2024Q1 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.

Duties of the Sponsorship Director

The responsibilities of the Sponsorship Director are:

• Coordinate with the ACL Business Manager to set the sponsorship rates for the conferences, 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
• 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

For future sponsorship directors I recommend:

• Hire an assistant to help with invoicing
• Coordinate with the ACL Business Manager and ACL Treasurer to ability to view bank account, so that you and your assistant can verify when sponsors have paid their invoices.

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.

• Tracking down unpaid invoices is currently not as organized as it could be. It can sometimes be difficult for us to confirm whether sponsors had paid their invoices.
• 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.
• Although printed materials like the conference handbook are a good place for placing sponsor logos, they are difficult to coordinate since they must be printed in advance of the conference, and they rely on input from many parties including program co-chairs. The EMNLP 2023 conference handbook ended up not being printed and only available in digital form. I have decided to remove printed handbooks and flyers from the list of sponsorship perks that we advertise in the sponsorship brochure, and I suggested we phase them out.

Proposals adopted last year: Reconfigure the ACL Sponsorship Committee

Seriously, 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. Last year, we adpoted more conference-centric model.

• 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).

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 2024 Conferences

In late 2023, Jennifer Rachford and I set the sponsorship rates for 2024.

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.

Last 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. For EACL 2023, Grammarly was the inaugural Welcome Event Sponsor for $25,500 (making it the largest sponsor of EACL). For ACL 2023, Cohere was the inaugural Welcome Event Sponsor for $75,000 (making it the largest sponsor of EACL).

Sponsorship Booklet for 2024 Conferences

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

Sponsors for 2023 Conferences

Our 2023 conferences secured the following confirmed sponsors. Note AACL opted to manage its own sponsorship, so I have no insights into it.

• EACL 2023 Sponsors:
  • Welcome Event: Grammarly
  • Diamond: LivePerson
  • Platinum: Amazon, Bloomberg
  • Gold: none
  • Silver: Duolingo
  • Bronze: Adobe, Adobe, Babelscape
  • D&I: Amazon

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

• EMNLP 2023 Sponsors:
  • Diamond: Apple, Google, LivePerson, GTCOM, HPC AI TECH, King Salman Global Academy for the Arabic Language, Sony
  • Platinum: Ahrefs, Alibaba, Amazon, Baidu, ByteDance, Cohere, Megagon Labs, NEC
  • Gold: Ant Group, Bloomberg, Huawei, JP Morgan, SAP, Salesforce
  • Silver: aiXplain, Duolingo, jenni.ai, Translated
  • Bronze: Adobe, Adobe, Babelscape, Mercari, ModelBest, Nyonic
  • D&I: Amazon, RIKEN AIP

The total sponsorship commitments for the ACL 2023 conferences was $1,096,340. Additionally, we had $159,877 for workshop sponsorships and colocated conferences.

• EACL 2023: $54,300
• ACL 2023: $557,600 (up from $382,000 for ACL 2022)
• EMNLP 2023: $481,600 (similar to EMNLP 2022)

I used | this spreadsheet to track sponsorship commitments.

Current Sponsors for 2024 Conferences

We have reached out to the following companies soliciting their sponsorship: ASAPP, Accenture, Adobe, Ahrefs, Aleph Alpha, Alibaba, Amazon, Ant Group, Anthropic, Apple, BASF, Babelscape, Baidu, Bayer, Beyond Limits, Bloomberg, Bosch, ByteDance, Cambridge University Press , Capital One, Cisco, Cohere, Comcast, Company, Continental, DATAOCEAN AI, Databricks, DeepMind, Duolingo, Dyson, ETS, Fraunhoer, G-Research, GTCOM, Google Research, Grammarly, HLTCOE, HPC AI TECH, Huawei, IBM, JPMorgan, KLOA, Kaust, Kensho, King Salman Global Academy for the Arabic Language, LDC, LG AI Research, LinkedIn, LivePerson, Machine Learning Center of Excellence", Magic Data, Megagon Labs, Mercari, Merck, Meta, Microsoft, ModelBest, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, NEC, Naver Labs, Nuance, Nyonic, OpenAI, RIKEN AIP, Reddit, SAP, SCAI, Salesforce, Schwarz Group, ServiceNow, Sony Group Corporation, Super.AI, TIAA, Telekom, Tencent, Tetrasoft Federal, Translated, Two Sigma, UCSC, VESSL AI, Weights and Biases, Zalando, aiXplain, jenni.ai, nyonic

As of February 26, 2024 we have secured the following confirmed sponsors.

• Apple - Gold NAACL, Diamond ACL, Diamond EMNLP
• Baidu - Platinum 3 pack for 2024 ACL; EMNLP; NAACL
• Kensho - Platinum NAACL
• Bloomberg - Gold EACL, Gold NAACL, Diamond EMNLP
• LG AI Research - Diamond ACL
• Capital One - Diamond NAACL
• HITS gGmbH - D&I Champion for EACL
• Babelscape - Bronze 2-pack for EACL and ACL
• Ahrefs - Gold ACL
• Two Sigma - Gold NAACL
• Megagon - Platinum 4-pack for 2024 (ACL, EMNLP, NAACL and EACL)
• Adobe - Bronze 4-pack for 2024 (ACL, EMNLP, NAACL and EACL)

The total sponsorship commitments for the main conferences as of February 26, 2024 was the amount of $373,205. Additionally, we have $25,923 for workshop sponsorships.

Note that the EACL 2024 sponsorship is likely to be substantially less than EACL 2023, since we did not secure a welcome event sponsor.

I have been using | this spreadsheet to track sponsorship leads and commitments.

Action item for ACL

I have requested that ACL President Emily Bender respond to Grammarly's request about adding a clause to withdraw from sponsorship if Russian individuals have papers published in our conference.