2013Q3 Reports: Sponsorship Committee

Sponsorship committee:

- Dan Bikel
- Jochen Leidner
- Patrick Pantel
- Eiichiro Sumita
- Idan Szpektor

Sponsors:

- Appen Butler Hill
- Baidu
- Cambridge University Press
- Children’s Hospital Medical Center
- CTB McGraw Hill
- Division of Biomedical Informatics of the Cincinnati 
- Emory College
- ETS
- Facebook
- Google
- Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.
- IBM
- ISI
- META-NET
- Microsoft
- Morgan Claypool Publishers
- MultilingualWeb  - Language Technology
- Nuance
- Ontotext AD
- Pacific Metrics Corp
- Qatar Computing Research Institute
- Rakuten
- SDL
- University of Washington
- Xerox Research Centre Europe
- Yahoo!
- Yandex, LLC.

General remarks: Although economic problems have persisted globally, the ACL sponsorship committee has raised $87,505.00 (as of this report date) for ACL/EACL/NAACL thanks to the resourcefulness of the local organization committee, the innovative and flexible solutions offered by Priscilla to prospective sponsors and the outreach enabled by the globally distributed sponsorship committee members. In addition to the usual large companies such as Microsoft, Google, IBM, Baidu and AT&T, support could be secured from various local and smaller sources. The range of sponsorships varies from regular cash support to student best paper award and exhibitions. For the third year in a row, Baidu has sponsored ACL at the platinum level. This year, the committee collected and centralized sponsorship documents on a Google Docs share, which also served as the central point for coordinating solicitations. The share is available at https://docs.google.com/folder/d/0B7E3GB6iE3rbSFlmN2ZhVlZSaG8/edit?invite=CKDD3jk. This helped address the outdated list of sponsors and emails that was being passed around from previous years.

What worked well: Personal connections and pleas, as in the past, worked best. The centralized share of sponsorship documents (spreadsheets, sponsorship booklet, previous years’ contacts) was useful in coordinating the committee activities. The flexibility in the various sponsorship options was appreciated by the sponsors, this is a strategy that should be continued in the future.

Suggestion: It would probably make sense to have a general sponsorship chair who can coordinate between the co-chairs as was the case in 2011.