It was a good move; a few years later somebody tried to force human resources policy with a gift, and the board was able to say "no" and point to us, their predecessors.
Also, charities have to be aware that they may be generating "unrelated business income" by accepting a donation in trade for something of value, as such income is taxable.
A simple example: gifts may be restricted. Restricting a gift is as simple as writing a $10 check to the Sierra Club and writing "spotted owl conservation" on the memo line. If the Sierra Club doesn't have a spotted owl program, they're supposed to get your permission to apply the gift elsewhere.
If your gift were for half a million dollars and restricted that way, you'd be trying to set policy with it.
Not all attempts by donors to drive policy are harmful to the org. And, not all such attempts are self-dealing or other fiscal shenanigans. Usually they're far more banal clashes of egos.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-used-258000-fr...
Out of sheer curiosity, what was the policy?
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3nv0vh/e...
Parsing hairs of course, and it's likely 90% of the board or more was the same, but it's enough.
It's always much easier to say:
"we already have a policy precedent that doesn't allow this."
than to say
"we can do anything we want, and we choose not to do this."
And there's a substantive difference beyond just perception. With the former, you're ruling in favor of a principled stand regardless of the person/policy behind the particular request at hand. With the latter, you're ruling against a particular person/request.
Real life example: A young lady suffered a slip and fall on the freshly waxed floor of a shop. The shop had a written policy against waxing the floors during business hours, but the janitor had done so anyway. The shop's written policy was used as evidence of negligence in court. They would have had a better outcome if they had no policy at all.
Once you have the policy, even though you wrote it, you can't declare that you're ignoring the policy or that you're changing it retroactively. Well, you could, but you'd look foolish and lose all credibility.
"Better outcome" meaning they would have been able to shirk responsibility and the woman would have been sent packing with nothing? I weep for the future.
Think about what you're arguing for.
Similar to how no one in industry reads patents (opposite of the intended purpose of knowledge-sharing) because they get treble damages if they are found infringing while being aware of the patent.
If you have one, the FTC can come after you for violation of said privacy policy. Fines can result.
If you don't have one, FTC has nothing.
> If you don't have one, FTC has nothing.
Surely this is in some sense as it should be? If a company has no privacy policy, then it explicitly offers me no guarantees about how it treats my data, and I can do business with it (or not) accordingly. However, if a company has a privacy policy, then I should be able to rely on it; it shouldn't be just feel-good boilerplate.
Also, if you make any privacy-related claims, the FTC can come down on you for misrepresentations. A clear, visible Privacy Policy provides an opportunity to clarify what might otherwise be taken as unqualified privacy claims provided elsewhere.