Biography

Zoran Rajn is the founder and president of the Center for Social Innovation and Sustainable Development (CEDIOR) and CEO of the International Crowdfunding Center (ICFC). He has more than 10 years of experience with crowdfunding, especially with the issues of crowdfunding regulation, connecting crowdfunding with government and financial institutions, regionalization of crowdfunding, inclusion of crowdfunding in the education system etc. He is the author of the first Croatian lifelong learning program on crowdfunding and the first crowdfunding accelerator program in Central and Southeastern Europe for social impact organizations. He is also a mentor on crowdfunding for several entrepreneurial public sector support institutions in Croatia and the surrounding countries. He has started an education project “Crowdfunding in Schools” for high school and college students for which he got the patronage of Croatian Ministry of Science and Education and other institutions at the state and local level. He is the initiator of the educational project Train the Trainers Crowdfunding Program, through which he transfers knowledge about crowdfunding to young experts of various profiles in less developed countries, who then transfer this knowledge to vulnerable social groups in their communities. He developed an innovative project financing program that integrates crowdfunding and budget funds. The program was praised by the European Commission and PwC Luxembourg and included in the publication “Unlocking the crowdfunding potential for the European Structural and Investment Funds” as an example of good practice, and interest in it was shown by France, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, Spain and Finland. He designed two economic diplomacy projects – Croatia Crowdfunding Exhibition and Crowdfunding Exchange Programme. He participated in the founding of four crowdfunding platforms – Bona Fides Invest, Croinvest.eu, Croenergy.eu and the Register of Humanitarian Aid of the Republic of Croatia. During 2023, he will also present a software solution based on artificial intelligence for application in the crowdfunding industry. So far, he has advised more than a hundred companies, NGOs and public sector institutions in preparing and conducting their crowdfunding campaigns and mentored more than 10 000 participants through crowdfunding workshops. The campaigns that he mentors must meet Cedior’s 4P principle of eligibility (Pater, people, planet, profit), i.e. they must be in accordance with God’s commandments, they must create good for society and the environment or at least they must not harm them, and they must be financially sustainable in the long term so investors get what was promised in the campaign. All the campaigns he has advised so far have fulfilled their promises to investors. For dealing with crowdfunding, he is the winner of the prize from Faculty of Law in Zagreb for the first legal interpretation of crowdfunding in Croatia and Quality Certificate from the consortium of organisations united around the EU project CrowdStream, on which is the leading partner Agency for European Integration and Economic Development (AEI) whose founder is the Austrian Ministry of Finance. He participates in Cambridge University annual surveys on crowdfunding in Central and Southeastern Europe. He is involved in The Economy of Francesco (EoF), an international event sponsored by Pope Francis involving scientists, social innovators and social entrepreneurs up to the age of 35 from 120 countries to find solutions to create a more fair, inclusive and sustainable world. Except of crowdfunding, his area of interest is other innovative models of project financing, social innovation and social entrepreneurship.