2025Q1 Reports: Sponsorship Director

From Admin Wiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search
The printable version is no longer supported and may have rendering errors. Please update your browser bookmarks and please use the default browser print function instead.

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:
    • Platinum: Megagon
    • 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: $18,620 (Down $35k from EACL 2023)
  • NAACL 2024: $159,750 (Down $118k from NAACL 2022)
  • ACL 2024: $558,866 (Up $1k compared to ACL 2023)
  • EMNLP 2024: $428,275 (Down $53k compared to EMNLP 2023)


I used | this spreadsheet to track sponsorship commitments.

Current Sponsors for 2025 Conferences

We have reached out to the following companies soliciting their sponsorship: Adobe, Ahrefs, Alibaba Cloud, Amazon, Ant Group, Appen, Apple, Babelscape, Baidu, Bloomberg, ByteDance, Capital One, Chen Institute, Citadel, Cohere, Dataocean.AI, Duolingo, Exa.ai, Google, Grammarly, HITS gGmbH, IBM Research, Intuit, Kensho, LG AI Research, Megagon, Meituan, Meta, Millennium, NewsBreak, Oracle, Otter.ai, RBC Borealis, SCAI, Snowflake, Sony, Toloka AI, Turing, Two Sigma, Xiaomi Group 

As of February 7, 2025 we have secured the following confirmed sponsors.

NAACL 2025:

  • Diamond: None yet
  • Platinum: Adobe (upgraded from Silver), Baidu, Capital One, Megagon Labs, Toloka AI
  • Gold: Apple, Bloomberg
  • Silver: None yet
  • Bronze: Translated
  • Exhibition add-on: Translated
  • D&I Ally: Apple

ACL 2025:

  • Diamond: Apple, Bloomberg, Citadel
  • Platinum: Amazon, Baidu, IBM Research, Megagon Labs, Toloka AI
  • Gold: None yet
  • Silver: Adobe, Appen
  • Bronze: Translated
  • Exhibition add-on: Translated
  • D&I Ally: Apple

EMNLP 2025:

  • Diamond: None yet
  • Platinum: Baidu, Toloka AI
  • Gold: None yet
  • Silver: Adobe, Appen, Bloomberg
  • Bronze: Translated
  • Exhibition add-on: Translated
  • D&I Ally: Apple

IJCNLP-AACL 2025:

  • Diamond: None yet
  • Platinum: Baidu
  • Gold: None yet
  • Silver: None yet
  • Bronze: None yet
  • Exhibition add-on: None yet
  • D&I Ally: None yet

Total commitments so far: $508,175


The total sponsorship commitments for the main conferences as of February 7, 2025 was the amount of $508,175. Additionally, we have $10,500 for workshop sponsorships.


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

Action item for ACL Exec

My term will end in 2025, and I do not wish to seek a 3rd term as sponsorship director. I would like the ACL Exec to recruit a replacement. I have worked with Raffaella Bernardi in her role as sponsorship chair of the ACL 2025 conference, and I think she would be a good potential replacement. The Exec may wish to way factors like industry connections, locations, etc.

Retrieved from "https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2025Q1_Reports:_Sponsorship_Director&oldid=76232"