As you may already know, every associate member is incredibly valuable to the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Since most of our funding comes from individual donations and memberships, associate members aren’t just a number. Each new membership magnifies our reach and our ability to effect social change, by demonstrating your commitment to the crucial cause of software freedom.

Right now, FSF associate members have the opportunity to reap some fantastic rewards by participating in our virtual LibrePlanet membership drive. We still have the raffle prizes generously donated by Technoethical, Vikings, JMP.chat, and ThinkPenguin for this year’s LibrePlanet conference, which we held entirely online this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, we’re giving them away to those who go the extra mile to help us grow by referring new annual associate members to sign up!

Associate members receive a range of benefits for their contribution, like an FSF email alias, access to the member forum, 20% discount in the FSF shop, and gratis entrance to the annual LibrePlanet conference. In fact, we've been working hard to add an exciting new member benefit this month as well -- stay tuned!

Winning the prizes is easy: just find a friend, acquaintance, colleague, or family member who uses free software, knows about free software, or is just worried about how corporate abuses of computer users by proprietary software are ramping up right now, and tell them why they need to support the FSF today.

In order for you to qualify to win a prize, new members have to sign up using your referral link. You will find your personal referrer link on the dashboard after logging in at https://my.fsf.org/.

To see the prize list, and find out how many referrers you need for each prize, check out our original announcement of the raffle at https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/virtual-libreplanet-raffle-encourage-others-to-join-fsf-and-win-prizes.

It shouldn’t be difficult to understand or explain why our work is so crucial today, and why the fight to free our software deserves everyone’s support. We hope you’ll agree with John Hamelink, who told us he became an associate member this month because "We've never needed the Free Software Foundation more than right now."