E-Mail This Article to a Friend WEB FUNDRAISING Support for gay-marriage candidates BY DEIRDRE FULTON

A three-month-old Web site that takes its cue from national grassroots Internet campaigns seems to be making waves in this year’s state legislative races — where it counts. This week, SupportEquality.org, the brainchild of local Internet whizzes Thomas Gerace and Carl Rosendorf, hit the $100,000 mark in its fundraising effort to get gay-marriage-friendly candidates into the state legislature. Donations funneled from the site certainly helped three pro-gay-marriage candidates win important primary races in Salem, Somerville, and Ashland two weeks ago.

"The Internet is a powerful tool for grassroots organizing," Gerace says. "We wanted to do our part to raise money, $50 at a time, to protect equal-marriage rights."

And they have, primarily through word of mouth. The site is easy to use: it identifies critical candidates and races, so all that potential donors have to do is scroll down a list of names and organizations and decide how much they want to give.

"It’s easy to trust their hard work to research which races and which representatives need help," says Randy Fasnacht, a 25-year-old Boston resident who has donated to three candidates and two political-action committees through the site. Because SupportEquality never processes the checks (which are instead deposited directly into candidates’ accounts), it does not have to register as a PAC, and donors’ names show up directly on the campaign-finance reports of the candidates they’ve supported.

In a state such as Massachusetts, where many legislative seats go uncontested, there’s always a possibility that donating to a local candidate will be a waste of money. By choosing races where donating will be most effective, SupportEquality can help hook up, say, a Boston donor (whose representative is staying in office) with a Worcester candidate (running against a gay-marriage foe).

Take Ed Augustus, a Worcester Democrat who is challenging a powerful Republican for an open seat in the state Senate. His opponent, Roberta I. Blute, has the backing of Governor Mitt Romney and the state Republican Party. Augustus opposes any constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriage, and joined the SupportEquality.org network just about a week ago. His campaign has already received about $1000 through the Web site. And it’s all from "people I’ve never met before, people outside my district," he points out. "I’ve got to get creative about ways to match that," Augustus says of his opponent’s cash. "And this is one of the ways to do that."

It’s also a creative way to connect several organizations and PACs — such as MassEquality and the Freedom To Marry PAC — that share a common goal. On the site, SupportEquality identifies those groups, along with a few others, as places to donate. Josh Friedes, treasurer of the Freedom To Marry PAC, calls the site "really brilliant" in its efforts to connect members of the civil-rights community from across the state.

"It’s a wonderful equalizer in political campaigns," he says. "Because what SupportEquality does is it allows lots of people to give money, thereby countering what has historically been — and what has historically been is big money, and big-money interests played a major role in funding campaigns."