My experiences with EFF in real life in Europe have been abysmal. I tend not to donate to organizations that are contrarian by statute.
Especially so when you go to conferences, you hear panels where a EFF representative is chatting with a Google lobbyist and ends up using sentences like - and I quote - "OMG, you are so right", "Wow, I can't agree more". The theme was the censorship of content and a critique - clearly instrumental to Google's bottom line - that any content shouldn't be regulated by law.
I had the opposite European experience. They seem to do pretty fine and talk constructively during the conferences I've attended where I listened to them, and I'm a regular donor to them, but, as a donor, I have to point this out:
Their communication with the donors is almost non-existential. Waited for like two weeks to receive an answer for them, had to ping them after two weeks, they've replied, but failed to answer my questions, which I pointed out and never received an answer, then they've sent me a t-shirt to a wrong country (got the address right, missed the country completely and I have no clue how that happened), so I had to ping them again and let them know that they've fucked up the country while sending me a package, to which they didn't reply, but a couple of days later sent me another email in which they claim to have sent another package to the right country. Meanwhile, my initial questions remain unanswered for about two or three months now and all I get from them is "another donation successfully charged" emails.
