In May of last year, Brooklyn-based artist Molly Surno raised over $4,000 for an art project she was doing called "Cinema 16" — which set short, silent films to live music — on the online crowd-funding site Kickstarter. Seven months later, she found herself an employee of the site, hired her to do outreach to other creative people looking for project funding.

Surno, who is an MFA student in visual arts at Columbia School of the Arts when she is not at the Kickstarter offices on the Lower East Side, describes herself as an idea scout. "The intention behind my job was augmenting the dialogue in the art community over Kickstarter," she explained. She works with artists, musicians, film directors, and writers, helping them figure out when and how to sell their ideas on the site — both encouraging them to sign up and educating them on making their pitches better.

This sort of outreach helps Kickstarter — which curates the projects that are publicly displayed on the site — separate the viable propositions from the thin, insubstantial ideas. After projects have made it through the original curation process by the Kickstarter team, they have to be fully funded before they become "successful." Artists don't get funding, and donors don't pay a dime, unless 100 percent of the stated budget is promised, which ensures that artists can finish their projects. In return for donations, project creators make a list of prizes for each level of funding. Coming up with rewards that get potential donors excited and that can also be funded for a reasonable price is no small task.

These types of rewards are the things that Surno helps artists devise. While the Kickstarter Web site is filled with success stories, there are plenty of projects that fail — many not because they lack creativity, but because their promotional videos and rewards are not enticing enough.

Surno herself had trouble with her rewards when she funded "Cinema 16" through Kickstarter. It was ultimately successful, and the films were shown at MoMA PS1 and the Kitchen, but she thinks it could have been better if she knew what she knows now. "I could have been more creative with the rewards," she said. "I could have done a better video."

What does make a good Kickstarter reward? According to Surno, many make the mistake of offering rewards like prints of increasing size for an increasing donation, but many great rewards correlate to experiences instead of material objects. She gave the example of a project which offered a special tour of the Studio Museum of Harlem for the highest level of donors. "For people who are fans, what better way is there to get a reward than to engage the artist directly?" Unique rewards are often what drives donors, and connects them to a project and an artist in a way they wouldn't be if they were simply consumers of the end product.

As for what's next for Kickstarter, Surno gives a true artist's answer. She says she would like to see more conceptual work on the site. As she puts it, "I would like to see people using the medium of Kickstarter itself as an art project ... using the site more and more creatively."