How St. Gregory's Athens Raised $165K for a Community Piano

Most capital campaigns start in a board meeting.

This one started with two high school seniors essentially double-dog-daring their piano teacher.

Our team recently sat down with Jonathan Klein, music director at St. Gregory the Great Episcopal Church in Athens, Georgia, and the owner of an independent piano studio he’s run for 26 years. Jonathan led a campaign called 88 Keys for Community to replace a piano that belongs, in every meaningful sense, to the whole city of Athens.

He did it while holding down two full-time jobs. He did it without asking his congregation. And he did it (by his own cheerful admission) as someone who finds asking for money deeply uncomfortable.

Here’s how it happened.

At a glance

• 💰 Total Raised: $164,913.67
• 🎯 Goal: $150,000
• 📈 Goal Exceeded by: ~10%
• 👥 Donations: 226
• 🎁 Largest single gift: $100,000, from an anonymous donor who found out about their cause organically

For context: a $150,000 goal is an enormous number for a parish that describes itself as “small but growing.” Jonathan spent a while being too nervous to say it out loud, but once he did, it started the snowball toward exceeding the goal.

The mission: Creating space for community connection

St. Gregory the Great began in April 1971, when a small group of Episcopalians started meeting in an elementary school cafeteria on the east side of Athens. They baked their own Communion bread and built a rolling altar. They were, as the parish history puts it, more interested in outreach than buildings.

Fifty-plus years later, that outreach instinct is still running, and these days, a lot of it runs through the piano.

The old instrument was purchased in 1999, right around when Jonathan was hired. “I’ve lived with it its whole life cycle, if that makes it sense,” he told us. And what he watched over those 25 years was an instrument that quietly became a community asset. “What we saw is the majority of the usage for [the piano] was for other events besides worship.”

Concerts. Student recitals… many, many student recitals. An all-piano festival every October that Jonathan co-founded with another teacher in town, which brings hundreds of students through in a single day. The Athens Master Chorale, which rehearses at St. Gregory’s every week and ramps up from there before concerts.

The piano at St. Gregory’s has “a lot to do with community,” Jonathan explained.

That’s the part that makes this a mission-story instead of a purchase-story. As Jonathan framed it: “We can open our doors and invite people to go ahead and make music in whatever capacity they have.”

The challenge: 2 large campaigns running at once

Two problems. The first was the piano itself.

To be clear, it still worked. “We have churches all around Athens… that have really humble instruments, and they are able to make worship and make music from that. And so it’s never about, like, this isn’t working or that isn’t working.”

But a career musician notices things. “We were seeing this instrument lose its power, lose its sound, lose some of its beauty. And part of teaching music is aesthetic training.”

He remembers the first fine instrument he ever played, in college: “It was like, wow. I get it now. There are levels to this.” He wanted to hand that moment to the next generation of musicians. “We could really give this to the precollege students of Athens as well as all those other community groups that use our space.”

The second problem was the genuinely hard one.

St. Gregory’s was about to launch its own capital improvement campaign: playground, septic tanks, the kind of infrastructure work nobody puts on a poster. The piano campaign could not compete with it and needed to stay separate.

So Jonathan sat down with his rector and made a decision that would have sunk a lot of campaigns: He took his own congregation off the table.

“When the goal for the piano started picking up on my end, we didn’t want to water down our capital campaign, which had to do with a lot of much-needed infrastructure,” Jonathan shared.

“I had to really reach out to the community, which at first seemed like having one arm tied behind my back, but it actually wound up being a really important asset to the whole campaign because it forced me to go out into the community.”

Or, as he put it more simply: “I think we thrive in limited situations sometimes.”

Then there was the number. Jonathan landed on $150,000, the cost of a serious instrument plus rebuilding the failing platform all these events happen on, and couldn’t bring himself to say the number out loud easily.

“I was not bold enough to say it out loud until my first meeting with 4aGoodCause with Ronald. I said, I’m gonna say something out loud, and you know, you say the words: $150K. Piano. And then you start feeling a little out of sorts because you feel like that’s really excessive.”

But the number wasn’t arbitrary. It wasn’t just an instrument for the congregation on Sunday mornings, but for the musical community of Athens on weekdays, too. Most instruments in the upgrade category Jonathan was looking at are well over $200K. Plus, St. Gregory’s knew they also needed to rebuild one of the platforms where the community music events happened because it deeply also needed repair. Jonathan was shopping smart, keeping an eye out for secondhand instruments of this caliber.

