2025Q1 Reports: Sponsorship Director

This is the 5th year that ACL has had a Sponsorship Director position. The position was created in July of 2020, and it officially started in Jan 2021. The position is currently filled by Prof. Chris Callison-Burch from the University of Pennsylvania, who will be stepping down after this year. The ACL Exec should select a replacement.

Duties of the Sponsorship Director

The responsibilities of the Sponsorship Director are:

Coordinate with the ACL Business Manager to set the sponsorship rates for the conferences, and benefits for each sponsorship level
Contact recurring sponsors to solicit sponsorship of upcoming conferences.
Maintain an organized list of current sponsors and of potential sponsorship leads
Help recruit new sponsors to the conference
Invoice sponsors once they have picked a sponsorship level, and decided which conferences to sponsor
Coordinate with the general chairs of the conferences to let them know about sponsor benefits like exhibition space
Coordinate the efforts of the conference sponsorship chairs
Liaising between sponsors and relevant conference organizers in order to ensure that we give the sponsors the promised benefits

The sponsorship committee for each year consists of:

The ACL Sponsorship Director
The ACL Business Manager
2 Sponsorship Chair for each conference, appointed by the general chair in consolation with the chapter boards and SIGDAT

For future sponsorship directors I recommend:

Hire an assistant to help with invoicing
Coordinate with the ACL Business Manager and ACL Treasurer to ability to view bank account, so that you and your assistant can verify when sponsors have paid their invoices.
Create a standard contract for sponsors. Currently we don't have a contact, but several sponsors need one, so we have them draft one. It might be more efficient if we just have a simple contract that we can offer up to them.

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 has been serving in the role for longer than a year, and has been quite valuable in handling the invoicing duties. 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.

Pain Points from Previous Years

There were several pain points for my role as Sponsorship Director from the past several years.

Tracking down unpaid invoices is currently not as organized as it could be. It can sometimes be difficult for us to confirm whether sponsors had paid their invoices.
For workshops that raised sponsorship funds, it took the ACL a very long time to reimburse the organizers for any expenses that they incurred. We should develop a procedure for how to process reimbursements.
For SIGs that raised sponsorship funds, we weren't able to communicate whether they had a balance in their shadow account. The ACL should track their balances.
Several companies asked for a Sponsorship agreement. It would be good for the ACL to draft a standard sponsorship agreement.
Although printed materials like the conference handbook are a good place for placing sponsor logos, they are difficult to coordinate since they must be printed in advance of the conference, and they rely on input from many parties including program co-chairs. The EMNLP 2023 conference handbook ended up not being printed and only available in digital form. I have decided to remove printed handbooks and flyers from the list of sponsorship perks that we advertise in the sponsorship brochure, and I suggested we phase them out.

Proposal: Sponsorship Chairs Should be on a 2-conference cycle

I recommend that the sponsorship chairs be a 2-conference cycle, with each chair serving for 2 instance of the conference, once as the junior chair and once as the senior chair (who trains the next junior chair).

Here are my suggestions for the conference sponsorship chairs duties.

Sponsorship rates for 2024 Conferences

In late 2024, Jennifer Rachford and I set the sponsorship rates for 2025.

We kept most of the sponsorship rates the same. We dropped the highest level sponsorship ("welcome event" and "social event") due to lack of up-take by sponsors. As an experiment, We added several new "add-ons" options beyond the base sponsorships.

Sponsorship Booklet for 2025 Conferences

I hired designers Kira Grennan <kira.grennan@gmail.com> and Jake Gingert <jakegingert@gmail.com> to update | the sponsorship booklet again this year. The designers have let us know that they have full-time employment now, so won't be able to work with us going forward.

Let me analyze the spreadsheet and create a similar report section for 2024.

I apologize for the error. Let me try again with the correct import syntax.

Based on the data, I'll generate a similar report section for 2024 conferences.

