By Paula Wasley

Nonprofit groups have embraced social networks like Facebook and Twitter to reach out to supporters, but few groups have attracted more than a few thousand supporters to their networks or raised much money, according to a survey of 980 nonprofit officials about their organizations’ use of online social networks.

The survey, sponsored by the Nonprofit Technology Network, Common Knowledge, a San Francisco online fund-raising and marketing consulting agency, and ThePort a social-media software company in Atlanta, found that nearly three-quarters of nonprofit groups maintained a presence on Facebook, by far the most popular commercial social network.

About 39.9 percent of the officials said their charities had used Facebook for fund raising, but 29.1 percent had raised $500 or less using the social network over the past 12 months. And only 1.2 percent had received $10,000 or more through Facebook. Revenue received through advertising and underwriting on social networks was “not present in any meaningful way,” the report concluded.

YouTube and Twitter were the next most common social networks after Facebook, with 46.5 percent and 43.2 percent of nonprofit groups, respectively, using those sites, followed by 32.9 percent that use LinkedIn and 26.1 percent that use MySpace.

Just under one-third of nonprofit groups had built their own in-house social networks to bring online supporters together to discuss a specific cause or issue.

On Facebook, 97 percent of organizations had attracted 10,000 members or fewer, and an average of 1,369 members. Among those organizations that built their own networks nearly three-quarters had 2,500 or fewer registered members.

The resources nonprofit groups have dedicated to social networking are “small but real,” says the report, and likely to grow. Four out of five participants reported that their organizations had dedicated at least one-quarter of a full-time staff member’s hours to social networking. And more than half said they planned to increase staffing for social-networking projects over the next year.