The solution: Partnership, not just a platform

Jonathan came to 4aGoodCause for the obvious stuff: He’d built websites before, but not the kind that ask for funding.

“We needed help with integrating the landing pages with things like Stripe and seeing who donated to what, are they doing one-time or recurring payments, etc.. And then, of course, we just needed help keeping track of the people we needed to follow-up with.”

The platform did its job, which is the highest compliment software can earn. “The platform itself was really, really good. It always, always worked. 4aGoodCause is a very, very stable platform, which is great. I could see what I needed to see.”

When a donor accidentally set up a subscription, or meant to and didn’t, Jonathan could easily, intuitively fix it himself in about a minute: He could “instantly unwind that through Stripe and through the 4aGoodCause back office.” No support ticket, no waiting on us.

He built a landing page that did real storytelling work, showcasing students and the events the space hosts, with drop-down videos so visitors could actually hear what they were funding.

Then he built peer-to-peer pages. All of his participating students got one.

He’d seen the model before: One of the seniors who dared him into this had fundraised with 4aGoodCause through the Atlanta Youth Wind Symphony, where each musician raised a few hundred dollars for a trip.

“So I kind of ran that model, with all 40 of my students… I made landing pages for every student.” Other studios in town joined in, and so did the Athens Master Chorale, split into competing sections.

But the thing Jonathan found the most helpful wasn’t just the software, it was the caring, supportive team at 4aGoodCause.

“Ronald would reach out email from time to time and ask if everything going okay,” and most of the time, Jonathan’s answer was that he was heads-down, “chopping wood and carrying water,” as he put it.

But when he got stuck, those conversations with Ronald were where he got unstuck. Early on, he was worried the whole thing would come across as a transaction.

“I wanted to be really clear that we had something more than just transactional that we were asking for… So I was afraid of making sure that we got the messaging right.”

So Jonathan worked on messaging with 4aGoodCause. We ran practice statements out loud until the language had some weight to it. And when he wondered whether the goal was too big, Ronald encouraged him: It’s better to go big and fall short than to go short and spend the next decade wondering what could have been.

“Having a conversation with an expert is all the difference.”

📚 Read more: Getting the words right is most of the job. If you’re stuck on how to ask without sounding like a transaction, start where Jonathan did and work on your messaging with five real fundraising email examples that landed.

The results: An unexpected ending

Three and a half years in, the campaign was sitting around the halfway mark. Nobody was panicking.

“That’s fine because we weren’t in a hurry to get it wrong,” Jonathan said. “You don’t wanna just rush it and then know, buy an instrument you regret. And I knew $150K was an aggressive number. I knew if we hit, say, $120K, we probably could do a lot of good with that.”

Which is the correct instinct. A piano bought in a hurry is a piano you live with for 30 years.

Then came a December conversation about donor recognition.

Ronald gave some encouragement to Jonathan about how to thank donors. They talked about going back to his donors and asking them for testimonials: why they gave, and why they gave at the number they did.

Jonathan took the idea and ran with it. He had his students record videos of themselves playing, with the young musicians thanking each donor by name.

📚 Read more: You don’t need a production budget to make a donor feel appreciated. Jonathan had his students record videos of themselves playing; here are five nonprofit video examples worth stealing from.

“It was really personalized, and it turned out to mean a lot to the people giving… They didn’t expect a small concert video, but they were really touched…. There was a community exchange happening rather than just dollars and cents.”

Here’s where the story gets good.

One of those donors loved her video so much that she showed it to someone else in her life, a friend who also gives philanthropically. Purely because it delighted her, no other reason. There was no ask attached.

Her friend watched it. And then he called Jonathan.

📚 Read more: Testimonials aren’t just nice-to-haves; they’re the raw material for everything else you’ll write this year. Here’s our exact process for gathering stories of impact for your nonprofit, templates included.

“This gentleman who heard it wanted to be a part of that. That’s as simple as it was,” Jonathan explained. “Probably the third sentence out of my mouth on my first phone call with him was like, Is this real?”

It was real. The anonymous donor, who doesn’t live in Georgia and had no prior connection to Athens, asked how long the campaign had been running. Three and a half years. How much longer did Jonathan expect it to take? Probably another three.

“He asked me, Well, what if you were done this summer?”