Sponsors for 2024 Conferences

Our 2024 conferences secured the following confirmed sponsors:

EACL 2024 Sponsors:
- Gold: Bloomberg, Snowflake
- Bronze: Babelscape
- D&I Champion: HITS gGmbH

NAACL 2024 Sponsors:
- Diamond: Capital One
- Platinum: Baidu, Grammarly, Kensho, Megagon Labs, Otter.ai
- Gold: Bloomberg, Cohere, Apple, Two Sigma
- D&I Ally: Grammarly

ACL/AACL 2024 Sponsors:
- Diamond: Apple, Google, LG AI Research, Meta, NewsBreak
- Platinum: Alibaba Cloud, Amazon, Baidu, ByteDance, IBM Research, Megagon Labs, Meituan, Oracle, SCB 10X, Sony
- Gold: Ahrefs, Chen Institute, Cohere, Exa.ai, Xiaomi Group
- Silver: Ant Group
- Bronze: Babelscape, Dataocean.AI
- Custom booth: IBM Research, Sony

EMNLP 2024 Sponsors:
- Diamond: Apple, Bloomberg, Citadel, Google, Meta
- Platinum: Amazon, Baidu, ByteDance, Cohere, Intuit, Megagon Labs, Oracle, SCAI, Toloka AI
- Gold: Millennium, Turing
- Silver: Ant Group

The total sponsorship commitments for the ACL 2024 conferences: $1,165,511. Split by conference:

EACL 2024: $12,220
NAACL 2024: $131,750
ACL 2024: $394,641
EMNLP 2024: $326,900

I used | this spreadsheet to track sponsorship commitments.

Current Sponsors for 2024 Conferences

We have reached out to the following companies soliciting their sponsorship: ASAPP, Accenture, Adobe, Ahrefs, Aleph Alpha, Alibaba, Amazon, Ant Group, Anthropic, Apple, BASF, Babelscape, Baidu, Bayer, Beyond Limits, Bloomberg, Bosch, ByteDance, Cambridge University Press , Capital One, Cisco, Cohere, Comcast, Company, Continental, DATAOCEAN AI, Databricks, DeepMind, Duolingo, Dyson, ETS, Fraunhoer, G-Research, GTCOM, Google Research, Grammarly, HLTCOE, HPC AI TECH, Huawei, IBM, JPMorgan, KLOA, Kaust, Kensho, King Salman Global Academy for the Arabic Language, LDC, LG AI Research, LinkedIn, LivePerson, Machine Learning Center of Excellence", Magic Data, Megagon Labs, Mercari, Merck, Meta, Microsoft, ModelBest, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, NEC, Naver Labs, Nuance, Nyonic, OpenAI, RIKEN AIP, Reddit, SAP, SCAI, Salesforce, Schwarz Group, ServiceNow, Sony Group Corporation, Super.AI, TIAA, Telekom, Tencent, Tetrasoft Federal, Translated, Two Sigma, UCSC, VESSL AI, Weights and Biases, Zalando, aiXplain, jenni.ai, nyonic

As of February 26, 2024 we have secured the following confirmed sponsors.

Apple - Gold NAACL, Diamond ACL, Diamond EMNLP
Baidu - Platinum 3 pack for 2024 ACL; EMNLP; NAACL
Kensho - Platinum NAACL
Bloomberg - Gold EACL, Gold NAACL, Diamond EMNLP
LG AI Research - Diamond ACL
Capital One - Diamond NAACL
HITS gGmbH - D&I Champion for EACL
Babelscape - Bronze 2-pack for EACL and ACL
Ahrefs - Gold ACL
Two Sigma - Gold NAACL
Megagon - Platinum 4-pack for 2024 (ACL, EMNLP, NAACL and EACL)
Adobe - Bronze 4-pack for 2024 (ACL, EMNLP, NAACL and EACL)

The total sponsorship commitments for the main conferences as of February 26, 2024 was the amount of $373,205. Additionally, we have $25,923 for workshop sponsorships.

Note that the EACL 2024 sponsorship is likely to be substantially less than EACL 2023, since we did not secure a welcome event sponsor.

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

Action item for ACL Exec

I have requested that ACL President Emily Bender respond to Grammarly's request about adding a clause to withdraw from sponsorship if Russian individuals have papers published in our conference.