2022Q1 Reports: Sponsorship Director

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This is the second year that ACL has had a Sponsorship Director position. The position was created in July of 2020, and official began in Jan 2021. The position is currently filled by Prof. Chris Callison-Burch from the University of Pennsylvania, who previous served in several positions for the ACL: he was the General Chair for ACL 2017, Program Co-Chair for EMNLP 2015, Chair of the NAACL Executive Board 2012-2013 and a Board Member for NAACL Executive Board 2010-2011.


Duties of the Sponsorship Director

The responsibilities of the Sponsorship Director are still being defined. Last year I defined this as the set of responsibilities:

  • Coordinate the ACL Sponsorship Committee, which consists of the Sponsorship Director, the ACL Business Manager, 2 regional representatives from each chapter, 2 representatives from SIGDAT. Here are more details about the Sponsorship Committee Procedures.
  • Coordinate with the ACL Business Manager to set the sponsorship rates for the conferences, and benefits for each sponsorship level
  • Produce a sponsorship booklet which is distributed to potential sponsors, and which outlines the costs and benefits for each sponsorship level
  • Coordinate with the web admins of each conference to post the sponsorship booklet on the conference website
  • Help recruit new sponsors to the conference, and direct new sponsors to the Business Manager for invoicing once they've joined
  • Coordinate with the general chairs of the conferences to let them know about sponsor benefits like exhibition space (which needs to be replicated in online conferences)
  • Coordinate with web admins fo each conference to post logos/URLs of sponsors when they agree to sponsor the conference
  • Maintain an organized list of current sponsors and of potential sponsorship leads
  • Help establish policies relating to sponsorship and streamline the process of sponsorship
  • Currently the Sponsorship Director helps oversee sponsorship for *ACL conferences only. In the future, it may be useful to help provide guidance for workshops or SIGs as well.


This year I have been taking on additional sponsorship duties that were previously handled by Priscilla Rasmussen, since she is retiring. These include: 1. Contacting recurring sponsors to solicit sponsorship of upcoming conferences. 2. Invoicing sponsors once they have picked a sponsorship level, and decided which conferences to sponsor. 3. Liaising between sponsors and relevant conference organizers in order to ensure that we give the sponsors the promised benefits

  • logos and links on conference websites
  • logos and promotional materials in printed conference materials
  • space for exhibition displays at the in-person conference
  • online options for virtual exhibitions
  • scheduling exhibition time in the conference program so that companies know when to staff their booths
  • complementary registration for the correct number of company's employees
  • etc.

Priscilla has done a masterful job of doing all of these things in the past and there are likely to be a few rough patches as we as an organization learn to replicate what she's done for us.

In order to help manage the invoices, I asked permission from both the ACL Treasurer and my own university department to hire my admin at the University of Pennsylvania to help with issuing the invoices. Her name and email is Lily Hoot <lhoot@seas.upenn.edu>. She's well organized, responsive, and quick. We will bill the ACL $40/hour for her time to reimburse the University for time taken away from her normal responsibilities. I recommend that the ACL Exec budget for administrative help for future Sponsorship Directors as well.


ACL Sponsorship Committee currently

The ACL Sponsorship Committee currently consists of:

  • Chris Callison-Burch <ccb@cis.upenn.edu> - ACL Sponsorship Director
  • Priscilla Rasmussen <acl.rasmussen@gmail.com> - ACL Business Manager
  • Chin-Yew Lin <cyl@microsoft.com> - Sponsorship Chair for SIGDAT
  • ??? - Sponsorship Chair for EACL chapter
  • Kenneth Heafield <kheafiel@inf.ed.ac.uk> - Sponshorship Chair for EACL chapter starting in Jan 2021
  • Wanxiang Che <wanxiang@gmail.com> - Sponsorship Chair for AACL chapter
  • Yusuke Miyao <yusuke@is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp> - Sponsorship Chair for AACL chapter
  • Mohit Bansal <mbansal@cs.unc.edu> - Sponsorship Chair for NAACL chapter
  • Ves Stoyanov <ves@fb.com> - Sponsorship Chair for NAACL chapter

Sponsorship rates for 2022 Conferences

In late 2021, Priscilla Rasmussen and I met the sponsorship rates. Here are the | new Sponsorship rates for 2022 Conferences. We kept the ACL sponsorship rate fixed from last year, and set the sponsorship rates for the other conferences for this year (EMNLP, NAACL, and AACL) to be roughly proportional ACL based on what fraction of attendees we expected. This means that EMNLP's sponsorship rates are now equal to ACL, NAACL's sponsorship rates are 75% that of ACL, and AACL's sponsorship rates are 40% of ACL's.

