Sponsorship chair duties

Sponsorship Chair Duties

Conference Handbook - Sponsorship Chair Duties

• Communicate with the sponsors about how to exercise their benefits, which are:
  • Logos on conference banners
  • Logos on conference bags
  • Printed materials in conference bags
  • Logos and ads in printed handbook
  • Exhibiting space

• Take responsibility for managing the sponsorship elements of the printed handbook, which means:
  • Collecting and arranging the sponsors’ printed ad.
  • Collecting and arranging the sponsors’ logos (in .eps or .pdf format) for the back of the handbook (don’t forget D&I sponsors)
  • Coordinating with whoever the General Chair designates as in charge of the handbook on dates, formats (color, size, etc).
  • Be aware that printers have hard deadlines, so communicating a sufficiently earlier deadline for sponsors to send their materials is important.

• Create an exhibition guide for the exhibiting sponsors, and distribute it 2 months before the conference. This should be done in coordination with the ACL Business Manager and the conference site POC. This should include:
  • What the size of each exhibition space will be
  • What materials will be provided (this could be as simple as tables, chairs and pasteboards, or as complicated as the ACL’s shell schemes which add $$$$ to the conference budget)
  • What the sponsors are allowed to bring (e.g. Facebook will want to rent furniture and build a shell - does the conference venue allow this? If so, does it limit to particular vendors)
  • What the setup and teardown times will be.
  • Where they should ship materials to, and what date window should the materials arrive in (helps to have a shipping label that they print out – doesn’t need to be pre-paid).
  • Include instructions to mark the outside of the boxes as “For conference bags” for materials they want us to put in the conference bags.
  • Set times when the exhibition booths should be staffed. Typically this is the full time that the conference is going on.
  • If the exhibition hall is unlocked during non-staffed hours, you should arrange a locked storage space for companies to put their booth materials, and arrange for a person to have the key to lock and unlock it at designated times (probably good to give their telephone number to sponsors upon arrival).
  • Much of this information requires input from he local organizers, so the Sponsorship Chair should be a local or should coordinate closely with them.

• Communicating instructions to sponsors on how to get their complimentary registrations.
  • If you are using YesEvents to manage the conference registration, they can help generate codes for the sponsors (be sure to CC the ACL Business Manager).
  • If you’re using another conference registration company, then they should be able to generate codes for complimentary registrations or tell you what the procedure is for having sponsors collect their complimentary registrations
  • There are two types of complimentary registrations:

(1) Full conference registrations + tutorials + workshops for the companies’ researchers, (2) Registrations for 2 company representatives per day to staff the exhibition booths. This registration types typically does not include the scientific content, or the social events. Providing a way for companies to purchase extra tickets to the social events would be good.

• Communicating the conference program schedule to the sponsors. This should include
  • As early as is known, the starting and ending times of the conference program each day. Some sponsors like to host their own social events. They should be ** Companies like to know what papers are being presented by their researchers. Having the program co-chairs generate such a list is useful (can be done via email addresses or affiliation of accepted papers authors).
  • Send the companies the full talk schedules when it is available.
  • Liaising between companies and the people who are running the virtual component of the conference.
  • For virtual exhibitors, the program committee should pick a few 2- hour blocks when the virtual exhibits should be open. These hours should be communicated to the virtual participants and to the virtual sponsors. I recommend setting the virtual exhibition hours to be the same as the virtual poster sessions.