2020Q3 Reports: Office Manager

Priscilla Rasmussen, Summer 2020

13 July 2020

ACL Business Office Report

First let me say that, although we have moved into the virtual world for 2020 conferences, there is still a lot of work to be managed by the Office. Both Pat and I have been consumed with ACL 2020 and now that it has ended, we turn our attention to helping in a similar way with EMNLP 2020. Within Memberships, Conferences, and Sponsorships sections below you will find descriptions of what we have been doing. It is a lighter load than when holding in-person conferences because the physical setup aspects are not needed but, to a lesser extent they have been replaced with a different set of questions and concerns (time zones posing a lot of issues and need to think differently, for example).

Following on the previously reported potential move to using Quickbooks as our Office accounting system, David and I have discussed the benefits and drawbacks of continuing to use Young Associates (our longtime Canadian accountants) or engaging Nisivoccia to serve as our accountant rather than (currently as) our auditor. We decided to continue more formally with Young Associates as the accountant and this means a fairly high learning curve for both Pat and me to learn Quickbooks and the process of working effectively with the Young Associates team. In the long term, this should improve and expedite our accounting and payment functions. David may speak more on this topic.

Pat Kirby continues to be an indispensable assistant to me in our daily office operations regarding membership entries, managing conference registrations as well as working with me in preparation for and during our conferences. Plus she continues to do more of the bank statement reconciliations and expenditure posting. She will be indispensable in our conversion to Quickbooks. Cathy Magnusson, my more part-time second assistant, continues communicating with the sponsors and exhibitors (who take a lot of our time and have lots of questions) and she seems to excel in following up on sponsorship delinquent payments and registrations that are declined or invalid and is doing a great job in financial recovery.

And, with the tremendous growth of our conferences, we have been overrun with requests for invoices and more proper receipts. I asked the registration form builders to make a receipt on our letterhead to hopefully satisfy these requests which they did but people are still not happy. I hope that, when Nitin has some free time, he may be able to help come up with an automated application process, similar to the visa letter requests, for paid-in-full invoices/receipts and certificates of attendance to reduce the hundreds of requests currently handled individually.

For the ACL initiatives on anti-harassment and diversity & inclusion (D&I), we have continued to include most items requested to be included on the registration form, with refinements as we learned what works best. The anti-harassment effort is working quite well. For the D&I initiative, the highly successful mentoring option has been included for the ACL 2020 conference as well as the question about needing assistance, etc. Overall, some very good and well received initiatives resulted from the D&I efforts in 2019 and are continuing in 2020 and the dedication shown by the committee and its leaders is impressive.

My hope is that by making the above suggested accounting adjustments we will be better equipped to handle the ever-increasing numbers of conference attendees and there will be more time for me to offer the always-called-upon advice, attend and organize meetings, identify and pre-negotiate future conference venues, conduct site visits, pre-negotiate catering/av/social event and other contracts, develop and monitor working budgets, review bids, make initial approaches to potential sponsors, oversee Office operations, etc. As previously explained, very cyclical employees are difficult to find and/or retain and, with the COVD-19 pandemic, it is fortunate that additional employees were not hired. The office has been closed since early March except for a few visits I have made to check on things. Going to a 100% virtual conference for ACL 2020 has shifted more of the complex planning and pre-conference management from the Office (planning space utilization, catering, and all onsite in-person arrangements) to the Organizing Committee and especially the amazingly excellent Infrastructure Team Dan Jurafsky pulled together. The office focused on advising, helping select virtual platforms for the conference, creating and monitoring the working budget, creating and managing registrations as usual, working with sponsors and exhibitors to ensure they still received promotion and recognition of their support, working with the Organizing Committee members (especially the general, program, tutorial, and workshop chairs).

I am beginning to formulate some ideas which may include engaging a Professional Conference Organizer (PCO) to work on all conferences to greater or lesser extent, as needed. After I am able to discuss this idea and expand it into something more complete that I can propose, I will come back to this.

Publications, Journals and Royalties:

With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates handling print-on-demand of our publications, I typically receive no requests for hardcopy publications in the office.

The Curran Associates agreement has been good for both them and the ACL. In the first half of 2020, we have received $1,521.76 covering the 4th quarter 2019 and the 1st quarter 2020.

