The Animal Pad 2025 Calendar Contest: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Animal Pad calendar ballot is and who runs it

The Animal Pad 2025 Calendar Contest is a public-vote photo fundraiser staged by The Animal Pad, a California organization whose mailing address sits at 4620 Avocado Blvd in La Mesa. GoGo Photo Contest, a GGPC, LLC property, carries the ballot, and this edition lives at gogophotocontest.com/theanimalpad-2024. The page titles the event a fundraiser for The Animal Pad, and the financial statement printed beside the title is direct: "100% of proceeds from the sale of the calendar along with entry and voting fees benefit The Animal Pad."

Mechanically this is a community ballot, closer in spirit to the best-of contests common across California than to a judged art show. Supporters browse dog photo entries, vote for the dogs they want to see in print, and the outcome rests entirely on the count: the dog receiving the highest number of new votes earns the coveted cover photo for the 2025 calendar. The audience is the community around the organization, the dog owners who enter their pets and the friends, family and followers those owners mobilize while the window is open.

The table below gathers the identifying details a reader needs when quoting this program.

Edition years and the voting window on the calendar

The program's confirmed edition years run 2023, 2024 and 2025, all on the same platform and under the same organizer. The edition that fills the 2025 calendar collected votes in October 2024, with the page noting that calendars would be available for purchase starting October 2024. Visitors opening the ballot outside that window meet a Contest has ended banner in Pacific Time, which is the page's own signal that the current cycle is closed rather than live.

Dates for the next cycle are published by the organizer itself: the submission period starts at 8:00 AM Pacific Time on Monday, March 30, 2026 and ends at 9:00 PM Pacific Time on Monday, April 27, 2026. That places the coming cycle in spring, a different slot than the autumn window the 2024 edition used, so anyone planning an entry should work from the live dates rather than from habit.

What the organizer has not printed alongside the ballot is the set of entry categories, a cap on how often any supporter may vote, or the eligibility terms for submitting a dog; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

How a supporter votes on the ballot

To vote, a supporter goes to the GoGo Photo Contest page carrying this edition. The navigation offers Participate, View Entries, Rules and About, plus a Sign In link. A supporter opens View Entries, browses the dog photos, selects a favorite and follows the prompts to vote. Entry and voting fees are part of the design here; the fundraiser statement makes clear that those fees, together with calendar sales, benefit The Animal Pad. The ballot page prints no figure for how often a supporter may come back and vote again during the window, so a campaign that depends on repeat visits should read the Rules tab directly.

The prizes give the vote its weight. The top 13 entries win a professional photo session with Peanut and Bean Photo and an 8x10 fine art print, with sessions scheduled during the month of May at Del Mar Dog Beach. The page adds a condition worth reading twice: an owner unable to commit to a session during that month forfeits the prize. At the very top of the ballot, the dog receiving the highest number of new votes takes the coveted cover photo for the 2025 calendar. The platform also fixes accountability after close, stating that winners will be monitored by GoGo Photo Contest and are final.

Where this ballot sits among California contests

The Animal Pad ballot is not part of a media readers'-choice network; it is a charity's own fundraiser, and that difference from the neighbouring California pages on this site matters. Those siblings each answer to a different publisher and market: Best of Central Valley Business, Best of Marin, Best of Orange County, Best of San Diego & Best Restaurants, Best of Silicon Valley and Best of North State Community's Choice Awards.

Each of those is a readers'-choice ranking of local businesses in its own California market. The Animal Pad program shares the public-vote mechanic but nothing else: the subject is a single organization's calendar, the prize is a photo cover and a professional session rather than a business title, and the money raised flows back to the organizer. A reader comparing them should treat every one of them independently, each with a different publisher, dates and rules, rather than assuming shared mechanics carry across.

Strengthening support for an entry

Because the cover goes to the top vote count, support for an entry is a promotion task before anything else. The basics travel well for a photo fundraiser: a direct link to the entry, a clear ask, reminders before the window closes, and a supporter base that understands what a vote funds, a calendar cover and a professional session for the winning dogs. Nothing the organizer has written for this edition addresses outside voting help, paid or unpaid, so anyone considering paid support should read the Rules tab and how paid votes work in general before spending anything. Tactics that suit community ballots like this are collected in our votes guide, and the legal side of paid support is summarized at whether buying votes is legal. For award-style ballots more broadly, see buying award votes.