Is this man the future of politics?

Thomas Gensemer masterminded Barack Obama's groundbreaking and astonishingly successful online presidential campaign. Could he help Gordon Brown at the next election? He thinks so, as he tells Stephen Moss and Sarah Phillips

Barack Obama wasn't the only winner in November's presidential election. Thomas Gensemer, whose company Blue State Digital managed Obama's slick online campaign, built his website, recruited 13.5 million supporters and raised $500m for the Obama campaign, is also doing very nicely out of the victory. As he arrives in London to open a UK office and try to entice the Labour party into his electronic embrace for the next election, he admits it's a handy "calling card" to have.

Gensemer is a thin, crop-haired, ultra-driven 31-year-old who talks so fast you have to slow the tape down to transcribe what he says. Here, you sense, in the basement of the Freud Communications building in central London - all asymmetrical furniture and obligatory brightly coloured cushions - that will serve as his headquarters in Britain, is the future of politics. Though perhaps, with even John Prescott now blogging, the future is already here.

He insists he is not a technology geek, and that the strength of his company's work for Obama was the manner in which the campaign engaged the millions who signed up to donate, offer help and organise, not the online means. "People have been bamboozled with the technology for too long," he says. "The real questions are, 'What are your goals, and how can you use technology to achieve them?' Our biggest sales pitch is that we couple the services along with the technology. A lot of our competition just sells technology, and the types of organisation and causes that we like to work with, if I go in and sell them really powerful technology, it doesn't do them any good, because they don't have the wherewithal to make sense of it." It is a point he was due to make at a speech last night at City University in London.

At the heart of the Obama web strategy was MyBO (pronounced MyBeau), which worked like any other social networking site, encouraging potential voters to get a membership to this exclusive club, create an identity within it and discuss the cause with acquaintances. But there was a difference. Rather than merely join this network, passively clicking a button to donate or express an allegiance to Obama, members were encouraged to go out into the real world to knock on doors, hand out leaflets and spread the word. The site then encouraged these efforts to be recorded and shared with the online community, making the user feel empowered and on the front line of the campaign.

Gensemer wants to demystify online campaigning, and his message is straightforward. "Organisations can build very quickly, if they do the messaging right. They need to be able to answer the question, 'What can someone do for me today?' But a lot of these organisations, political and cause-related, aren't really used to that question. What can they do? 'Well, they can give me money. That's what we do. I'm a charity.' But they need to deepen it. You need first to answer the question of what the money goes for."

He wants to nurture active supporters, not passive donors - people who have a stake in the organisation they have signed up to support, envisage a long-term relationship and want to be taken seriously. He tells a story of another political campaign he worked on in the US (he prefers not to name it) where supporters were invited to send feedback by email. "I was wondering, 'Where does that email go?' he says. "I was still wondering three or four days later. Finally, we found out. We got to the inbox and there were 78,000 emails in there that had never even been read. That was never allowed to happen with the Obama campaign. From day one we said that can't happen."

Political causes have been the cornerstone of Blue State's work since it was founded five years ago by a group of activists who had cut their teeth working on Howard Dean's ill-fated bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004. They carried on working for Dean when he became chairman of the Democratic National Committee the following year, and in 2007 got a call from another presidential hopeful.

"The approach from the Obama campaign came two weeks before his announcement address in February 07," recalls Gensemer. "They said, 'It's clear that this is going to be a centrepoint of our campaign and that we have underestimated the needs - how quickly can we get something going?' It took 10 days and we got everything put together such that the site was literally ready an hour before the announcement address."

Gensemer stresses that the three years spent working with Dean and the Democratic party were crucial to the way they could so quickly establish Obama's online support network. "The too-often untold story of the campaign," he says, "is that the work that we were able to do in 2007 and 2008 actually started in 2005 and 2006 with Dean at the DNC."

The other key factor was that online campaigning was no longer seen as an optional extra; it was now a crucial political tool. "It can't exist under fundraising or under communications," he says. "It really needs to be a parallel operation, so you can manage competing interests. Fundraising always wants to send fundraising messages; field need the volunteers; communications needs different things. So how do you weave that into the narrative? It ended up being a department of nearly a hundred people in Chicago. On election day it was the biggest single effort. That was a big, big change from earlier campaigns. In 2004, campaigns weren't structured that way: the web operation was over there in the closet and they had tools and hardware; people didn't have the notion of it as a communications entity. That's changed."

