Why Our CSR Workspace Is Free, and How to Check It

What “free” covers

No fees. No licence fee, no setup fee and no employee limit. “Company access, employee participation and CSR Cockpit reporting are included.” “Free for every partner. No licence, no setup, no limit on people.”¹² We do not require a donation.

The programmes. Employees can take part in TEEI Language (one-to-one conversation practice with a learner), TEEI Mentorship (one-to-one guidance on career decisions and professional skills) and Skills Academy (workshops, classes, clinics and Expert Q&A).¹² Companies can also design a custom programme with us, which we review and approve before launch.²

The work around the programme. “You decide which opportunities to introduce and who to invite. TEEI manages participant access, onboarding, safeguarding, the sessions and the support.”¹ That includes identity verification and profile review before a volunteer becomes bookable, and the safeguarding essentials each volunteer completes.¹²

CSR Cockpit. The company workspace: employee invitations, programme management, a personal portal for every employee, and roles for managers, leads and viewers.² You can open a live demo with sample data without signing up.⁹

Reporting. No paywall.¹ The next section is about what that reporting contains, because a free report is only worth having if you can rely on it.

What the report contains, and why it can be checked

How verified conversation hours are measured

There are two ways to arrive at a volunteer hour. A logged hour is a claim: someone enters a number after the fact, or the booked length of an event is taken as the time given. An observed hour is a record: a system saw two people in the same place at the same time. Both can be honest. The trouble starts when a report presents the first as if it were the second, because a calendar cannot tell a session that happened from one that was booked and missed. We make no claim here about how any particular platform counts. We can only describe how we count.

For one-to-one sessions in TEEI Language and TEEI Mentorship, a verified hour works like this:²³¹⁰

• Overlap, not attendance. We count only the time both the employee and the learner were connected to the video session together. If one person waits alone for ten minutes, those minutes count for nobody.
• Not booked time. Booked duration is never added to the hours. A booked session that did not take place contributes nothing. Overlap is capped at the booked window plus a short grace period.
• A five-minute floor. A session only counts once the shared time reaches at least five minutes. A connection that dropped after two minutes is not a session.
• Awaiting evidence is kept apart. A session whose attendance has not yet been settled is left out of the hours and reported as its own number. The saved snapshot of 18 September 2026 records 7 sessions awaiting evidence.¹¹
• No rounding up. The public counter floors conversation-hour totals to one decimal place.³

Group conversation clubs are measured differently, as each participant’s observed time in the room, and are reported separately. They are never added to the one-to-one hours.³¹⁰

The full method is set out in How TEEI Counts a Verified Volunteer Hour.

What a report holds

CSR Cockpit reports identify each figure’s source and measurement basis:²

• Figures linked to their sources, with the relevant records and counting rules identified.
• A verified record per employee. Employee, programme and verified session time. Participant identities stay with TEEI.
• Sessions awaiting evidence, shown separately, never folded into the verified hours.

Who can see and change what

The workspace gives managers, leads and viewers the access their responsibilities require, and keeps an audit history that traces “changes to access, settings and reports, including who made them and when”.²

What it does not claim

Verified conversation hours are calculated by TEEI from its own session records. They are not certified by an external auditor. They measure time spent together, not learning or employment outcomes; hours are an output, not an outcome.³

Why we decided this

A licence fee filters companies by budget before anyone has seen whether their employees would be good conversation partners or mentors. For programmes whose limiting resource is skilled volunteer time, that is the wrong filter. Financial support is optional, and a partnership is a success without a donation.

And a free workspace with weak reporting would only move the cost to the company’s CSR team, who would spend it defending numbers. So the reporting is part of the free product, not an upgrade.

How voluntary support keeps the programmes running

The programmes have operating, platform, safeguarding and reporting costs, and companies do not pay for them. Voluntary support is how they keep running. Volunteers, including employees of partner companies, give the time the sessions are made of. Donors who choose to give money help cover the costs of running them.

Donations are optional and are not tied to any company’s participation. We do not turn them into a cost per hour, a price per participant or a value for the programmes. Our transparency page states that all public donations support TEEI programmes, and that TEEI does not publish a split of what it spends.¹²

What other platforms publish

We read the following five platform pages on 5 October 2026. The table quotes what each page says about pricing or contacting sales.

These contact routes do not tell you what any company would pay, and an unpublished price is not necessarily a high one. The services differ, and some of what these companies sell (payroll giving, grant disbursement) TEEI does not offer at all, so this is not a like-for-like price comparison. Five platforms is not the market. We report what we read, on one day.

TEEI runs its own education programmes and provides CSR Cockpit alongside them, so the session records a report is built from are ours to show you.²

What “free” does not mean

It does not mean free for TEEI. The programmes, platform, safeguarding, support and reporting all cost money to run.

It does not mean unlimited capacity. There is no limit on the number of employees, but specific sessions have their own capacity and access rules.

It does not mean no requirements. We review every company application before a workspace is set up.² Each employee who volunteers is identity-verified, completes the safeguarding essentials and is reviewed before becoming bookable.¹² And the company contributes the one thing that cannot be free: its employees’ time.¹

It does not mean a donation buys anything. If your company wants to give money as well, we welcome it. It will not unlock a feature, change your access or improve your report.

Evidence that the programmes are running

TEEI’s saved impact snapshot of 18 September 2026 records:¹¹

• 11,984 completed one-to-one sessions across TEEI Language and TEEI Mentorship, all time, and 9,070.4 hours of shared conversation time.
• 33 ended group sessions, with 99.7 participant hours, counted separately.
• 7 sessions awaiting attendance evidence.

The same snapshot also records:¹³

• 911 bookings marked completed since 10 July 2026, when our own booking platform began, and 594 in the 30 days before the reading.
• 187 volunteer profiles approved to receive session requests, and 81 volunteers who completed at least one session in the previous 90 days.
• 24 participant reports received about a session or another participant, most of them about attendance, and 20 reviewed with a recorded outcome.

Reports received and reviewed are published separately, with their definitions in the methodology. The counter is live and the snapshot is a fixed reading.³

If this fits your company

The workspace, the programmes and the reporting are free for every partner. Apply for your free CSR Cockpit, or open the live demo first and look at the screens with the questions your auditor would ask.

Verify this

• Live counter (JSON, no login): language.theeducationalequalityinstitute.org/api/lc/public-stats.
• Published impact snapshot, 18 September 2026: open the saved publication.
• How each figure is counted, including the awaiting-evidence rule: theeducationalequalityinstitute.org/about/impact/methodology/.
• How a verified volunteer hour is counted: How TEEI Counts a Verified Volunteer Hour.
• What the workspace contains and how hours are counted: CSR Cockpit.
• The workspace screens, with sample data: live demo.
• Verify TEEI’s identity and programme names: theeducationalequalityinstitute.org/verify/.
• What companies pay, in our own words: Corporate volunteering and CSR Cockpit.
• Platform pricing and sales pages: footnotes 4 to 8, all read on 5 October 2026 at 13:59 UTC. Pages change, so the table describes that day.