Bianca Berkhia, discusses La Casa Norte’s campaign to get 50o Facebook fans by the end of 2009 and how her organization uses social media for its fundraising and communicaitons today from Community Media Workshop on Vimeo.

Ever since Beth Kanter posted in November about whether small nonprofits can succeed with social media (a post that garnered a lot of comments), I’ve been wondering about stories and proof that, indeed, integrating these new modes of communication into our work is part of our future at nonprofits with budgets under $1 million — especially organizations that have been around a while, and those that provide traditional sorts of services. Found a couple stories these past two weeks.

I met Bianca Berkhia, in the video here, at a workshop a couple of weeks ago and she had great stuff to say about social media for fundraising, so even though I still need to concentrate harder on the filming part of the video (or bring an intern with a steadier wrist along) I couldn’t resist the chance to interview her. Her agency is smaller so therefore more flexible than some, but what I like about her story is this:

• It’s a small organization, their use of social media is small-scale, the results are correspondingly not yet stratospheric, but they are figuring out how to incorporate new media into the rest of their communications work
• Bianca sounds like she’s having fun with it, so it’s not stressing her out too much

Most of all, what sturck me is that Bianca is where a lot of us are: her emphasis is on figuring out how to make this part of standard operating procedure in the future–so you know that while the group has not hit a home run yet, they’re as she puts it so well, “getting there.”

Blono=Bloomington-Normal

Thanks to Vikki Baptiste of MidCentral Community Action, Inc. I was able to lead workshops for the Central Illinois Association of Fundraising Professionals and then on social media, the news and you for a group of about 20 communications folks from different area nonprofits (you can see them both at Slideshare).

A favorite moment was during a panel with Editor Mark Pickering and Online Editor Jamahl Episcokhan of the Bloomington Pantagraph as well as Vikki and Pete Moore–the latter two being resident nonprofit Twitter mavens.

We were discussing– as we always do on such panels — the best way to pitch journalists –where we discovered that Pete is part of a shadowy news conspiracy — “@Blono” a small unorganized group (he wasn’t too clear about that part) who have been flooding the Twittersphere with news of important (and less important) happenings around their two towns. Without taking away from the reach of the Pantagraph–45,000 daily circulation–it was clear that Blono was offering reach of a different kind.

Furthermore, several people had “pitched” BloNo in the past (via Twitter) — in fact, Pete and his shadowy crew are curating a great conversation about what’s going on around their towns. Until our event the other day, no-one knew who was behind the Twitter account. Not sure if this really counts as “small nonprofits” with social media success. Pete works at The Baby Fold, a larger adoption agency– but it was a local nonprofit communicator who had said the Twitter feed helped her communicate her work successfully. Certainly it’s a great example of how social media creates a new news stream by making it easy for a group to self organize to distribute information that’s useful to everyone.

Of course in BloNo I met lots of somewhat-to-much larger groups with social media successes. Easter Seals raisd $17,000 locally, and a new development office staffer at Illinois State University announced he’d helped his previous institution raise a significant sum on Facebook by pledging to sing the school fight song (many pledged even more to stop him from singing, Brian said). I think it’s fair to say that smaller nonprofits are integrating social media and have come a long way but still have a long way to go–do you have a good success at a nonprofit with budget under $1 million story?