MIT Press Journals has not yet sent invoices for their 2019-2020 year for services supporting both the CL and TACL journals. These invoices generally are submitted in September and total $70-80,000.

Our journals pay editorial assistants to help with the process. The CL Journal’s assistant has not submitted an invoice in the first half of 2020. The TACL Journal’s assistant was paid $3,858.43 covering the 4th quarter of 2019 and $9,911.97 for the 1st and 2nd quarters of 2020.

Membership:

For the previous report, I was pleased to say that we finished CY 2019 with 5,145 members and I can now report that we currently have 4,186 current 2020 members. We began 2020 with 94 members who were in a multi-year membership and about 274 members renewed on their own. As is becoming more standard, most memberships come from conference registrations. This includes most of the ACL 2020 members who renewed or joined along with their conference registrations. It indicates the continuing growth of our field and conferences...Only three years ago, membership was under 3,000. Additionally, it appears that holding virtual conferences allows more people, especially students, to be able to afford and attend conferences and pay memberships. Typically, regular vs student memberships had been 60/40% or even 65/35% but so far this year we are running at almost 50/50, regular vs student. And, I expect many more memberships to come in with the virtual EMNLP 2020 later this year, most likely bringing memberships up to 6,000 or so by year’s end. The distribution of countries represented and numbers from each country fluctuate each year depending upon the area of the world our conferences are held, although we seem to be representing 70 or more countries on a regular basis. Countries represented in the first half of 2020 are 78, reflecting the WiNLP and Diversity & Inclusion outreach efforts. Please refer to the Membership Report and Members By Country report for full details.

Occasionally inquiries come to the Office about what the benefits of ACL membership are and whether a particular country qualifies for the hard currency discount. It would be good to 1) update and more prominently post member benefits at the portal and 2) annually update the countries qualifying for hard currency discounts. I would also recommend making the location for posting job announcement more prominent at the portal.

Fellows Program:

The only involvement the Office now has in the Fellowship nomination and selection process is to verify nominated members’ eligibility according to our new policy for future years.

Conferences:

ACL 2020, intended to be in Seattle, was held 100% virtually due to the COVD-19 pandemic. This was a difficult decision in part because it had to be made early enough to educate ourselves on the best ways of producing a virtual conference and also to renegotiate our contractual commitments and avoid huge cancellation penalties. We were successful in avoiding very large penalties by negotiating the rescheduling of both the hotels and the social event space and caterers to now be NAACL 2022. The decision was made to learn from ICLR 2020 which was about the same size and complexity as ACL 2020 and they were a big help in sharing information to get us started in the right direction. This dramatically changed my role in particular in that I did not have to be concerned with the physical conference setup, space requirements, av and catering contracts and arrangements, exhibits’ physical setups, etc. I worked very closely with Dan Jurafsky as General Chair and the marvelous infrastructure team he pulled together, led by Hao Fang, Sudha Rao and Yizhe Zhang on selecting the various platforms/systems to use, negotiating and paying the contracts, and sitting in on presentations. With this team, one of my largest ongoing interactions was in providing lists of the registrants so they could be sent individualized conference access information. Overall, this went well but there were a couple of snags when, the day before the conference, all downloading stopped working from the registration system and, being a holiday weekend, it was difficult to find someone at the company to fix the problem…but it was fixed. Some people wrote requesting the access information, claiming not having gotten it so there was a bit of communication between Pat, me, the team and the requestors but, there are always some questions and issues that possibly the team did not expect. I was disappointed that the registration form building company closed for the weekend, leaving us with no one to help if something went wrong. I will be speaking to them so this does not happen again. The Office was always available to offer advice and registration lists and statistics, track and approve the budget expenditures, monitor registrations and work with the tutorial and workshop chairs and organizers; these became the primary roles of the Local Arrangements Chair. Many innovations suggested by the D&I Committee were implemented. The more successful D&I initiatives (mentoring, preferred names, accessibility/assistance, registration payment assistance, helping to purchase greater bandwidth for some attendees in Africa, coordination for time zones and scheduling, etc.) were incorporated into this conference.

ACL 2019 in Italy ended with 3,283 registrations and Virtual ACL 2020 ended with a total of 4,959 registrations, with regulars accounting for 49% and students numbering 50% of all registrations (the 1% was staff, organizers, sponsors and exhibitors). I believe a part of this increase was due to our need for 250-300 volunteers rather than the normal 75-100. This large increase in volunteer awards and the much lower cost of registration allowed more student and younger attendees.

While it is always difficult to project attendance at conferences, we now face the difficulty of having to negotiate and enter into venue contracts at least two years in advance for in-person meetings but cannot predict whether our conferences will continue to grow substantially or if the numbers will level out. Now that we have held our first virtual conference, there may be a demand for fully virtual or hybrid conferences in the future. This has implications in how much space we contract and, if too much, be locked into space we may not need at a convention center with very high costs. Also, whatever space is contracted for a particular conference tends to lock the Program Chairs into presenting the posters in a certain way and removes their flexibility in planning the program (for example, they could not revert to evening poster sessions with dinners because that type of meeting space might not be available once the contract is set with meeting space to accommodate daytime parallel poster sessions). And, if hybrid conferences are desired, we could run the danger of defaulting on contracts we are in or may negotiate before this decision is made. The space/catering/av may not be required at the amounts contracted, placing us in a position of not meeting contracted amounts. Or, conversely, we may need to pay space rental if our catering and guest rooms are not at a high enough level to gain complimentary space as we do now.

Workshops continue to be more challenging for in-person meetings in finding adequate space for the growing attendance at some workshops plus the many poster sessions they plan to present. Careful advance planning is essential for these events.

EMNLP 2020 planning is underway, led by Bonnie Webber. Again, due to COVD-19, the decision has been made to hold this as a 100% virtual meeting and we were fortunate enough to be able to negotiate moving the in-person meeting to 2021 at the same all-inclusive resort, the Barcelo Bavaro Resort in Punta Cana, thereby avoiding large penalties. Bonnie and her team have been communicating with Dan and watching closely what was involved in holding our first virtual meeting of ACL 2020. And, I will be acting as Local Arrangements Chair in doing the same sort of things as for ACL 2020, working with the sponsors and exhibitors, managing registrations, maintaining the working budget, etc. With EMNLP 2018 numbering 2,458 registrations and EMNLP 2019 numbering 1,939 final registrations, I expect a minimum of 3,000-3,500 registrations for EMNLP 2020.

We will now begin to consider more closely what our options will be for ACL 2021 in Bangkok and EACL 2021 in Kiev. NAACL 2021 is already planned for Mexico City. For all of these future meetings, we now need to decide the sort of conference each one will be…completely in-person or a 50/50 hybrid or fully virtual…so the planning can begin in earnest.

Conference Sponsorship:

ACL 2020 ended with $267,084 in main conference sponsorships from many of our faithful continuing sponsors such as Amazon, Apple, Bablelcape, Baidu, Bloomberg, Bytedance, Deep Mind, Facebook, G-Research, Google, Grammarly, IBM, ISI, Johns Hopkins, Megagon, Microsoft, Naver Labs Europe, Poly AI, and Two Sigma plus newly returning sponsors including Adobe and Alibaba. WiNLP 2020 brought in $57,500 and the other workshops who found sponsorships had a combined total of $6,000. And the D&I received $17,247 from two sponsors. We did lose one sponsor at the Platinum level, Duolingo, due to COVD-19 but, given the pandemic, we were fortunate that our sponsors stayed with us.

EMNLP 2020 has received $128,901 in sponsorships so far. All were the result of 2-Pack sponsorship agreements so many of the same companies that were listed above generously donated. Additionally, there are commitments of $8,500 sponsoring specific workshops.

Although I do not have the complete list of sponsorships committed for AACL-IJCNLP 2020, I can report that, from the International Sponsorship Committee call for 2020 sponsors, we have a Diamond level commitment from Baidu for $and a D&I commitment from Bloomberg. I believe the Local Sponsorship Chairs may have obtained more commitments.

