2021Q3 Reports: Sponsorship Chairs

The sponsorship team of ACL-IJCNLP 2021 (Jing Li, Zhongyu Wei, Rachada Kongkrachantra, and Kobkrit Viriyayudhakorn) worked with ACL Sponsorship Committee (e.g., Chris Callison-Burch, the ACL Sponsorship Chair, and Priscilla Rasmussen, the ACL Business Manager) for the sponsorship issues of the conference. The duties of the conference sponsorship co-chairs are to recruit new sponsors who would be interested in supporting the conference while Priscilla and Chris helped contact the usual sponsors to seek their continuous support.

We started the sponsorship recruitment in Feb 2021 via sending emails to the potential sponsors (especially regional sponsors in Asia), posting advertisements to our social networks, asking our personal friends in NLP communities to promote the recruitment activity in their companies, etc. Because of the continuous effects of the COVID-19 crisis, many companies have decided not to support any conferences. Others are concerned about the benefits and potential impacts to sponsor online conferences because of the limits of virtual communications.

Despite the difficulties in running the sponsorship recruitments this year, we have obtained 22 sponsors for ACL-IJCNLP 2021 --- 4 diamond sponsors (Apple, Bloomberg, Facebook AI, and Google Research), 8 platinum sponsors (Amazon, Bytedance, Megagon Lab, Microsoft, Baidu, DeepMind, Tencent, and G-Research), 2 gold sponsors (IBM and Alibaba), 3 silver sponsors (Duolingo and the joint sponsor of Naver and Naver EU), and 5 bronze sponsors (Babelscape, BOSCH, LegalForce, ETS, and Adobe). In comparison to ACL 2020, EMNLP 2020, and NAACL 2021, ACL-IJCNLP 2021 not only has more sponsors in total but also more sponsors at the level of platinum and above.

To further help the sponsorship of future conferences (especially virtual conferences), we also list the comments and suggestions gathered in the sponsorship recruitment activities:

• Many sponsors valued the potential to communicate with people for recruitment in the conference (for some of them, it is even the only reason they would say yes for the conference sponsoring). Unfortunately, virtual conferences are limited in such capability. If virtual conferences have similar sponsorship price to face2face conferences, companies might think twice before they are willing to sponsor. Future conferences might consider to give some discounts for virtual conference sponsors.
• For some sponsors, it seems that the benefit differences between different levels are not so significant in virtual conferences, which might hinder them to go for high-level sponsorship. This year we have a sponsor who lowers the sponsorship level because of this. For future conferences, we might consider to larger the benefit difference for different levels of sponsorship to better motivate high-level sponsorship.
• In the face2face conferences, there were some good sponsorship activities, e.g., a sponsor-hosted lunch gathering and a recruitment party, which allow easy interactions between the sponsors and the conference attendees. Some good alternatives proposed for virtual conferences might be very helpful to engage more sponsors in the future.