An American tech entrepreneur who survived a double lung transplant is the brains behind a new software tool which is being increasingly used by British political parties as they seek to harness the internet to win elections.
Just as the internet has transformed the way people work and shop and interact, it is now changing the way that politicians court the public for their votes.
Electoral software based on vast databases have slowly replacing the chaotic old system of strips of paper with names of voters typed out in long lines.
And the latest models are combining social media with electoral data to allow candidates to reach thousands of voters – and know whether they are genuine supporters – with more ease than ever before.
Los Angeles-based NationBuilder – set up by Jim Gilliam, whose unusual medical operation took place six years ago – is a technology start-up which hopes to become the Gmail of the election software world, offering its model to parties regardless of their political perspective.
The group’s software allows candidates to manage their website, email, text messaging, Facebook page, Twitter feed and voter data all from one central “community organising system”.
The Liberal Democrats used NationBuilder in their successful by-election in Eastleigh, following the Scottish National Party who used the product in the 2011 breakthrough Holyrood elections.
The Labour party is now rolling out the software for its MPs’ websites and for its volunteer management system.
Election experts in Britain expect this type of electioneering to become ever more common in a world where traditional party membership – with its coffee mornings and bring and buy sales – is dwindling.
Kirk Torrance, a former SNP social media adviser, told the FT:
Where NationBuilder is really good is that if you stick the electoral register into it you can see where people are geographically but also match them online. You can see Mrs McGrew in Glasgow and where she lives but also her Twitter and Facebook.
In the old days activists would knock on people’s doors and ask someone if they were a party supporter, and they might say yes to be polite, said Mr Torrance.
You would then have SNP people giving them lifts to the polling station despite the fact that they might actually be Labour supporters.
New software – such as NationBuilder – allows politicians to have “thousands of relationships” with constituents without the problems of face-to-face meetings and having to remember voters’ names and their last conversation. “Politicians don’t have the bandwidth to remember everything and everyone,” says Mr Torrance.
Not long ago staff might use multiple different software platforms for different tasks, whether handling fundraising or managing volunteers. NationBuilder puts all of these in one place.
Mr Gilliam told FT Westminster in an interview that the company was his attempt to “democratise democracy” in the same way that popular culture, music and film had been by the internet.
He was previously an independent movie-maker, crowd-sourcing funding for two Iraq films from thousands of small donors.
Soon after he was applying the lessons learned there to the political world, trialing his new community building technology in a congressional race in New York.
NationBuilder, he believes, can vastly change the potential for a political candidate to manage relationships. He said:
An average person manages maybe 300 relationships without extra tools. With this you can manage up to 3,000 or even 6,000 people and keep up.
In effect the tools allow campaigners to filter potential voters, flagging up those who want to become more engaged.
There is still one knotty problem for advocates of computer-generated campaigning: the older voters, who are more likely to vote, may not be regular users of social media. There are still plenty of activists and MPs who distrust new-fangled campaigning methods and prefer face-to-face meetings.
But Mark Pack, a Lib Dem activist and director of Blue Rubicon, a consultancy, says there is a “huge correlation” between those who vote and those who are online.
Grassroots campaigning is moving increasingly into the web, it started with basic things like mass email campaigns using things like MailChimp and Campaign Monitor. We’re now moving to a new level, services like NationBuilder go one step further because they don’t just have email but also a range of online campaign tools and website services.
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