2015Q3 Reports: Sponsorship Committee
The sponsorship activity of ACL conference is typically divided in two subtasks to make the entire process more efficient: (1) search for local sponsors, i.e., roughly, those who have location and specific interests in the area of the conference and (2) global sponsors, who typically are all the others. According to previous years' working experience, the sponsored chair from the local organization committee is responsible for the local sponsorship while Priscilla (ACL business manager) is responsible for searching for global sponsors.
In this year, the conference is located at Beijing and the local sponsor chair contacted a number of major IT-related companies in China. Three of the most popular internet companies, say, Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent (or so called "BAT") all agree to be platinum sponsors. CreditEase, which is a internet-based financial company focusing on big data processing and Samsung R&D Beijing are also platinum sponsors. These five sponsors make up a large part of our sponsorship and we mainly pay our attention to help them better involve into the ACL activities. One novel service provided to these platinum sponsors is that we provide a chance for them to help organize a company tour to their Beijing offices. During the visit, the partcipants of ACL will have a better chance to know how NLP related techniques are adopted in the field and this will also prompt the collaboration between academic and industrial researchers.
A few suggestions about the booklets and sponsorship: 1. The benefits on the booklets provided to sponsors should be examined by the local organizers before sending to companies. Many companies require details about these benefits and it may be difficult to decide if we cannot get information from the venue managers. For example, the size of the "large, prominently displayed banner" is unknown (even whether we could hang such a banner is unknown, either). The size of the booth ( 6.0 m or 3.0m wide x 2.0 m deep) is also not reasonable because the standard size for most exhibitions in China is 3.0m deep.
2. The amount of sponsorship we ask for is a bit lower. After discussion with local sponsors, most of them tell me in private that the amount can be raised (e.g. 1.5 times of current amount) and they are also willing to support. Considering that ACL is a top-tier conference and NLP is a hot research topic in the era of big data and AI, we perhaps should follow their suggestions and raise the amount required in the next year.
3. The exhibition staff. According to the booklet, there are no free registration for exhibition staff for all kinds of sponsorships. However, for the platinum and gold sponsors, it is usually not possible for the people with free registration (who are usually high-level researchers or administrative ) to work on the booth. Therefore, perhaps we should provide 4 (platinum) or 2 (gold) exhibition staff quota to the sponsors. These people may not attend the keynote or technical sessions, but they should be allowed to come into the venue and work on site.