The Spayed Club Calendar Contest: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Spayed Club Calendar Contest is and who runs it

Unlike the reader ballots run by Pennsylvania magazines, The Spayed Club Calendar Contest is a charity photo fundraiser. The organizer is The Spayed Club Veterinary Clinic, a non-profit that describes its work as solving dog and cat overpopulation, pushing back against devastating euthanasia statistics, and providing low-cost vet care to animals in the Philadelphia area and beyond. The clinic operates from 930 MacDade Blvd in Collingdale, Pennsylvania.

The vote itself runs on GoGo Photo Contest, whose own description says it builds custom donate-to-vote photo contests in which one dollar equals one vote. The ballot lives at gogophotocontest.com/thespayedclub, and the page frames the whole exercise as a fundraiser for the clinic. For the 2026 calendar the clinic announced the contest in partnership with Carol Arscott Photography, and the page states that The Spayed Club will receive all proceeds from the sale of the calendar and the photo contest.

So the shape of the program is different from a best-of poll in three ways at once: the entrants are pets rather than businesses, the currency is donated dollars rather than free clicks, and the output is a printed calendar rather than a ranked list. The table underneath pulls those fixed facts together.

The dated record for this ballot

Two editions are on firm ground: 2025 and 2026. The 2026 page is the more detailed of the two, because it carries the rules text for the cycle that produced the calendar now being sold. Those rules state the 2025 voting period precisely: it started at 8:00 AM Eastern Time on Thursday, May 8, 2025 and ended at 8:30 PM Eastern Time on Thursday, May 29, 2025. That is a three-week window, opening and closing on Thursdays, with the close falling in the evening so that last-day supporters have the full working day.

The pairing of years is worth reading carefully. The vote that ran in May 2025 filled the 2026 calendar, which is why a page headed "2026 CALENDAR" carries 2025 dates in its rules. Each edition therefore feeds the following year's printed product, and a supporter voting in the current window is competing for the next year's pages.

What the ballot page does not print is just as useful to know. There is no day-level open and close for the 2026 edition, no roster of entry categories, and no stated ceiling on how often a single person may donate or vote; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The platform's own contest listing for this market is likewise silent on round dates. A supporter planning a push should treat the live page, not last year's rules, as the authority on the current window.

How a supporter votes today

The mechanic is a donation, not a click. GoGo Photo Contest describes its format as custom donate-to-vote photo contests where one dollar equals one vote, and this ballot follows it: a supporter finds a pet photo, chooses an amount, and the donation converts into votes credited to that entry. The clinic receives the money, which the page says comes to it as all proceeds from the contest and the calendar sale.

The rules add a second route onto the calendar. Alongside the ranked photo contest, supporters can reserve a special spot in the calendar for a pet, honoring a gotcha-day or birthday by picking a favorite photo, a month and a day. That path suits someone who wants a guaranteed date page for their own animal rather than a competition against every other entry.

Practically, a supporter's session looks like this: open the ballot, browse the entries, open the photo worth backing, complete the donation, and watch the entry's total move. Because the 2025 window closed at 8:30 PM Eastern Time on a Thursday, timing mattered on the final day, and the same will hold in whatever hours the current edition sets. Anyone supporting a pet across the full window should expect to return more than once, since standings shift as other supporters donate to rival photos.

How this ballot sits beside its Pennsylvania neighbours

Pennsylvania's public-vote page on this site is dominated by media reader polls, and the contrast with this fundraiser is sharp. Best of Philly (Philadelphia Magazine) and Best of the 'Burgh rank businesses in their metros on free clicks. Best of Berks (Berks County Living Magazine) and Best of the Lehigh Valley (Lehigh Valley Style) do the same for Reading and Allentown area readers, while the Bucks County & Chester County Readers' Choice ballot and Erie Reader Best of Erie cover their own corners of the state.

Every one of those is a marketing exercise: the publisher sells advertising on the back of the ranking, entrants are businesses, and a vote costs nothing. The Spayed Club Calendar Contest inverts nearly all of it. The organizer is a veterinary non-profit, the entrants are pets, each vote is a dollar donated to the clinic, and the outcome is a printed calendar rather than a business ranking. Its market is the Philadelphia area and the animal-loving public beyond it, not a metro's dining or services scene.

For anyone backing a pet, the practical upshot is that money, not reach alone, moves the standings here, which changes how a campaign for a photo is planned and paid for.

Strengthening support for a pet photo on this ballot

On a donate-to-vote ballot, support is arithmetic: votes equal dollars, so a campaign for a pet photo is a fundraising effort. The most direct step is donating on the ballot itself at one dollar per vote. Beyond that, the clinic's page gives no stated cap on participation and no published rule against coordinated support, but its contest rules are the governing text and should be read in full before any outside help is arranged. What tends to work for this format is a small circle of committed backers who give repeatedly across the three-week window rather than one large push, since standings move continuously as rival photos collect donations. Sharing the pet's entry link with a specific goal, such as a named month in the calendar, gives donors a reason to give again near the close. For a fuller treatment of outreach that fits paid ballots like this one, see our votes guide.