The entrepreneur with a heart of gold may now be a cliché, but when Chris Hughes announced his philanthropic plans this March, things suddenly got interesting. After all, this is the 26-year-old phenomenon who not only co-founded the superlative-defying social networking sensation Facebook, but also masterminded an online campaign that helped elevate Barack Obama from obscure Illinois senator to first black president in American history.

Hughes believes that although people have a latent desire to critically engage with the world around them, most meaningful ameliorative action happens when disaster strikes: Katrina, Haiti, the Boxing Day tsunami – moments of vivid tragedy impossible to ignore.

While online philanthropy conduits already exist – for example, Doctors Without Borders, and Napster founder and erstwhile Facebook president Sean Parker’s Causes – Jumo, Hughes’ latest project, engages earlier and goes deeper. Jumo, which will operate as a non-profit organisation, is all about the long-term. “Discovery and relationship building – that’s our core,” Hughes explains. “It’s a long-term process. It doesn’t happen on day one when you type in www.Jumo.com”.

Users will be able to identify a cause and engender relationships with relevant organisations before donating specific skills and/or, where appropriate, funds. And the platform will function differently for each user: a lawyer fluent in Spanish might be able to help Latin American governments rewrite building codes to better protect against earthquake damage; college students on vacation could find volunteer opportunities where they want them, when they want them; a US radiologist who wants to build on their past experience of working in South Africa, but can’t afford to take extended leave, could remotely review X-rays or perform other advisory duties during the weekend.

Over 60,000 people have connected with Jumo since March’s soft-launch of a bare bones site, and recruitment and fundraising activities are reportedly going to plan. And, unsurprisingly, Hughes knows exactly what the secret to success will be when everything goes live in the autumn.

“The reason Facebook works is that it is extremely easy for people to talk about who they are and for them to connect to the people they want to share and learn from,” he says. “In the case of Jumo we want to make it easy for people to talk about the causes and issues that are important to them and to make sure they get direct access to the organisations that are doing good work.”

Jeffrey Sachs, an influential economist, global poverty thought-leader and director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, has been advising Hughes on Jumo, and is confident it will be a game-changer: Philanthropy 2.0 if you will. “Just listening to [Hughes] think out loud about how to use social networking techniques – what people want to see, how they get engaged, how it works – is fascinating, because it really was watching a master at work,” says Sachs, a twice-listed figure in TIME’s 100 Most Influential People In The World. “He comes at this with a real commitment – a deep sincerity.”

Another informal advisor, Linda Rottenberg, CEO and co-founder of Endeavor, a non-profit organisation that identifies and supports entrepreneurs in emerging markets, agrees: “He’s the guy. There are so many great solutions in the non-profit world but it’s very fragmented. Chris is an anti-bureaucrat; he’s going to find ways to match the talent, the resources and the passion with the good ideas that are working. He’s the right guy with the right idea at the right time.”

The only child of middle-class parents (his father was a paper salesman, his mother a teacher), Hughes grew up in the conservative hinterland of Hickory, North Carolina. Without his parents’ knowledge he plotted his escape by applying to prep schools, eventually getting accepted on a financial aid package at the elite Phillips Academy in Massachusetts. He went on to study history and literature at Harvard where fate threw him together with an inscrutable, ever-so-slightly socially backward roommate by the name of Mark Zuckerberg.

They hit it off straight away, despite their obvious differences – Zuckerberg, a scruffy, flip-flop-wearing coding geek from a relatively affluent background and Hughes, an openly gay, sociable humanities student with a predilection for dapper couture (which earned him the nickname Prada).

Before long, Hughes was heavily involved in the social networking site that Zuckerberg was feverishly developing with fellow dorm-mate Dustin Moskovitz, his fierce intelligence and intuitive empathy for the platform’s potential users proving invaluable in the design process.

“Mark had, and still has, a lot of respect for [Hughes’s] judgement,” says David Kirkpatrick, a former senior editor at Fortune magazine and author of The Facebook Effect, the first definitive journalistic book on the company. “The thing about Chris that’s critical for Facebook’s early days and first couple of years is that he just had better common sense about how ordinary people would respond to this thing.

