Diamond: None
  • Platinum: Megagon
  • Gold: Bloomberg, Snowflake
  • Silver: None
  • Bronze: Adobe, Babelscape
  • D&I: HITS gGmbH

• NAACL 2024 Sponsors:
  • Diamond: Capital One
  • Platinum: Baidu, Kensho, Grammarly, Megagon, Otter.ai
  • Gold: None
  • Silver: None
  • Bronze: Adobe, JP Morgan
  • D&I: Grammarly

• ACL/AACL 2024 Sponsors:
  • Diamond: Apple, Google-Deepmind, LG AI Research, Meta, NewsBreak
  • Platinum: Alibaba Cloud, Amazon, Baidu, ByteDance, IBM Research, Megagon, Meituan, Oracle, SCB 10X, Sony
  • Gold: Ahrefs, Chen Institute, Cohere, Exa.ai, Xiaomi Group
  • Silver: Ant Group
  • Bronze: Adobe, Babelscape, Dataocean.AI, Translated
  • D&I: Apple

• EMNLP 2024 Sponsors:
  • Diamond: Apple, Bloomberg, Google
  • Platinum: Baidu, ByteDance, Cohere, Megagon
  • Gold: Millennium
  • Silver: Ant Group
  • Bronze: Adobe, Jane Street, JP Morgan, Translated
  • D&I: Apple

The total sponsorship commitments for the ACL 2024 conferences was $1,033,316. This figure is similar to the sponsorship income of $1,093,500 in 2023 and $1,093,125 in 2022. However, it is effectively substantially lower, since this year the sponsorship is for 4 conferences, the 2023 and 2022 numbers represent sponsorship income for 3 conferences each year.

An approximate breakdown per conference was:

• EACL 2024: $19,580 (down $34,720 compared to EACL 2023)
• NAACL 2024: $170,300 (down $107,245 compared to NAACL 2022)
• ACL 2024: $557,600 (up $34,511 compared to ACL 2023)
• EMNLP 2024: $481,600 (down $230,275 compared to EMNLP 2023, but we still have 2 months before the EMNLP 2024 sponsorship deadline)

Additionally, we have $94,497 of sponsorship for 2024 workshops (compared to $156,877 for workshops at all ACL 2023 conferences).

I used | this spreadsheet to track sponsorship commitments.

Action items for ACL

I am in my second my term as Sponsorship Director and will serve until 2026. I recommend that the ACL Exec appoint another Sponsorship Chair with an overlapping term, so that we can have a period of knowledge transfer. Alternately, the ACL Exec might consider hiring someone to perform the role of Sponsorship Director.