I see that you wanted some suggestions about a non-donating activity about getting Clocks, i guess i could also account other silk items.
1) Add them to uniques or some strong monsters as drops.
2) Add them to CTF as rewards, rarity you have to think through.
3) Buyable with job coins or some other coins you can get though other activities.
4) Would it be possible to add a silk item lottery ingame or homepage? As for its tickets i think they should be obtainable through somekinda activity similar to CTF, with gold it seems too easy and im not even gonna talk about donating to spin it. There could be like you get 1 ticket each 24 hours automatically and you can also obtain them from other activites as mentioned. Maybe even add these tickets as FGW drops or you can also add Clocks there.
5) Of course make some events with them as rewards.
Okay these are all the ideas i have for now, dont seem much, heheh.
Id like to write a story here about a server, which i was once in, not mentioning name. There the uniques had silk item drops and they were really strong, requiring at least one party with end-game sets to kill, but ppl didnt have so powerful equipment so they needed even more firepower. I really loved it as some of them dropped DS(which was not buyable with silk), some dropped special 10D stones that increase fear, stun etc resistance. These uniques were built very differently, some for ints and some for strs, of course both parts could deal dmg, just that they had weaknesses and one unique was 1 hitting anything it came in contact with, so it had to be kited, obviously it moved real slow, but eventually still got to kill some birdbrains. Now cause they dropped such items, they were camped and killed all the time, ppl couldnt wait to kill them, so they really had a point in the whole game.
Good Luck.