2010Q3 Reports: Sponsorship Chairs

Sponsorship

Christy Doran and Srinivas B.

The sponsorship effort for 2009-2010 was reasonably successful compared to the preceding year. For the NAACL 2010 conference, we raised over $30,000 from a range of small and large companies. Given the economic times, this is a noteworthy amount.

Here are a few points to improve the efficiency of raising money for future conferences:

• There should be a single point of contact in the committee who will be responsible for each organization we approach to solicit sponsorship. (Compile and update the list of donors.)

• There should be a local organization member as part of the committee, given that there are usually companies local to the conference who might be better targeted by local organizers.

• The committee members should approach the organizations well ahead of time, perhaps even the fall of preceding year, since organizational budgets are decided during fall of previous year.

• Besides corporations, it might be meaningful for research institutions to show off their research in a "Show and Tell" like set up. This event might attract additional funds to support a conference.

• Clear guidelines need to be established as to how sponsor materials will be presented (logo, write up etc.) on the conference web site.

• Only two sponsors subscribed to the "combo" packs. Sponsors preferred to sponsor conferences in their business regions, this year. Is there a way to make these more attractive to sponsors?

Local Sponsorship

Mats Wirén and Hercules Dalianis

The Sponsorship Booklet for 2010 became available by early November 2009. The local sponsorship chairs then approached funding agencies, organizations and companies within Sweden, roughly during the period December 2009--April 2010.

Our strategy was to concentrate on a small number of funding applications and on trying to recruit companies where we had some kind of connection (direct or indirect), rather than sending out general information about sponsoring opportunities to all organizations with a potential interest in language technology.

We submitted two applications to funding agencies (the Swedish Research Council and the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation). Both of these councils have special budgets for supporting scientific conferences, though it was not self-evident that a large international conference such as ACL -- which essentially sets its conference fees to make a surplus -- would be a good candidate for funding. Both applications were successful, however. We also managed to get support from the Swedish National Graduate School of Language Technology as well as from Uppsala University.

The hit rate for companies within Sweden was poorer -- only a handfull out of those approached were recruited. Unsurprisingly, personal contacts seem to have been a crucial factor for success in this case.

Here are some items that might be worthwhile considering for the future:

• It would be good if the Sponsorship Booklet could be available when information about sponsoring opportunities is published on the conference website (including the e-mail address sponsorship@acl2010.org). In our case, we were approached by one company (Textkernel) already in September, but basically had to put them on hold until the booklet was out.

• It would have been good to use the ACL wiki for documenting responsibilites among the persons involved in sponsoring and the progress made, and not just for the reporting that we're doing now. It was sometimes hard to follow what was happening and understand the division of labour just using e-mail.

• The timing of preparing applications to funding agencies is quite delicate. On the one hand, one must supply a detailed conference budget to show why funding is needed. On the other hand, one needs the decision from the funding agency before the conference budget is finalized, for otherwise it can't be used for reducing the conference fees (which we take to be the purpose of sponsoring). Also, different agencies process applications at different speeds (in our case, one did it in one month and the other did it in three months). Fortunately, we got terrific help from Priscilla and Joakim in explaining the tentative budget, which allowed us to put together a coherent calculation in time.