2022Q1 Reports: Sponsorship Director

This is the second 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.

Duties of the Sponsorship Director

This year I have been working to take over many of the sponsorship related duties that were previously handled by Priscilla Rasmussen, since she is retiring. These include: 1. Contacting recurring sponsors to solicit sponsorship of upcoming conferences. 2. Invoicing sponsors once they have picked a sponsorship level, and decided which conferences to sponsor. 3. Liaising between sponsors and relevant conference organizers in order to ensure that we give the sponsors the promised benefits

• logos and links on conference websites
• logos and promotional materials in printed conference materials
• space for exhibition displays at the in-person conference
• online options for virtual exhibitions
• scheduling exhibition time in the conference program so that companies know when to staff their booths
• complementary registration for the correct number of company's employees
• etc.

Priscilla has done a masterful job of doing all of these things in the past and there are likely to be a few rough patches as we as an organization learn to replicate what she's done for us.

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's well organized, responsive, and quick. 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.

Sponsorship rates for 2022 Conferences

In late 2021, Priscilla Rasmussen and I met the sponsorship rates. Here are the | new Sponsorship rates for 2022 Conferences. We kept the ACL sponsorship rate fixed from last year, and set the sponsorship rates for the other conferences for this year (EMNLP, NAACL, and AACL) to be roughly proportional ACL based on what fraction of attendees we expected. This means that EMNLP's sponsorship rates are now equal to ACL, NAACL's sponsorship rates are 75% that of ACL, and AACL's sponsorship rates are 40% of ACL's.

Sponsorship Booklet for 2022 Conferences

I hired a designer to make the Sponsorship Booklet again this year. We hired Kira Grennan <kira.grennan@gmail.com> who updated | the sponsorship booklet plus created | a new wordmark for ACL invoices and letterhead for about $350 USD. Here's | the old style booklet and | the old letterhead prior to us hiring a designer, for comparison.

Current Sponsors for 2022 Conferences

I have reached out to the following companies soliciting their sponsorship: Adobe, aiXplain, Alibaba, Amazon, Apple, Babelscape, Baidu, Bloomberg, Bosch, Bytedance, Deep Mind, DuoLingo, Etsy, G-Research, Google, Grammarly, HLTCOE, IBM, ISI, KPMG, LegalForce, LivePerson, Megagon Labs, Meta, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, Naver Labs (and Naver Labs Europe), NVIDIA, OpenAI, Relatively, Samsung, ServiceNow, Tencent, Text IQ, TIAA/Nuveen, Zoom.

As of March 4, 2022 we have secured the following confirmed sponsors.

• ACL: Amazon (Diamond), Apple (Diamond), LivePerson (Diamond), Meta (Diamond), IBM (Platinum), Megagon (Platinum), ServiceNow (Gold), Relativity (Gold), Adobe (Bronze), Babelscape (Bronze)
• NAACL: Amazon (Diamond), LivePerson (Diamond), Meta (Diamond), Apple (Platinum), Megagon (Platinum), Nuveen (Gold), ServiceNow (Gold), Relativity (Gold), Adobe (Bronze), Babelscape (Bronze)
• EMNLP: Amazon (Diamond), Apple (Diamond), LivePerson (Diamond), Meta (Diamond), Megagon (Platinum), Adobe (Bronze), Babelscape (Bronze)
• AACL: Adobe (Bronze)

• D&I Sponsorship: Microsoft (D&I Champion) for all 4 conferences.

The total sponsorship commitments for the main conferences as of March 4, 2022 amount of $400,510. Additionally, we have $48,575 for workshop sponsorships and colocated conferences ($20k for IWSLT).

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

Suggested Policies

Last year, Colin Cherry asked that the ACL Exec vote on adopting a Sponsorship policy similar to the ACM FAccT conference's Sponsorship Policy

…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.

TODO: Was this adopted? If so I'll add information to the sponsorship websites.

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.