A Year of Paws: How Voting Works & How to Win

What A Year of Paws is and who runs it

A Year of Paws is the pet photo contest and fundraiser organized by the Friends of the Animal Center Foundation, an Iowa City, Iowa nonprofit based on S. Riverside Drive in Iowa City. The foundation presents the program as its 7th annual pet photo contest, and it frames the whole event around a single purpose: the money raised by the event helps feed and care for the animals that pass through the shelter's doors, a population the page itself describes as running into the thousands. That fundraising framing matters for anyone approaching the ballot, because the contest is not a media poll or a readership award. It is a calendar fundraiser in which supporters lift individual pet photos up the standings, and the top photos earn spots in the foundation's published calendar.

The ballot itself sits on GoGo Photo Contest, a platform that hosts charity and community photo contests, at the address gogophotocontest.com/facfcalendarcontest. The page carries the platform's standard controls, including Participate, View Entries, Rules, Prizes and Sign In, so a supporter's experience on it will resemble other GoGo Photo Contest ballots. The foundation's name and its own masthead sit above those controls, which is the clearest sign that this is the organizer's official page rather than a third-party copy.

Facts at a glance

The dated record: editions and the 2026 window

Two edition years are confirmed for A Year of Paws: 2021 and 2026. The program is annual by the foundation's own description, since the 2026 page announces the 7th annual contest, but the years a reader can pin down from the public trail are those two. The foundation has not published a full year-by-year list of the intermediate contests, so reconstructing every past calendar from the ballot itself is not possible.

The 2026 cycle carries the only full dated window on the page. Entries were accepted from 8:00 AM Central Time on a Monday in early June 2026 through the final evening of Friday, July 2026. That is a two-month summer entry period, which fits a calendar product: a photo contest that closes at the end of July gives the foundation the back half of the year to assemble and print the calendar it sells into the following year. The contest page now carries the notice that the contest has ended, so no entry or vote cast today will count toward the 2026 edition.

One dated consequence is written directly into the prize text: the calendar cover winner of 2026 becomes the featured Pet of the Month in January of the 2027 calendar. That ties the summer 2026 vote to a January 2027 publication. Dates for any future cycle, including whether the foundation repeats the June-through-July pattern, are things a supporter should confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

How a supporter votes and enters today

The mechanic is a photo gallery vote. A supporter arrives at the foundation's contest page on GoGo Photo Contest, opens View Entries, and casts votes for the pet photos shown in the gallery. Each vote moves a photo's standing, and the pets with the most votes when the contest closes are the winners the foundation announces. The page's own summary line, the pet with the most votes becoming the cover pet for the 2027 calendar, makes the connection between votes and prizes explicit.

Entering is a separate action from voting. The Participate control is where an owner submits a pet photo, and the foundation describes the event as a fundraiser, so the entry step is the natural contribution point. The 2026 page is in an ended state, which means both controls currently lead nowhere: the gallery displays but the vote and entry actions are closed out. A supporter landing there today should read it as a results page, not a live ballot.

What the available page text does not carry is the fine print. No stated ceiling on how often a single supporter may cast a vote, no rule about returning day after day, and no eligibility terms for entrants appear in the text examined here, and GoGo Photo Contest ballots differ from contest to contest on exactly those points. Anyone planning a serious entry campaign should read the Rules and Prizes links on the live page before the cycle opens, and treat award-vote considerations as subject to whatever those rules say rather than to general assumptions.

Where this ballot sits among Iowa's public votes

Within this site's Iowa coverage, A Year of Paws is the odd one out, and that is its value to a reader comparing ballots. The other confirmed programs in the state are readership and business awards: the AHBA Parade of Homes in Ames, Cedar Rapids CommunityVotes, the Best of Cedar Rapids from The Gazette, Best of Des Moines from CITYVIEW, the Best of the Corridor from the Corridor Business Journal, and the Business Record's own Best of Des Moines. Every one of those is a best-of ballot where businesses compete for customers' votes.

A Year of Paws instead puts pets, not businesses, on the ballot, and its organizer is a foundation rather than a publisher or a builders association. The vote supports animal care in Iowa City, so a supporter's incentive is sentimental as much as competitive, and the fundraising structure means entry fees and donations carry the cause while votes decide the calendar placement. That also changes the shape of competition: a strong campaign usually runs on pet personality, shareable photos and local animal-lover communities rather than on a business's customer base. For vote-driving tactics that suit any of these Iowa ballots, the votes guide covers the fundamentals, and the service pages on buying votes explain what a purchased push involves before any cycle opens.