[UK-TUG] Fwd: December 2014 TUG newsletter: new membership campaign

[Joseph Wright]

-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: December 2014 TUG newsletter: new membership campaign
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2014 01:12:40 GMT
From: TeX Users Group <tug-news at tug.org>
To: all-tug-members at tug.org

Dear TUG member,

Maybe you use TeX and friends in your work, or maybe you appreciate
the beauty and power of the systems, or maybe you just like working
with systems that are free for everyone, but the availability of TeX
and friends matters to you.

To continue to thrive, and to grow for the future, TeX needs support.
This includes support for the maintenance of the current releases -- the
software that you're using now -- and for the continuing progress of
actively-developed systems such as XeTeX and LuaTeX. For thirty-five
years the TeX Users Group (TUG, http://tug.org) has been a key part of
that support.

Lately TUG has seen a slow but perceptible drop in membership. We
depend on members for everything, including the financial basis
to help keep TeX and its related systems strong.

We are very grateful for your support as a current TUG member -- and we
want to ask you for something else: we hope you can help in a
new membership drive.

The full description is at http://tug.org/membership/ but the idea is
simple. We call it "members bring members". We ask current members to
invite new ones; the membership form (at http://tug.org/join.html) now
asks, "Who invited you to join TUG?" If a new member lists you then you
will receive a thank-you gift: an exquisite letterpress notecard made
specially for this campaign by long-time TUG member Peter Wilson. In
addition, at the end of 2015 you will be entered in a drawing to win an
original illustration by Duane Bibby, the artist who created the art in
The TeXbook, and many other works, both TeX-related and otherwise.

So, again thank you for your support as a member. If you think of
someone who also values TeX and friends then please encourage them to
join TUG. It will help keep the systems strong.

Happy TeXing,
Steve Peter, TUG President
for the TUG Board

P.S. If you can help spread the word about this drive, and about TUG in
general, by posting to a related blog, or social media, that'd be great.