Christmas Pet Photo Contest (kool965): How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Kool 96.5 Christmas Pet Photo Contest is and who runs it

The Christmas Pet Photo Contest is a seasonal listener ballot run by KLIX-FM, the Idaho radio station behind the Kool 96.5 brand at kool965.com. Unlike many public votes that sit on a third-party balloting service, this one answers to a single publisher throughout, so the contest page, the entry form and the winners announcements all come from the same source.

The program belongs to the pet photo vertical. Listeners submit pictures of their animals, station staff choose the finalists from the entries, and the public then votes on the posted finalist photos to decide the winners. The 2025 edition carried the Valley View Veterinary Clinic name in its title, making the clinic the named sponsor of that round, and the station's own news sections around the contest include Magic Valley News and Twin Falls News alongside its general Idaho coverage.

The station's site also promotes adjacent giveaways, including a Hall Pass Cash prize of $500 and a Save Money - Seize The Deal promotion, so a visitor landing on kool965.com will find the pet ballot sitting among several concurrent station contests. The facts below are the fixed points a supporter needs.

The dated history of the Christmas Pet Photo Contest

The program's confirmed editions fall in 2020, 2023 and 2025, which is what marks it as an annual December event rather than a single promotion. Each round is anchored to the weeks around Christmas.

The 2025 round is the best documented. Entries closed at 11:59 p.m. MST on December 21, 2025, with photos submitted through the Submit Media tool on the radio station app. Finalists were then chosen by station staff and posted on the website for public voting beginning on December 22, 2025, through midnight on the 28th. Once that week of voting was over, the station published a winners article under the title Valley View Veterinary Clinic 2025 Christmas Pet Photo Winners, noting that two dogs and a pig finished in the top three that year.

No per-supporter vote limit, one-vote-per-day rule or eligibility terms appear on the ballot page; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The station has also not published a prize list for the 2025 pet round, so the reward for the winning photo goes unnamed on the ballot itself.

How a supporter votes in the Christmas Pet Photo Contest today

The mechanic has two phases. The first is entry: a listener opens the radio station app, uses the Submit Media tool to upload a pet photo, and gets it in before the stated deadline, which in 2025 was 11:59 p.m. MST on December 21. Entry is the only phase a pet owner controls directly, because the second phase depends on the station's own judgment call.

That second phase is the public vote. Station staff pick the finalists from the submitted photos and post them on the contest page at kool965.com, and the audience then votes on those posted pictures. In 2025 the vote ran from December 22 through midnight on the 28th, a seven-day window that ended at midnight rather than at an afternoon hour, so a supporter backing a finalist had evenings as well as daytime to act.

Because the ballot lives entirely on the station's web home, everything happens in one place: the same site carries the entry instructions, the finalist photos, the vote form and the winners announcement afterward. There is no separate balloting platform to learn, no account step described on the page, and no round structure beyond the single entry-then-vote sequence the 2025 rules text lays out.

How this ballot sits beside its Idaho neighbours

Idaho carries a busy calendar of public-vote programs, and the Christmas Pet Photo Contest is the seasonal pet entry among them. Its closest neighbour in subject matter is the All About the Animals Coalition Pet Photo Calendar Contest, which also asks the public to support animal photos, though it feeds a calendar rather than a Christmas-week winners post.

The rest of the state's lineup is best-of voting. The Best of Magic Valley Readers' Choice ballot covers the station's own region, while the Best of Canyon County and Best of Greater Idaho Falls programs serve their own local business scenes, and the Best of North Idaho ballot covers the panhandle through the Coeur d'Alene Press. The Boise Area Parade of Homes rounds out the set with a housing event rather than a readers' poll.

What separates the Kool 96.5 pet ballot from all of these is its host and its rhythm. It runs on the station's web home instead of a dedicated balloting platform, it compresses its whole public phase into a single December week, and its finalists are chosen by station staff before the audience ever sees the ballot, whereas a best-of contest usually opens its list to nominations from the floor.

Strengthening support for a finalist photo in this ballot

Support in this program is built around one short, dated window, so timing matters more than volume. A finalist's supporters know the vote runs from December 22 through midnight on the 28th in the 2025 shape, which means the practical play is to line up friends, family and coworkers before the window opens and ask each of them to vote early in the week rather than scrambling on the final night.

The station's ballot page carries no statement about outside help, paid or otherwise, so the only published rules a supporter can lean on are the entry steps and the voting window itself. Anything beyond the free public vote sits in unstated territory, and the station retains the final say over its own contest. For a grounded look at what support campaigns involve on ballots like this one, read how to get more votes online, and weigh any paid option against the station's published terms before committing money to it.