2024Q1 Reports: Treasurer

ACL's financial health continues to be very strong, in spite of and in fact to some degree because of the exceptional risks and challenges of the past 4 years and our response to them.

ACL's combined financial reserves are $5.8 million (USD) of 6/30/2023 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 10% year-to-year growth in financial reserves since 6/30/2022, given both the ongoing success of our 2022-2023 conferences and registration income received for ACL 2023.

These financial reserves remain important, given that ACL self-insures and because of the ongoing financial volitility, risk and future unpredicability in the conference landscape, and our need to make very large cash deposits for future meetings.

However, the scale of these financial reserves provides ACL with opportunities for investment in both long-overdue infrastructure improvement (such as for our reviewing platforms, and for multimodal development of the ACL anthology) and for new initiatives (focused particularly on greatly expanded support for diversity and inclusion). ACL is also intentionally investing more to partially subsidize its conferences from past reserves to keep registration fees at a more affordable level, especially for students, in the face of unusually high conference cost structures in both Toronto and Singapore.

In 2023, ACL further diversified its reserves across a greater variety of interest bearing accounts and investments.

ACL's membership revenue continues to be critically important to funding its journals and anthology and other core services. On average between 2018-2023, ACL's core services were supported by:

Core Services Income:

• 97% Membership fees • ~0% Royalties/Licensing Fees • 3% Other earned revenue • 0% Journal subscriptions and open access charges

Core Services Expenditures:

• 33% ACL Office, Legal/Accounting, IT Infrastructure (Anthology) • 66%+ TACL and CL Journals and other initiatives As we stand today, ACL's membership fees are focused on 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.

Sponsorships continue to be extremely important to our conferences, covering more than 28% of conference expenses in the past year, with have particularly enabled longstanding and growing substantial investment in student support and diversity and inclusion initiatives.

The conference expense structure has changed dramatically post-COVID, due both to inflation (which is particularly high for food, ACL's single largest conference expense), and to the very high infrastructure costs of hybrid conferences (for both the virtual platform and hosting costs as well as the substantially increased on-site costs for the interactive platform). As ACL invests in improving the hybrid experience, these costs have increased substantially and are not fully covered by virtual registration fees.

ACL is still facing a 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, and incurring combined costs for both substantially greater than either model by itself.