The gift was $100,000. But the donor didn’t just write a check and disappear. He wanted to talk about how the community was being engaged around the instrument, because he understood something Jonathan already believed: This kind of investment is a community investment. So they structured part of the gift as a matching challenge, giving Jonathan something to take back out into Athens.

Which he did, with a home concert: professional artists, a 50-person capacity, invitations targeted at people known to support arts in town, party favors, the works. The giving match was announced before, during, and after the event.

“It really was a huge success. It really did work.”

The campaign closed at $164,913.67 against a $150,000 goal, across 226 donations.

We want to be honest about the unglamorous half of that number, because Jonathan was. Even with the anonymous large-gift donor, this campaign was hard work over the long term:

“There were a lot of conversations with donors who didn’t say much, and I won’t say they disappeared, but when I had that exchange with them, it was a friendly first exchange and that’s it. And many of them, but not right away, after digesting and thinking, came back to support this cause in their own right-sized amount.”

People he was sure would give, didn’t. People he’d never have guessed showed up “full throatedly.” His conclusion: “Don’t put anybody in a box.”

The operational load stayed survivable, too, which matters when you’re one person running a large campaign with two full-time jobs.

The fundraiser went dormant for stretches as needed (during Easter and during concert season, for example) and came back fresh.

Why it worked

A few things stand out about this unique fundraising challenge:

• A constraint became a strategy. Separating this fundraiser from congregational asks launched Jonathan’s goal into the wider community outside of St. Gregory’s, which is where a $100,000 donor was eventually waiting. “It actually wound up being a really important asset to the whole campaign.”
• Peer-to-peer pages built early credibility. Forty students, plus other studios and the Athens Master Chorale, put roughly $30,000 on the board via P2P fundraising. “When you could see on the landing page that people had already donated up to $30,000 for this thing, it legitimized it. So we could go out a little bit more boldly.”
• Thanking donors was treated as a strategy, not a chore. The recognition videos weren’t a wrap-up task. They were the single highest-ROI thing that happened to the campaign.
• The ask was never about the object or a purchase. Jonathan refused to run a “help us buy a thing” campaign, and that discipline and focus on a community is why a stranger states away wanted in.
• The platform stayed out of the way. Stable pages, real-time visibility, easy payment processing, self-serve fixes through Stripe and the 4aGC back office.
• He had a partner in the loop with 4aGoodCause. Regular check-ins, a December strategy conversation, and honest feedback on the goal number. In Jonathan’s words: “Work with people like 4aGoodCause and Ronald to help you fine tune your message.”
• Slow was allowed. Four years with intentional dormant stretches beat a frantic 12 months that burns out the asker and the audience.
• He kept going without proof it was working. This is the one Jonathan would tell you matters most. His advice to any music director attempting the same thing: “Get comfortable because you’re going to do a portion of the campaign just on faith. You’re going to do it just kinda moving in the dark.”

What’s next: They’re just getting started

Here’s my favorite part of Jonathan’s fundraising story: The instrument is in. The campaign is closed. And Jonathan’s take on that is they’re not done.

“Now that we have the instrument, the real campaign begins.”

St. Gregory’s is launching Concerts for a Cause, a new program where any group performing in the space chooses a local cause they believe in. Attendees don’t pay at the door. Instead, they learn about the cause, meet the people running it, and find tables set up in the room. A concert with a thread running through it.

The first one is the last Sunday of September: an all-women’s choral project, benefiting a local immigration rights organization.

“We’re starting something rather than just finishing a campaign.”

Jonathan is also tracking down former students, kids who graduated and left for college before the campaign finished, to invite them back to play the piano they helped raise money for.

That’s the kind of follow-through with long-term impact that’s hard to quantify on a spreadsheet.

And the vision for Concerts for a Cause came out of the campaign.

“There was something about the largeness, the big purchase price of this, that it seemed like we have to do more than just get an instrument. And that came out of the conversations with everything with 4aGoodCause and conversations with my students. People always say think bigger, don’t talk yourself out of what could be.”

We’ll be right here for the next one. For a guy who says fundraising is “absolutely out of my wheelhouse,” Jonathan became alarmingly good at it, doing it from a very human, heartfelt position.

“It became something more than money,” Jonathan shared, “And I’m really proud of that.”

Want to launch a high-performing campaign like St. Gregory’s Athens? Schedule a demo of 4aGoodCause and we’ll show you how.