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

What the MCAAC Pet Calendar Photo Contest is and who runs it

The Maclean-Cameron Animal Adoption Center runs the 2025 MCAAC Pet Calendar Photo Contest, a photo ballot where supporters enter a cat or a dog and the highest vote totals earn places in the printed 2026 MCAAC Pet Calendar. The organization is an animal adoption center based in Great Falls, Montana, and the calendar contest doubles as its fundraiser, because votes are cast through payment rather than through a free click.

Hosting sits on GoGo Photo Contest, the service behind charity and nonprofit photo ballots at gogophotocontest.com. The ballot's own address is gogophotocontest.com/mcaacpetcontest, and that page carries the entry gallery, the Participate link, the contest rules, the prizes list and a sign-in area for returning supporters. Twelve winners receive one of the calendar prizes, and the ballot describes the top result as the cover, with month features for the rest.

For a supporter deciding whether to take part, the practical shape is simple. An owner enters a pet photo during the entry period, then rallies people to the gallery, where each vote is paid. Because the organizer is a single adoption center rather than a media publisher, the ballot is smaller and more local in feel than the big readers-choice polls that also run across Montana, and its rules live on the contest page rather than in a newspaper's fine print. The table below collects the fixed details.

The dated history, editions and the 2025 window

Two editions are confirmed for this ballot, 2025 and 2026, both tied to the same GoGo Photo Contest address. The center's own event listing describes the program as its "second annual Pet Calendar Photo Contest", and that same listing prints October 2022 start and end dates, so the calendar contest has an October history that stretches back before the editions this page confirms directly. Nothing published pins a first-run year beyond that listing.

The 2025 edition carries the only fully dated close. Voting ended at 8:00 PM Mountain Time on Friday, October 31, 2025, and the deadline to enter was set at the same hour on the same day, so entry and voting shut together at the end of the month. The month-level window for 2025 was therefore the whole of October, but an exact opening day was never printed on the ballot page, and the same holds for the 2026 edition's open and close days.

That gap matters more for this ballot than for most, because the entry deadline and the voting close landed together in 2025 and there is no published round structure to lean on. The center also does not print an eligibility rule for entrants or a schedule of platform rounds on the page. Anyone planning around the next edition should treat the ballot page as the only source that counts and confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

How a supporter votes on this ballot today

The mechanic is printed on the ballot itself, in the how-to-vote instructions. A supporter clicks "View Entries", selects the cat or dog they wish to vote for, enters their payment information and clicks "Submit". Those four steps are the whole path, and they are unusual in one respect: this is a donation ballot, where the printed rule sets votes at one vote per dollar. There is no free daily click and no login-gated free tier described anywhere on the page.

That structure changes how a pet owner should think about the gallery. Every vote is a small donation to the Maclean-Cameron Animal Adoption Center, so the vote total on an entry is also a fundraising total, and supporters who already intended to give can direct their giving at a specific animal. The gallery at gogophotocontest.com/mcaacpetcontest shows each entry's standing, which lets a campaign judge where it sits before the close at 8:00 PM Mountain Time.

The center has not printed a rule about how many votes a single person may buy in one session, and it has not published a list of ballot categories either, because the entries are simply cats and dogs competing for the twelve calendar spots. Payment details are entered on the platform itself, and GoGo Photo Contest handles the transaction, so the ballot page is the place where every action in the sequence actually happens rather than an off-site form.

How this ballot sits beside its Montana neighbours

Montana's public-vote scene is dominated by readers-choice and best-of polls run by media publishers, and this program is the outlier among them. The sibling ballots on this site are KMMS Best Dog, a radio station pet poll; Best of Whitefish; the Billings Gazette's Best of Billings; the Bozeman Daily Chronicle's Gallatin's Greatest; Bozeman Magazine's Bozeman's Choice; and Community Votes Billings. Every one of those is run by a publisher or a promotions network, while this one is run by an adoption center and hosted on GoGo Photo Contest.

Three differences follow. First, geography: the MCAAC ballot is anchored to Great Falls and its animal adoption center, while the siblings cover Whitefish, Billings, Bozeman and a statewide radio audience. Second, subject: this program alone produces a physical calendar, with a cover and twelve monthly features, so winning has a printed artifact attached to it. Third, the paid mechanic, since the readers-choice polls generally run on free daily voting rather than dollar-per-vote donations.

For a Great Falls pet owner, the practical overlap is small. A supporter who votes in the KMMS Best Dog poll at KMMS Best Dog will find a different rhythm here, because entry and voting closed together on October 31, 2025 and the category list is simply cats and dogs. Readers who want the wider Montana picture can compare it with Best of Whitefish or Community Votes Billings, both of which name towns instead of pets.

Strengthening support for an entry in this calendar contest

Because votes here are paid donations, the honest way to strengthen an entry is to reach people who would give to the adoption center anyway and point them at your pet's entry page. The gallery link, the pet's photo and the one-vote-per-dollar framing do most of the work: a supporter lands on the ballot, clicks "View Entries", finds the animal and completes payment in a single sitting. Share that path directly rather than a generic appeal, since the center's own instructions are the shortest route to a cast vote.

Timing matters too. The 2025 round gave the whole of October and closed entry and voting together at 8:00 PM Mountain Time on October 31, so a campaign that waits for the final week compresses into a few paid days. Spreading appeals across the month reaches more donors and smooths the total. For a rundown of outreach methods that work on paid photo ballots, see our guide to getting more votes online, and treat anything involving automated voting as off limits until the center's rules say otherwise.