The idea of offering 2-Pack or 3-Pack options and including EMNLP allows sponsors to make one payment to support two or all three events rather than one at a time. This has made sponsoring easier, especially for our ongoing sponsors. For the 2020 Sponsorship Booklet we continue to offer these multi-pack options including AACL 2020, ACL 2020, and EMNLP 2020, which will hopefully result in some first-time as well as repeating commitments and sometimes at higher levels. With the new Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) initiative continuing since NAACL 2019, we kept and updated the section giving options to sponsor this. However, once it was decided that, due to COVD-19, both ACL and EMNLP 2020 would be 100% virtual, about half of the benefits assured to sponsors could no longer be promised since they were in-person benefits (exhibit space, inserts into conference bags, logos emblazoned on conference bags, ads in conference handbooks, etc.). To encourage sponsors to continue their support, the benefits were adjusted to include what could be offered from the “old” Sponsorship Booklet and add the additional benefits of free virtual exhibit space to all but Bronze, Supporter and Publisher levels, ability to receive a list of registrants who indicated they were looking for employment and wanted their information shared, full Participant List (with those who expressed not wanting to share contact information culled from the list), and exhibiting allowed for the full 6 days rather than just the main conference 3 days.

Proposal to Add a New Sponsorship Director or Point Person:

I would ask that you consider appointing an overall Sponsorship Chair, along the lines of Nitin’s and Matt’s roles or, if more appropriate, a Point Person similar to Tim’s sustainability role.

Although I do include the status of our sponsorship outreach in each of my Office Reports, it may be unclear what a large role sponsorships play in keeping our registration fees affordable while offering more and more complex conferences. This is our largest solicitation and requires more attention to attract and keep our faithful supporters. Please refer to the attached “Sponsorships for 2010 – 2020” to see the growth in support over the years.

As I understand and remember, the International Sponsorship Committee (ISC) was established back around 2010 by Owen Rambow and others as a way of “standardizing” our requests for sponsorships from the various companies. This was a follow-up to the initial ideas proposed by Robert Dale, Alex Lascarides, Martha Palmer, Owen Rambow, and Priscilla Rasmussen in June 2007. It had been the case that different conferences were setting their own rates and companies were being approached by multiple people, each representing their own conference and with very different requests and promises. So, the annually updated sponsorship booklet was created and, each year, the conferences of that year have been included, allowing a company to plan once to support 1, 2, or 3 conferences (multiples becoming package deals). ACL, EACL when it takes place, EMNLP and NAACL when it takes place have all been represented in years they hosted conferences. So, for 2020, I had included AACL, ACL and EMNLP as the conferences to share in the ISC efforts and created 2-Pack and 3-Pack sponsor options in addition to sponsoring just one meeting. For 2021, we will offer up to a 4-Pack which would include ACL, EACL, EMNLP and NAACL. In future years, there may be up to a 5-Pack option. A benefit to the sponsoring companies is that they can apply just once to their internal financial team to support one or up to all ACL conferences in a given year. This has proved to be a successful strategy for the ACL.

But, I believe we have come to a point where we should revisit the sponsorship booklet, arrangements and benefits to companies which are outlined in the booklet and how to better structure our solicitation efforts. Additionally, it has been suggested by some that we do not charge enough to the sponsors and at the top levels, we should be charging double, if not more. I believe possibly raising the pricing a bit would be alright but, our top long-term sponsors already support multiple conferences and workshops at well over $50-75,000 each. Having a Sponsorship Director or Point Person would not only help with updating pricing and benefits (to make sponsoring more appealing), keeping consistency across all conferences, but may also have better insight into new or different companies to approach (Citibank, Disney, 3M, come to mind as examples), and whether the apportioning of multi-packs between conferences should change. Or possibly there should be an entire rethinking of coordination across conferences.

The pandemic has led to an immediate need to restructure sponsoring benefits by removing anything to do with in-person conference bags, handouts, advertising in hardcopy handbooks, delineating exhibit space/booth building/staffing/etc. and so on. In trying to maintain the sponsor commitments already made, I gave each sponsor additional benefits such as exhibiting for 6 days rather than just the three main conference days and helping them in their recruiting efforts by providing contact information of attendees who expressed interest in employment opportunities. But, while this seemed to work in retaining companies, it also highlighted the possible need for a revamping of the booklet.

Additionally, a Sponsorship Director or Point Person may have better knowledge of people in the community who might be interested in representing the various parts of the world and be more effective in finding new companies to add to our amazing list of sponsors.