Rescue Brew: How Voting Works & How to Win

What Rescue Brew is and who runs it

Rescue Brew is a public-vote contest built around rescued pets, run by the Charleston Animal Society. The society's site masthead carries the line Preventing Cruelty To Animals Since 1874, which places the organization among the long-established animal welfare bodies in South Carolina. The program's full title on the society's own pages is the Rescue Brew Beer Contest, a name that wraps a beer-contest framing around what is at heart a pet photo ballot where the public picks the favorites.

The ballot lives on the charity's own website rather than on a third-party media platform. The results page for the program sits at the Rescue Brew Beer Contest address on charlestonanimalsociety.org, and the 2025 promotion ran on the gogophotocontest.com platform under the rescuebrewcontest-2025 address, where the submission and voting periods were printed. The society operates from 2455 Remount Road in North Charleston, South Carolina, and the contest draws its audience from the Charleston area and the wider state.

In the vertical terms used across this site, the program fits the best-of mold: supporters choose among entries, the public vote decides, and the cycle closes with a winners announcement on the organizer's own domain. The 2025 page that carries the results is titled Rescue Brew Beer Contest Winners Announced, which is the page this guide links to as the program's ballot address.

The dated record for Rescue Brew

Two edition years are documented for this program, 2022 and 2025. The 2022 evidence sits on the society's own Rescue Brew Beer Contest page, and the 2025 cycle is documented through the promotion at gogophotocontest.com and the winners announcement on charlestonanimalsociety.org. The program is marked annual, with the next expected edition in 2026, but the society has not printed the dates for that cycle on any page this guide draws from.

The 2025 window is the most fully dated fact about the program. The submission period began at 12:00 AM Eastern Time, Friday, April 11, 2025, and closed at midnight, 11:59:59 PM Eastern Time, Monday, April 28, 2025. The voting period opened at 5:00 PM Eastern Time on Friday, April 25, 2025, so the two phases overlapped for the first few days, and voting closed at midnight on Friday, May 23, 2025. Every vote cast during that window was a one dollar donation to the Charleston Animal Society.

What the society has left off these pages is the roster of ballot categories for the program, and no limit on votes per supporter and no eligibility text appears there either; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The same gap applies to the exact dates of the next edition: the society's own pages carry the 2025 results, not a forward calendar, so a supporter planning for 2026 needs to watch the society's site for the announcement rather than rely on a printed schedule.

How a supporter votes in Rescue Brew today

The literal mechanic is a donation-backed public vote. A supporter reaches the ballot through the Charleston Animal Society's own pages, and during the 2025 cycle the active voting form sat at gogophotocontest.com under the rescuebrewcontest-2025 address. On that form the supporter picks a favorite entry and completes the vote, with each vote cast carrying a one dollar donation to the society. The money goes to the organizer, which is what distinguishes this ballot from a free-click readers poll.

Timing matters because the 2025 phases ran in Eastern Time and overlapped. A supporter could submit an entry from April 11 through April 28, and voting was already open from April 25, so an animal entered late in the submission window had a shorter stretch to collect votes than one entered on the first day. Voting then ran to the midnight close on May 23, 2025, giving the field a bit under a month of open balloting after the submission period ended.

After the close, the society publishes the outcome on its own domain. The 2025 results page is the Rescue Brew Beer Contest Winners Announced page on charlestonanimalsociety.org, and that page is the program's standing ballot address between cycles. A supporter returning for the next edition should start there, because the society routes its audience to the active contest from its own site rather than from a separate media publisher.

Rescue Brew beside its South Carolina neighbours

Rescue Brew sits in a South Carolina best-of market with several neighbours, and it differs from all of them in who answers for the result. The Best of South Carolina Awards, the BroadwayWorld South Carolina Awards, the Charleston City Paper's Best of Charleston, Charleston Magazine's Best Of, and the two Best of Columbia programs from Columbia Metropolitan and Free Times are all media-run readers ballots, where a publication owns the brand and the audience.

Rescue Brew belongs to a charity instead. The Charleston Animal Society runs it on its own site, the vote money flows to the society as donations, and the theme is animal rescue rather than local business or entertainment rankings. That gives the ballot a supporter base of pet owners and adopters in the Charleston area rather than the general readership a city magazine pulls.

The mechanics differ too. A readers poll usually lets a supporter click through a category list at no cost, while the 2025 Rescue Brew cycle attached a one dollar donation to every vote cast, which changes how a campaign for an entry is planned: each vote is both a show of support and a gift to the organizer. The market overlap is real, since Charleston supporters may encounter both the society's ballot and the city's media polls in the same year, but the organizer, the cause and the vote rule set this program apart from every sibling on the state page.

Strengthening support for a Rescue Brew entry

Because every vote in the 2025 cycle was a one dollar donation to the Charleston Animal Society, support for an entry is fundraising as well as voting, and that shapes what a push looks like. The people most likely to back a rescued pet are the ones already connected to it, so the organic path is to reach the adopter network, the foster circle and anyone who has followed the animal's story, and to point them at the ballot while the voting window is open.

The society has not published a rules text covering outside help for this program, so the safe assumption is that votes should come from real supporters completing the donation step themselves. A campaign that leans on the ballot's own donation mechanic stays inside the spirit of a charity fundraiser, and the wider tactics for public-vote contests are gathered in the guide at get more votes online, which can be read alongside the society's own ballot instructions for the live cycle.