Fulfill your pledge... or else

Ian Wilhelm at the Chronicle of Philanthropy provided an update on the fact that the "Clinton Gathering" has now raised more than $7 billion in pledges to fix global warming. But, to me, more impressive than the dollar figure, was this interest nugget at the end of the article:

Mr. Clinton's event sets itself apart from other business and civil-society conferences in that participants must make a charitable promise - and fulfill it - or they will not be invited back. According to Jay Carson, Mr. Clinton's spokesman, "less than 20" of 2005's Clinton Global Initiative participants were removed from the guest list.

The William J. Clinton Foundation, which runs the conference, tracks the commitments and promises to hold people accountable.

Despite this, Mr. Carson, declined to name the banned parties. "We didn't say we would either, A, chase them down to their houses or B, beat the commitments out of them or that we would embarrass them with the international press corps," said Mr. Carson.

Who wants to help compare guest lists and figure out who made this list on deadbeats not invited back because of unfulfilled pledges? It reminds me of The Simpsons episode where Homer makes a pledge to PBS and then fails to pay. If your nonprofit is only getting a 75-80% fulfilment rate on your telemarketing campaigns... this is awesome.

UPDATE: In an interview Friday night, President Clinton was asked about recent gifts by Gates, Buffet, and Branson in order to get his thoughts on this age of philanthropy. His answer:

"I think that for one thing really rich people have always given money away. They’ve endowed libraries and things like that. The unique thing about this age is first of all you have a lot of people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet who are interested in issues around the world that grow out of the nature of the 21st century and its inequalities — the income inequalities, the education inequalities, the health care inequalities. You get a guy like Gates who built Microsoft and he actually believes that he can help overcome all of the health disparities in the world. That’s the first thing. Second thing…there are a lot of people with average incomes who are joining me because of the Internet. Take the tsuami for example we had 1.3 billion dollars given….by households. The third things you have all these NGO that you can partner with along with the government. So all these things together mean that people with real money in ways that help people that before would have been only the object of government grants and loans."

To see the video, go here: