2025 Pet Calendar Contest: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who votes in the FACF pet calendar and why

The 2025 Pet Calendar Contest is a public-vote fundraiser run by Friends of the Animal Center Foundation, an Iowa City, Iowa organization that raises money for animal welfare work. Entries and voting both happen on the foundation's own website, and the ballot page sits at https://facf.org/events/2025-calendar-contest/. No outside contest company sits between the supporter and the foundation, which matters because every dollar the ballot collects goes straight to the organization itself.

Supporters fall into a natural pair of groups. Pet owners enter their animals into the calendar, paying the published entry fee, and then work their personal networks for votes. Behind them stand the friends, relatives, coworkers and local animal lovers who pay $1 per vote to back a pet they know. Because a wall calendar is a keepsake, motivation in this ballot is unusually personal: people are not voting for a business category they use, they are putting a familiar animal onto a printed page that will hang in kitchens for a whole year.

That mix of charity giving and friendly competition is what sets the tone for everything else on this page, from the entry rules to how a supporter should plan their votes.

The confirmed editions and the printed window

The confirmed history for this program covers the 2024 and 2025 editions, both carried on the foundation's event pages at facf.org. The entry page for the 2025 contest describes the program as the 5th annual pet calendar contest, which is the foundation's own count of how long the fundraiser has been running. That makes the calendar a recurring summer fixture for Iowa City animal lovers rather than a trial event.

The printed window is specific. The page states that entries and voting run from June 1 through July 31, and it attaches the 2024 year to that span, so the dated evidence for the cycle comes straight from the organizer's own event copy. Anyone planning an entry or a vote push should treat that printed span as the reference and re-read the page when the next edition opens, because the foundation has not yet printed dates for the edition after 2025.

The entry page publishes no category list for the calendar itself, so the lineup of months or groupings a winning pet can claim is not stated; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The foundation also does not print a per-supporter vote limit anywhere on the entry page, and it publishes no eligibility text beyond the basic rules about entering animals. Those silences are worth knowing before you promise a supporter a particular month or a particular format.

How a supporter actually votes on this ballot

Because the ballot is hosted by the charity itself, the mechanic is unusually simple. A pet owner opens the 2025 calendar contest page on facf.org, submits animals through the entry form, and pays the $10 entry fee. The basic rules printed there say an entrant may enter as many animals as they wish, so a household with several pets can put forward all of them rather than choosing a single favorite.

From there the rules hand off to the supporters. The page's own instruction is to ask friends and family to vote for your animals, at $1 per vote. That price point is the heart of the design: a vote is simultaneously a show of support for a pet and a small donation to Friends of the Animal Center Foundation. A supporter who wants to move an animal up the calendar simply votes again, at a dollar each time, unless the live page states a limit it does not currently print.

Practically, that means the strongest entries are the ones with the widest circles, not the deepest pockets of a few people. Twenty supporters each paying a few dollars spread the fundraiser further than a couple of large backers, and the foundation benefits either way. Everything a supporter needs, the entry form and the vote action, sits on the same facf.org event page from June 1 through the July 31 close the page prints.

Where this ballot sits among Iowa's vote-driven contests

Iowa runs a busy calendar of public-vote programs, and the pet calendar occupies a distinct corner of it. The state's largest ballots are publisher-run best-of contests: the Best of Cedar Rapids (The Gazette), the Best of Des Moines (CITYVIEW) and the Best of Des Moines (Business Record) each invite readers to name their preferred local businesses in field after field. The Cedar Rapids CommunityVotes and the Best of the Corridor work the same reader's-choice ground, while the AHBA Parade of Homes lets the public weigh in on builders' showcase homes in Ames.

The pet calendar differs from all of those in three ways. Its organizer is a charity rather than a publisher, so the money the ballot raises is itself the point. Its subject is a personal entry, an animal, rather than a business or a home. And its votes are priced at $1 each by the organizer's own rules, where most best-of ballots charge nothing to click. For an Iowa City pet owner, that means the competition is neighbors and their animals, not the statewide advertising muscle a business brings to a readership poll.

Building support in a paid-vote fundraiser

Because FACF prices votes at $1 each, the honest way to strengthen an entry is to widen the circle of paying supporters early in the June-to-July span. Share the direct facf.org entry link rather than making people search for it, name the pet and the cause in the request, and remind people that each dollar supports the foundation's animal work. The organizer's own rules tell entrants to ask friends and family, so a personal ask is exactly the intended behavior. Tactics suited to paid ballots like this are collected in our support guide, and anyone weighing outside vote help against the organizer's rules should start with the award-votes overview before spending anything on a charity contest.