Mainstreaming Alternative Finance – The project was set up within the context of capitalizing on current trends in alternative finance and impact investing, especially crowdfunding, crowdinvesting and cross-border impact investments for SMEs, startups and enterprises in CEE. This project successfully set up the grounds to advance the ecosystem and enabling environment in Serbia, by conducting know-how transfer and resources transfer from the Visegrad countries: Slovakia, Poland, The Czech Republic and Hungary.

The project further focused on examples of best practices in Visegrad countries, researched the Serbian context, as well as provided more insights, data and incentives for SMEs, startups and enterprises to turn to alternative finance mechanisms as financing tool.

Within the precincts of the project we successfully executed the Crowdfunding academy for SMEs and startups which lasted four days from the 17^th of November to the 20^th of November 2020. We are glad to have hosted over 60 participants sourced from 18 teams.

Briefly, the teams were taken through a rigorous exercise where they handled the entire crowdfunding campaign value chain from basics of crowdfunding (types, terms and platforms) to strategy to the crowdfunding canvas to social media and ads and lastly to the legal frameworks and administration on which crowdfunding platforms are run among others. To that effect, we can comfortably say that our participants left the event having fully experienced the transfer of the V4 experience and also were well impacted and ready to go out there and seek alternative financing mechanisms to support their startups.

We cannot thank enough all the partners that made this event possible and an eventual success. They include; PEDAL Consulting s.r.o, Brodoto, RERA and Rocketside.