Sponsorship Booklet for 2022 Conferences

I hired a designer to make the Sponsorship Booklet again this year. We hired Kira Grennan <kira.grennan@gmail.com> who updated | the sponsorship booklet plus created | a new wordmark for ACL invoices and letterhead for about $350 USD. Here's | the old style booklet and | the old letterhead prior to us hiring a designer, for comparison.

Current Sponsors for 2022 Conferences

I have reached out to the following companies soliciting their sponsorship: Adobe, aiXplain, Alibaba, Amazon, Apple, Babelscape, Baidu, Bloomberg, Bosch, Bytedance, Deep Mind, DuoLingo, Etsy, G-Research, Google, Grammarly, HLTCOE, IBM, ISI, KPMG, LegalForce, LivePerson, Megagon Labs, Meta, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, Naver Labs (and Naver Labs Europe), NVIDIA, OpenAI, Relatively, Samsung, ServiceNow, Tencent, Text IQ, TIAA/Nuveen, Zoom.

As of March 4, 2022 we have secured the following confirmed sponsors.

  • ACL: Amazon (Diamond), Apple (Diamond), LivePerson (Diamond), Meta (Diamond), IBM (Platinum), Megagon (Platinum), ServiceNow (Gold), Relativity (Gold), Adobe (Bronze), Babelscape (Bronze)
  • NAACL: Amazon (Diamond), LivePerson (Diamond), Meta (Diamond), Apple (Platinum), Megagon (Platinum), Nuveen (Gold), ServiceNow (Gold), Relativity (Gold), Adobe (Bronze), Babelscape (Bronze)
  • EMNLP: Amazon (Diamond), Apple (Diamond), LivePerson (Diamond), Meta (Diamond), Megagon (Platinum), Adobe (Bronze), Babelscape (Bronze)
  • AACL: Adobe (Bronze)
  • D&I Sponsorship: Microsoft (D&I Champion) for all 4 conferences.

The total sponsorship commitments for the main conferences as of March 4, 2022 amount of $400,510. Additionally, we have $48,575 for workshop sponsorships and colocated conferences ($20k for IWSLT).

I have been using | this spreadsheet to track sponsorship leads and commitments.

Suggested Policies

Last year, Colin Cherry asked that the ACL Exec vote on adopting a Sponsorship policy similar to the ACM FAccT conference's Sponsorship Policy

…outside contributions raise serious concerns about the independence of the conference and the legitimacy that the conference may confer on sponsors and supporters. We take these concerns seriously and have taken a number of steps to ensure that we’re able to maintain a transparent and appropriate relationship with our funders:

  • To ensure the independence and integrity of the conference, sponsors have no say over the paper selection process, tutorial selection process, choice of invited speakers, the composition of the program committees, or the best paper awards. The substance and structure of the conference are determined independently by the program committees.
  • All papers are chosen through a rigorous, double-blind peer review process. Authors of submitted papers must also disclose conflicts of interest by identifying institutions and potential reviewers with whom they have existing relationships.
  • We will always acknowledge our sources of financial support
  • We will always disclose the benefits that funders receive as a condition of their contributions.
  • Sponsors can only contribute to a general fund; they cannot specify how their contributions are spent.

TODO: Was this adopted? If so I'll add information to the sponsorship websites.


Action item for regional chapters, SIGDAT

At the start of each year, please pick a representative for your chapter to serve a 2 year term. Ideally we'll have 2 reps from each group serving staggered 2 year terms.

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