Ahakim: New page: Sponsorship Committee Report (6/9/2011) Members: Local Organization: Brian Roark Richard Sproat European Region Stephen Pullman Massimiliano Ciaramita Asian Region Kevin Duh Haif...

2011-06-13T12:41:53Z

New page: Sponsorship Committee Report (6/9/2011) Members: Local Organization: Brian Roark Richard Sproat European Region Stephen Pullman Massimiliano Ciaramita Asian Region Kevin Duh Haif...

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Sponsorship Committee Report (6/9/2011)

Members:

Local Organization:

Brian Roark

Richard Sproat

European Region

Stephen Pullman

Massimiliano Ciaramita

Asian Region

Kevin Duh

Haifeng Wang

North American Region

Micahel Gamon

Srinivas Bangalore

List of Sponsors

AT&T

BBN Technologies

Baidu

Barefoot Wineries

Butler Hill Group

CSLU

DMICE

ETS

Google

Honda Research Institute

IBM

Microsoft

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL)

Preferred Infrastructure

Rakuten Institute of Technology

University of Washington

viaLanguage

Vlingo

Widmer

Yahoo!

Summary:
--------

Despite the harsh economic conditions and budget restrictions in many
organizations around the world, the ACL sponsorship committee has
raised over $62,000 (as of this report date) thanks to the
resourcefulness of the local organization committee, the innovative
solutions offered by Priscilla to prospective sponsors and the
outreach enabled by the globally distributed sponsorship committee
members. The sponsorship committee raised support not only from the
usual large companies such as Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, IBM and AT&T,
but was able to reach out to smaller institutions in the northwest
local region. The range of sponsorships varies from regular cash
support to student best paper award and even smoothie station and
alcoholic beverages during the reception and banquet.

Organizational structure:
-------------------------

The new plan of appointing a Sponsorship Committee with two
representatives from each regional world area (Asia, North/South
America and Europe/Africa) and having an overall Chair (currently
Srinivas Bangalore) is working very well. While it is usually quite
difficult to get sponsorships from areas of the world not hosting the
conference, this year, Kevin Duh (Asia Co-Chair) has been successful
in obtaining two (smaller) Supporter Level sponsorships from Japanese
companies. And, we have been a bit creative in ways of enticing
larger sponsorships from the old standby companies (Google, for
example, has increased from their previous Silver Level).

Strategies:
---------------------------

As always, personal contacts and perseverance with added creativity
and flexibility are needed for a successful sponsorship campaign. An
example of such an effort is illustrated in Priscilla's effort to
raise Google's sponsorship level to Platinum.

Google, who had been and wanted to remain at the Silver level
($4,000) as in the past are now at the Platinum level ($12,000). At
first, Priscilla was suggesting Google to have an exhibit and make a
visible presence but they were not interested. They suggested all
but the usual $4K to go to student awards but she pointed out that we
really did not have space for more than one best student paper award
but they could use some portion of their monies for student travel.
Then she discussed options for student travel and settled on $4K
going toward a few developing country student travel awards and that
Google representatives would take the students to lunch during the
conference. The remainder of the donation will be used at our
discretion.

In the same vain, Baidu agreed to be a Platinum Level sponsor when
Priscilla offered to display a sign prominently at the poster/dinner
session saying "Baidu welcomes you to the ACL HLT 2011 Poster Session".

Things that worked:

1. Personal contacts within organizations.

2. Sponsorship brochure indicating different sponsorship options.

3. The "Supporter" sponsorship plan is very attractive particularly
for new potential sponsors and strikes a good balance
between cost and publicity. We should continue having these kind
of plans to make it easy for new sponsors to join the ACL
community.

Suggestions:
-----------

1. It might be beneficial to lower the banquet sponsorship to a lower
and more reasonable level, even if it were to cover only a part of the
banquet costs. This might entice more sponsors to consider that
package as an option.

2. In the current sponsorship booklet, there is no sponsorship level
that covers poster sessions. With increasing number of ACL papers in
the poster sessions, one could also package sponsoring poster
sessions as a sponsor-able level.

3. There needs to be better coordination of request for sponsorship to
conferences; EMNLP 2011 organizers are having a tough time raising
funds given that ACL is advertised as the only major conference
and companies have committed their funds to the ACL
conference. EMNLP was not listed as a conference in the ACL
sponsorship brochure. Perhaps a better planning could have avoided
this oversight.

4. The spreadsheet information of the potential sponsorship contacts
is often outdated and needs to be updated to maintain relevance
and pertinence. It might be better served as a wiki-site with
possible contributions from ACL membership at large, instead of
being a responsibility of only the previous sponsorship committee.

5. In addition to attaching the sponsorship brochure in an email, it
might be easier to point to it on a website for ease of access.

6. We should move the sponsor logos to the conference homepage
(http://www.acl2011.org/) rather than a subpage
(http://www.acl2011.org/sponsors.shtml). It not only advertises
sponsors, but also advertises ACL as a thriving community with lots
of industry support.

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2011Q3 Reports: Sponsorship Committee - Revision history

Ahakim: New page: Sponsorship Committee Report (6/9/2011) Members: Local Organization: Brian Roark Richard Sproat European Region Stephen Pullman Massimiliano Ciaramita Asian Region Kevin Duh Haif...