“He’s not afraid to be who he is. That’s significant, because Facebook’s ethos from the start has been about revealing who you really are – your personality, beliefs, and experiences – and not pretending to be something you’re not.”

As Facebook took off, initially across US colleges, Hughes’s congenial charm and precise articulation made him the ideal company spokesperson and customer service/public relations figurehead, particularly as Zuckerberg was notoriously media-averse at the time.

When Zuckerberg and Moskovitz relocated to Silicon Valley, Hughes stayed behind to complete his studies yet he still managed to devote hours to Facebook every day. After graduation he moved to California to join the revolution full time.

“We didn’t think of ourselves as part of a craze or a phenomenon or anything like that,” says Hughes of the site, which today has almost 500 million registered users and could surpass $1bn (€800m) in annualised revenue by the end of the year. “Instead we were just building a website that helped us keep up with our friends and what they were doing more easily than we’d been able to in the past. What’s particularly powerful about that concept is that it is something everybody wants to do, regardless of whether you’re a college student or retired.”

He retains a healthy stake in Facebook, and remains close to Zuckerberg, a bond strengthened by honesty and aloofness in the face of unimaginable success. “Chris never hesitatied to tell Mark what he thought,” adds Kirkpatrick. “He’s never been cowed or intimidated by him.

“He’s just not into the whole mythology of Facebook. For him it’s like ‘is it doing what it’s supposed to or not?’ He’s really very practical and unsentimental about it. That is one of the things Mark and Chris share, an attitude about ‘let’s not celebrate what we’ve got, let’s make it better’.”

The seeds for Hughes’ Facebook departure were sown in 2006. A buzz was starting to gather around Illinois senator Barack Obama to stand for president, and, deciding to make the most of it, his staff contacted Facebook to set up a profile. Politically clued-in, Hughes – who was president of his high school’s Young Democrats chapter and knocked on doors for Al Gore in 2000 – duly obliged. When Obama officially announced he was standing for office, Hughes wasted no time in contacting the campaign to see how he could help. In February 2007, he was hired on the spot as the third member of Obama’s new-media team.

“I came in relatively naïve, I think,” says Hughes. “But I also came in with a clear mission to help adapt a campaign to the realities of the social internet in 2007.”

And so began the most successful online campaign in history, at the heart of which was Hughes’s baby, www.MyBarackObama.com, a social networking platform that sought to empower people at grassroots level to take action, join local groups, host events and raise funds. Its impact was sensational, allowing the campaign team to remotely organise supporters in key states ahead of schedule, as well being able to reach areas that would otherwise have been well beyond logistical and financial boundaries.

“What Chris had was a really intelligent, nuanced, intuitive understanding of how networks work and how they turn into action,” says the Obama new-media team’s chief technological officer Michael Slaby, who is now chief technology strategist for TomorrowVentures and a board member of Jumo. “There’s a lot of accepted wisdom about how campaigns do things and he was very comfortable challenging those ideas and making the team think through how we should do things in a new way.”

By the time Obama took office in January 2009, www.MyBarackObama.com had spawned over two million profiles, 35,000 volunteer groups, 200,000 events, 400,000 blog posts and raised around $30m.

“Chris put himself in the shoes of the end-user,” says Joe Rospars, co-founder of marketing firm Blue State Digital, and head of the Obama campaign’s new-media team. “He had a passion for that individual person who was using our website or wanted to get involved in the campaign. He wanted to make sure we were providing them with everything they needed, and giving them as great an opportunity as possible to be a meaningful part of the campaign.”

Jumo would appear to be the logical next step for Hughes: a humanistic grand vision of optimism that entrusts that we can do the right thing if we’re given the right tools. The idea had been fomenting for years, but finally crystallised during an extensive post-electoral globetrot to some of the poorest, most deprived countries in the world.

There was no real eureka moment, just the matter-of-fact recognition that volunteers and professionals wanting to lend a hand in those areas, or indeed anywhere in the world, would benefit from better online connectivity. And that he was uniquely placed to make it happen.

“I personally felt disappointed that the internet and online technology hadn’t caught up with that social desire [to help], and hadn’t offered any opportunities for people to engage in a long-term and sustainable way,” says Hughes. “It’s about seeing obvious need for a more efficient information system and trying to build the pipes and infrastructure to improve the state of information flow.”