What does NOT count

Here is what colift won’t credit as volunteer hours, and why.

Self-help and personal-benefit tasks

Updating your own resume. Building your LinkedIn. Tracking your own habits. Setting personal goals. These benefit the volunteer, not the community. SNAP volunteer/community service has to be service to others.

Paid surveys or any compensated participation

Paid research participation is income. That fails the “unpaid work” requirement under 7 CFR §273.24(a)(2)(iii), and can affect SNAP eligibility on its own. Cash, gift cards, raffle entries, and money-equivalents all count as compensation.

Social media posting and personal advocacy

Tweets, posts, and shares on your own accounts are personal action. The work product doesn’t reach the organization. There’s no deliverable colift can use.

Education and training you receive

Attending a workshop, completing a course, watching a training video. These belong to the SNAP Employment & Training (E&T) pathway, which is a separate state contract and a separate model. colift does not currently operate in the E&T lane.

Lobbying and partisan political work

Advocating for specific legislation or candidates. A 501(c)(3) cannot make lobbying a substantial part of its activities (IRC §501(c)(3); §501(h) limits). Civic education and nonpartisan voter engagement are fine. Lobbying and campaigning are not.

Passive time

Starting a timer, leaving a tab open, letting the clock run while you do something else. Time without engagement is not work, and the platform’s idle detection won’t credit it.

Padded content

We don’t credit reading time engineered to inflate the clock, repeated identical submissions, or content sized to extend a task. Credited hours equal actual measured engagement, capped per task.

Self-disclosure without a real research use

General “tell us about yourself” prompts with no named deliverable. These fail the survey-task gates. (See Surveys & community-research contributions.)

Deliberately unverifiable claims

Tasks designed so the claim can’t be checked. A task we can’t verify is a work-hours certification we can’t sign for in good faith.

Commercial labor in disguise

Labeling data for a for-profit startup. Doing tasks for a commercial vendor. Not charitable service to a qualifying organization.

If you want to propose a task type, every idea gets checked against this list and against the internal qualification test. Not legal advice.