2020Q3 Reports: Treasurer

• ACL's financial health continues to be very strong, with sufficient capital reserves to weather one of the most challenging and risk filled fiscal environments in our history.

• ACL's combined financial reserves are $3,291,243 (USD) of 6/30/2020 at the end of the 2nd quarter. This total includes the central ACL organization, and all of ACL's many chapters and SIGs including the EMNLP conferences, and it represents a mean 24% year-to-year growth in financial reserves since 2015.

• These financial reserves remain critically important: We risked losing nearly half of *ACL’s combined reserves to cancellation penalties for ACL2020 and EMNLP2020 if these venues had not been successfully rescheduled to future years.

• For this reason, ACL/NAACL/EMNLP are contractually committed to hosting 4+ large live on site conferences in 2021 2022. *ACL’s future financial health depends on making them a great success!

• ACL's membership revenue continues to be critically important to funding its journals and anthology and other core services. On average between 2011-2019, ACL's core services were supported by:

Core Services Income:

  • 96% Membership fees
  • 1% Royalties/Licensing Fees
  • 3% Other earned revenue
  • 0% Journal subscriptions and open access charges

Core Services Expenditures:

  • 37% ACL Office, Legal/Accounting, IT Infrastructure (Anthology)
  • 63%+ TACL and CL Journals and other initiatives

As we stand today, ACL's membership fees barely cover its core services, which include not only our journals but also ACL's very leanly run office, legal and accounting costs, and our IT infrastructure (which includes the ACL Anthology). And as our journals continue to grow significantly in size and scope, those costs continue to grow steadily as well.

Even in a fully virtual-conference world these crown jewels depend on fully paid membership fees at a roughly 5000 person level, which may not be sustainable in some potential financial futures.

• The central reason that ACL does depend so much on our membership fees is because we have *no* journal subscription or open access charges. Now we of course could change that financial model and make the journal authors and users pay for our journals all by themselves, but there appears to be strong consensus that its a good thing that our complete half century of scholarship is freely available to everyone rather than stuck behind a paywall like at some of our peer institutions.

• Before COVID, our conferences were supported roughly 81% by registration fees and 19% by sponsorships, which in particular enabled longstanding and growing substantial investment in student support and diversity and inclusion initiatives.

• COVID-19 has dramatically changed that basic model. Now we rely on our various forms of sponsorship to cover 41% of our costs of the ACL 2020 meeting based on early projections, those costs have shifted dramatically, with about 85% of our direct expenditures now going to audio visual services and hosting, which to do them well and robustly is quite expensive.

• ACL is still facing an unprecedentedly challenging financial future as we work to reimagine our conference structures, balancing the wishes of those who are passionately eager to return to the energy and personal interaction opportunities of live meetings and those who see the transformative potential and advantages of virtual or hybrid meetings.