Crowdfunding or high-tech panhandling?

Nick Pantaleone, 28, and Anthony Ruffo, 27, of King of Prussia, have known for eight years that they wanted to get married and have a child. Last year, marriage was finally, legally possible. Now, they're ready to adopt; all they need is $30,000.

Like a growing number of millennials in need, they looked to crowdfunding.

For Ruffo, it felt like their only option.

"Is there ever going to be a time that we'll be able to save that money?" he said. "It's a race we'll never be able to catch up to."

Such campaigns are a long way from the origins of crowdfunding, a concept that first gained traction as a means to realize pie-in-the-sky creative projects and generate income in advance of business launches.

Now, though, many are seeing crowdfunding as something else: a socially acceptable twist on panhandling, useful for financing small luxuries, covering unexpected personal expenses, recovering from tragedies, or just making ends meet in a pinch.

Recent local campaigns on the site GoFundMe included any number of pet surgeries, school trips, and pleas for tuition assistance. Two different transgender men hoped to raise funds for mastectomies; conversely, an area Internet pornographer was raising $5,000 for breast augmentation.

On IndieGoGo, one woman sought $15,000 to redo her kitchen (rewards included, for a donation of $1,200, the chance to select her backsplash). It was, she admitted, a long-shot alternative to the old-fashioned standby of waiting and saving.

Such efforts have had mixed success. They've also, on occasion, sparked outrage (see: the Baltimore woman who requested donations after accidentally taking a $362 Uber ride, making her temporarily Internet infamous).

"I think we're in the midst of negotiating [what's acceptable], as people keep trying new things to crowdfund, and also keep getting pushback," said Dustin Kidd, a Temple University sociologist who studies popular culture. "It's an ongoing negotiation of what the new normal will be."

Lora Burns, 30, was keenly aware of that when she created a campaign to raise $547, the cost of a plane ticket from Maine, where she's lived for two years, to Philadelphia, where her favorite bar, Nodding Head, was shutting down.

She was embarrassed to post the request, but wanted to be there for the pub's final night badly enough that she was willing to risk potential backlash.

"I thought, if my friends wanted to see me, then they would help out. And they did," she said. "It's OK to admit that you need a little help sometimes."

After all, Kidd pointed out, people have been crowdfunding personal expenses for generations.

"It's not all that different from a wedding registry," he said, "where you get people to fund the start of your new life."

That people are turning to such sites with growing frequency, he said, may have less to do with a sense of entitlement than with postrecession economic realities.

"It highlights just how poor everyone feels now," he said. "Incomes are not going up, and yet the expectation of what you need to have a normal lifestyle has gone up."

Liz Regnitz, 25, of Manayunk, has been feeling the pain. She moved from Georgia in July and got a job as a dispatcher at Revolution Recovery, a recycling services company, but was caught off guard by the cost of moving and of living in Philadelphia. Then, a week of unforeseen expenses - dental work, car repairs, and medical care for her dog - put her $1,100 in the hole.

All of that went on her credit card, but she wanted to avoid paying the card's 17 percent interest rate. So, she looked to GoFundMe.

"If I didn't make the money off of this, no harm, no foul. There's nothing that could be hurt by doing this," said Regnitz, who raised $850. "I figured, 'Why not try it?' "

"Why not?" is a common refrain among fund-seekers - and an apt one, given that it takes just minutes to create an online campaign.

But there can be a social cost, Kidd said.

"It's shocking to me how casually people will ask for things, like, 'Help me pay off my school loans,' " he said. "I don't think it's working out well for most of them. They're alienating their friends who are in the same position financially."

Jessica Gutierrez, 20, was willing to risk that this fall. The Widener nursing student, who was looking to raise $7,000 on GoFundMe for tuition for her junior year, thought that she didn't have many other options.

Her financial-aid package, sufficient while her father was unemployed, was obliterated once he got a job. And after borrowing to pay for her sophomore year, she was denied another loan. She has since gotten a part-time job and acknowledges that she could move back in with her parents to save money.

"It's kind of hard when you're in your junior year and you're backed against a wall," said Gutierrez. She's the first in her family to attend college, and her parents are, themselves, only just getting by; their electricity was recently shut off for nonpayment.

"Everyone has a different financial story, and a lot of people struggle in different ways just to maintain their status here as a student. I know people who have trouble paying the tuition and haven't come back."

The success of a crowdfunding campaign tends to hinge on revealing that personal story.

"What many people look for with a charity is touching a specific person and watching them fulfill their goal," Ruffo said. "It's nice to see where your donation is going."

So, Pantaleone and Ruffo, both nurses, explained in their adoption-fund campaign that both came from modest, single-parent households. Both are the first in their families to finish college and go on to graduate school, and took out loans to do so.

Pantaleone said, "We thought, maybe, through crowdfunding, we could get a little bit of an advantage to catch up to where other people are fortunate enough to be."

Cjloe Vinoya, 24, recently ran a campaign for grocery money for a friend who had had a string of bad luck. The campaign brought in more than double the $100 she requested. But she admitted she'd never seek funding for herself; asking for money for yourself, she said, when you have a job and a place to live just didn't feel right.

"When you do your own campaign, it looks like you're greedy," Vinoya said, "when everyone needs money, everyone needs some financial help."

Burns, who made her pilgrimage to Nodding Head in October, doesn't regret her crowdfunding success.

But, while the etiquette of crowdfunding is evolving, she has set her own limits. She's doing her best to pay it forward and has resolved that any future campaigns would be for charity, not for her own benefit.

"I think I used my one chance," she said. "It was really special, but it was definitely a onetime thing."

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@samanthamelamed