Abandoned Pet Rescue's "Pets and Their Favorite Places" 2027 Photo Calendar: How Voting Works & How to Win

A photo calendar ballot, not another readers poll

Most Florida ballots covered on this site ask readers to rank businesses, restaurants or services. This one asks a different question entirely: which pet photo deserves a month of a printed calendar. Abandoned Pet Rescue, the no-kill animal shelter at 1137 NE 9th Ave in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, runs the vote under the title Abandoned Pet Rescue's "Pets and Their Favorite Places" 2027 Photo Calendar. The shelter brands itself Fort Lauderdale's No-Kill Animal Shelter, and the calendar is its own fundraiser rather than a media readers' poll.

Balloting runs on GoGo Photo Contest, a platform built specifically for calendar contests, at gogophotocontest.com/aprcalendar. Voting here is a plain public ballot over pet photos: supporters open the entry board and cast votes for the animals they want featured. The vertical is pets, and the audience is the shelter's own supporter base in Fort Lauderdale and the wider Florida community.

Where the Best of Miami Readers' Poll sorts businesses into categories, this ballot ranks individual animals, and every photo submitted goes into the printed 2027 calendar no matter where it finishes. That softens the stakes compared with a best-of list, because a pet that never approaches the top of the board still appears in print. The table below pulls together what the APR calendar fixes in place.

The dated history behind the 2027 calendar vote

Two editions of this calendar vote are confirmed, 2025 and 2026, and that consecutive pair is what makes the program annual. The ballot now live carries the 2027 title, meaning the shelter is already printing toward the next calendar, and that 2027 page currently reads Contest has ended. The page also notes Eastern Time as its clock, so any deadline shown there is set to the shelter's own time zone.

The voting window falls in April, with the start month and the end month both the fourth month of the year. Abandoned Pet Rescue leaves the 2027 window's opening and closing dates unstated, so confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Round dates that the platform sets for its calendar contests are likewise not published for this market.

Two other gaps are worth naming plainly. No category roster appears on the ballot page, which fits a calendar format where pets compete as one field rather than in divisions. And beyond the eligibility line attached to the cover photo rule, the page prints no standalone eligibility text and no per-supporter vote limit. A supporter who needs those specifics before planning a push must read them from the live ballot during an open window, because the shelter does not reproduce them anywhere else on the page.

How a supporter takes part in the APR calendar vote

The literal sequence is short. A supporter opens the GoGo Photo Contest page for the APR calendar, browses the entry board through the View Entries control, and casts votes for the pet photos they want to see featured. The board is public and the tallies sit beside every entry, so standing is visible at a glance. In the most recent cycle the board showed adoptable animals labelled APR Adoptable competing alongside pets entered by their owners, and one entry listed as Squirt - APR Adoptable sat near the top with 2275 votes, with the entries around it clustered within a few hundred votes of that mark.

For owners, the submission side matters as much as the voting side. Every pet photo submitted is included in the printed 2027 Abandoned Pet Rescue calendar, win or lose. The submission rules carry two conditions worth knowing before entering: no people in photos, and an optional add-on that lets an owner reserve a special date for their pet inside the calendar.

The prize structure is fixed by the format. The twelve photos with the most votes that meet eligibility requirements are featured as the monthly cover photos, one for each month of the year. Finally, the calendar itself is distributed by pre-order: to receive a copy of the 2027 APR Calendar, the page directs supporters to pre-order it through the ballot site, which is how the shelter turns the vote into funds for its adoptable animals.

Where this ballot sits among Florida pet and best-of contests

Florida carries several pet ballots that look similar at first glance and behave very differently. The Animal Welfare League of Charlotte County Best in Show Photo Contest is the closest cousin, since it too lets a shelter's supporters vote on animal photos, but it crowns a best in show rather than filling twelve calendar months. The Dachshund Rescue South Florida Calendar Contest is the nearest structural match, a breed-specific rescue calendar built on the same print logic.

The SRQ Magazine Pets We Love Fan Favorites vote sits further away: a publication runs it, so the prize is editorial featuring rather than a printed product the shelter sells. Beyond the pet vertical, the state's best-of ballots, including the Best of Florida Awards and the Best of Orlando readers' choice poll, rank businesses by category and draw a commercial audience.

What makes the APR calendar distinct within that set is the combination of a single undivided field, a physical printed product every entrant appears in, and an organizer that is the shelter itself rather than a publisher or a chamber. A vote here supports adoptable animals directly, and the board's public tallies make the race visible to every supporter from the first day of the window.

Strengthening support for a favorite pet on this ballot

Because the APR board displays every tally publicly, the effective organic play is momentum a supporter can see. Share the pet's entry link directly rather than the ballot root, since a supporter who lands on the right animal is one press away from a vote, and ask the same people to return during the April window rather than relying on a single visit. The page prints no per-supporter vote limit, so the return habit is the variable a campaign controls. For a broader playbook that fits a public photo vote like this one, see our guide to getting more votes online, and for the general position on paid support read our award votes page before spending anything.