2025 Howl-O-Walkoween People’s Choice Contest: How Voting Works & How to Win

A shelter costume ballot that is not a best-of list

Most Indiana ballots listed alongside this one ask voters to name a favorite business in a broad readers-choice field. The Howl-O-Walkoween People’s Choice Contest is built differently. It is a single-shelter fundraiser run by Fort Wayne Animal Care and Control, the municipal animal welfare agency based at 3020 Hillegas Rd, Fort Wayne, IN 46808, and the entries are not businesses at all. They are costume photos of pets.

The ballot is carried by GoGo Photo Contest, a photo contest platform, at the address gogophotocontest.com/howl2025. Supporters view a gallery of Howl-O-Ween themed pet pictures and vote for the one they like best, which makes the contest a straight popularity vote rather than a nomination round followed by a final ballot. The organizer bills the wider Howl-O-Walkoween program as an annual event, and the People’s Choice vote is the online companion to it.

The contrast matters for anyone comparing Indiana ballots. A program such as CommunityVotes Fort Wayne Best Of answers to a local partner and covers many categories across the city, while this contest answers to one agency and carries one subject. That shape is why the page reads differently from the best-of programmes listed later, and why the support tactics that suit a readers-choice ballot need adjusting for a pet photo gallery.

The dated record for the 2025 cycle

Confirmed editions of the People’s Choice Contest cover 2024 and 2025, and the organizer separately describes Howl-O-Walkoween as an annual event. The 2025 edition carries the only fully dated ballot. Voting began at 1:00 PM Eastern Time on Saturday, October 18, 2025. Entering closed earlier, at 10:00 PM Eastern Time on Tuesday, October 21, 2025, which gave late entrants only a short runway after the vote opened. The vote itself ended at noon, 12:00 PM Eastern Time, on Friday, October 24, 2025, and the winner was announced that same day at 4 PM on Facebook and other social media.

Prizes were attached to the 2025 result: the first place winner received two tickets to the 2026 Barks & Mews Gala, scheduled for Saturday, May 2, along with a $50 prize. The ballot page now carries a contest has ended notice, so the 2025 cycle is closed in every direction.

The page prints no category roster, no entry fee schedule and no rule on the number of times one person may back an entry, so the shape of the next gallery can only be confirmed on the live ballot each cycle. The organizer also leaves the 2026 opening date unstated, and no platform schedule for a future round exists. Anyone watching for the next edition is better served by the October timing of 2024 and 2025 read as a pattern rather than a promise, and by reading the terms shown when an entry is actually made.

How a supporter votes on this ballot today

The mechanic is a photo gallery vote. A supporter opens gogophotocontest.com/howl2025, chooses View Entries, and browses the costume pictures one by one. Each entry is a pet dressed for Howl-O-Walkoween, uploaded by its owner through the Participate option on the same page. To vote, the supporter selects the entry they favor and casts a vote for it before the posted close. The page also shows a Sign In option, so the platform supports supporter accounts, though the ballot does not print whether signing in changes the number of votes a person may cast.

Because the 2025 vote has closed, the live page now serves only to document that cycle rather than to collect votes. When a new edition appears, the same platform hosts it and the same three actions apply: browse the gallery, pick an entry, vote before the deadline. The one dated anchor from the last cycle is worth repeating in planning terms: voting ran from Saturday, October 18 to Friday, October 24, 2025, while entry closed on Tuesday, October 21, so supporters who discovered an entry late had less room to act than the voting window suggested.

The practical read for a future cycle is to check the ballot at the start of October, note the posted open and close times, and read the per-supporter rule straight off the page itself before arranging any support, since no published text for this contest carries that rule.

Where this ballot sits among Indiana’s public votes

Indiana carries a set of broad best-of programmes, and this contest shares the state with none of their mechanics. Best of Indiana runs a statewide readers-choice field. CommunityVotes Fort Wayne Best Of covers this contest’s own city with a nominate-then-vote structure across many business categories, which makes it the closest geographic neighbour but a very different ballot. The same CommunityVotes shape repeats in CommunityVotes Bloomington IN Best Of and CommunityVotes Evansville Best Of.

Two further neighbours round out the map: YourChoiceAwards South Bend Best Of in the north of the state, and Best of Elkhart County, which ties a readers-choice ballot to a local newspaper.

Against that field, the Howl-O-Walkoween People’s Choice Contest is the only one run by a municipal animal welfare agency, the only one whose entries are pet photos, and the only one whose prize list points at another shelter event, the 2026 Barks & Mews Gala. Its window is also narrower, a single October stretch, where the best-of programmes run on their own annual calendars. A vote earned here supports one shelter entry, not a business category, and the competition is a gallery of costume pictures rather than a roster of local shops.

Strengthening support before the close

Support on a GoGo Photo Contest ballot rests on reach and on timing. The gallery format rewards an owner who shares the entry link directly, posts the costume photo where their own network already looks, and reminds people as the posted close approaches, since the 2025 window ran only from Saturday, October 18 to Friday, October 24. A sign-in account on the platform may matter to the vote, and the ballot does not print a per-supporter rule, so the terms on the entry page are the thing to read first. Fort Wayne Animal Care and Control publishes no stated position on outside help for this ballot, which is why any paid support question is answered by the entry terms rather than by a rule the organizer has written down. The tactics that transfer cleanly to a photo gallery ballot, and the ones that do not, are laid out in our guide to getting more votes online.