2021Q1 Reports: Sponsorship Director

This is the first 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. When he was the General Chair for ACL 2017 he recruited several new sponsors, including Apple and Alibaba, in order to ensure that the conference was financially viable, because he wanted to do an D&I outreach effort to provide childcare at the conference to allow parents with younger children to attend more easily. Based on that experience, Priscilla Rasmussen recommended him to the ACL Exec for the new position. Chris will serve as Sponsorship Director until the end of 2023.

The responsibilities of the Sponsorship Director are still being defined. These are the current 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.

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
• Raffaella Bernardi <raffaella.bernardi@unitn.it> - 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 2021 Conferences

Here are the rates for 2021 Conferences. Several considerations went into setting the rates. Raffaella Bernardi compared sponsorship rates for peer conferences to ensure that our rates were comparable. She looked at rates from

• ICCV 2019
• IJCAI 2019
• AAAI-2021
• NIPS 2020
• ACL 2020
• COLING 2020
• LREC 2020
• ECCV 2020
• ECAI 2020
• ECIR 2019

AAAI 2021 and IJCAI 2019 had sponsorship rates that were twice as high as ACL 2020. We considered raising our sponsorship rates to match, but ended up keeping the rates similar to our previous year. The rationale is that we have multiple conference each year when we include the main ACL conference, the chapter conferences and EMNLP. Although the rates for each individual conference is lower than some other peer conferences, we want sponsors to be able to sponsor multiple of our conferences in the same year. The aggregate total sponsorship from large sponsors tend to be similar to or surpass the higher rates of single-conference organizations. (We offer a 20% discount for sponsoring multiple of our conferences. We call this a "multi-pack" sponsorship.)

Another consideration was the cost for exhibition space. Last year we quickly shifted from in-person to online conferences. We offered all sponsors complimentary exhibition space. This year, we decided to keep complimentary exhibition space as a differentiating factor for the higher sponsorship levels, and allow exhibition space to be purchased by other sponsors. We kept the exhibition space rate the same for both in-person and virtual conferences.

We trimmed several sponsorship options that weren't regularly used, and updated the sponsorship benefits.

We carried forward the rates for our Diversity and Inclusion sponsorships. I coordinated with the D&I Chair on this, and would welcome further suggestions on how best to position sponsorship of our D&I initiatives.

We hired a designer to make the Sponsorship Booklet look more professional. We hired Kira Grennan <kira.grennan@gmail.com> who completed new sponsorship booklet for about $350 USD. Here's | last year's booklet, for comparison.

Current Sponsors for 2021 Conferences

As of March 12, 2021 we have secured the following sponsors.

• EACL: Facebook (Platinum), Grammarly (Platinum), Bloomberg (Gold), Babelscape (Bronze), LegalForce (Bronze), Celi (Supporter)
• ACL-IJCNLP: Google (Diamond), Bloomberg (Diamond), Facebook (Diamond), ByteDance (Platinum), Megagon (Platinum), Bosch (Bronze), Babelscape (Bronze), LegalForce (Bronze), Vanguard (Gold), HLTCOE (Bronze)
• NAACL: Google (Diamond), Megagon (Platinum), Facebook (Platinum), Vanguard (Gold), Grammarly (Gold), Bloomberg (Gold), Babelscape (Bronze), LegalForce (Bronze)
• EMNLP: Google (Diamond), Bloomberg (Diamond), Facebook (Diamond), Megagon (Platinum), ByteDance (Platinum), Grammarly (Gold), Babelscape (Bronze), LegalForce (Bronze), HLTCOE (Bronze)

• D&I Sponsorship: Google (Champion)

Suggested Policies

Jon May suggested that we adopt a Sponsorship Policy similar to the ACM FAccT conference's Sponsorship Policy, which is meant to clarify that conference publications and awards are selected independently of sponsorship funding. The ACL is already adhering to this policy, so it would be sensible to officially adopt it. Here are the relevant details:

…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.

Colin Cherry will ask that the ACL Exec vote on adopting a similarly worded sponsorship policy. I encourage the Exec to adopt it.

Potential successor for the Sponsorship Director

Raffaella Bernardi is a member of the ACL Sponsorship Committee as a representative of EACL. She has been actively involved in helping with sponsorship this year, and has spearheaded activities like researching the sponsorship rates at peer conferences, contacting new sponsors, and helping keep the committee, at the sponsorship director and the business manager organized. I recommend that the ACL consider nominating her to new the Sponsorship Director beginning in January of 2024.

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.