He says politicians, their eyes glazing over, used to look at the twentysomethings running the new-media campaign and say, "I don't really know what they do." No longer. "That won't be the case ever again," he says. "In the traditional campaign structure, you had your outreach desks for different regions, different states, Latino-Americans and so on. We paired a new-media person with each one of those, so that it infected the whole operation. That's why it ended up being so many people."

Did it help that Obama is switched on technologically? "He carries a BlackBerry, but he doesn't write code," says Gensemer. "The biggest thing is that the guy was a community organiser 20 years ago, and he knew that you as my neighbour knocking on my door meant more than a paid organiser or even himself knocking on the door." Obama saw technology as the only way to transfer traditional community organising to a national level, with volunteers and donors signing up online and then being encouraged to go out to recruit further volunteers, hold meetings and house parties, spread the message.

Gensemer is convinced the approach would work in Britain, too - hence the new office. He has already worked on Jon Cruddas's bid in 2006-07 for the deputy leadership of the Labour party and Ken Livingstone's unsuccessful re-election bid last year for London mayor, managing to raise more money in eight weeks than the Labour party normally does in a year online. He is currently working on a campaign by the group Searchlight to keep the British National party below the threshold they need to win the EU seat they are targeting in the north of England, and in the process discovering how rightwing organisations are also using social networks to mobilise people. But his greatest hope is that Labour will recruit his company to run its online campaign in the next election.

"We're very eager, and I think it would work equally well here," he says. "I don't think they're going to raise a half a billion dollars, but it certainly would raise far more money than it costs and you could make a big difference. As our work with Jon Cruddas and Ken Livingstone shows, if you ask people to do things they will do it, in similar numbers that we see in the States."

He is critical of the way British parties are currently approaching new media. "They have focused too much on gimmicks and what they can sell to the press," he says. "Now Labour MPs are using Twitter, but the political capital that went into getting a couple of MPs to Twitter probably wasn't worth it. Prescott's petition on the bankers has 15,000 signatures, but what are they asking people to do? You could have asked for different things that would create a greater sense of engagement. None of this is a technology challenge; it's an organisational challenge, being willing to communicate with people."

He sees online organising and campaigning as a way in which parties can change and renew themselves, bringing new people into the party at a grassroots level. He thinks there will be resistance - party members may feel threatened by such newcomers - but that such renewal is essential. "If those local parties just exist because they've been there for 30 years, that's not enough," he says. "That's a social club, not a political party."

Gensemer has an unlikely background for a saviour of the Democrats and the possible supplier of a lifebelt for Labour. "I'm from a political family, but they were Republicans," he says. "I was speaking at my grandfather's funeral a few months ago. He was a Republican butcher turned state politician, and I said in my tribute to him that I am a vegetarian Democrat and I'm still welcome to speak here today."

He grew up in western Pennsylvania, studied politics at New York University and then started an MBA, which he abandoned because he was already involved in a company and thought he was learning about business "in real time". He spent his 20s financing dotcom start-ups, and with Blue State has managed to combine all three of his interests - politics, technology and entrepreneurship. He is serious about backing progressive politics, but he is also serious about "growing" a business that already has 85 staff, and he hopes the two objectives will go hand in hand. "But I don't want to do things we're not proud of doing," he says. They currently run sites for a variety of organisations including the Red Cross's "$30m in 30 days" web donation campaign, and a portal for the Oscar-nominated hurricane Katrina documentary Trouble the Water, encouraging users to get involved in activism.

The long slog of building the business lies ahead, but for the moment he can luxuriate in having helped Obama to win the White House. "Being at the inauguration in good seats with the staff and then getting everyone dressed up in tuxes and going to balls was very special," he says. And will his company henceforth be claiming they were the ones that won it? "We ran Barack Obama's campaign very proudly, but it was the buy-in from the organisation that allowed us to do what we did," says Gensemer. "It comes back to the fact that we elected a president who used to be a community organiser, and that's a very different mentality from other campaigns".