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

Who votes in the BRAT 2025 Calendar Contest and why

The BRAT 2025 Calendar Contest is a photo fundraiser run by Basset Rescue Across Texas, a rescue organization whose postal address sits in Carrollton, Texas. Its audience is not a readership or a chamber membership: it is the community of basset hound owners, adopters and rescue volunteers across Texas who want to see their dog, or a dog they followed through the rescue, appear in the printed 2025 BRAT Calendar. That makes the vote intensely personal in a way city best-of ballots are not, because a supporter is usually voting for one specific animal.

GoGo Photo Contest, the platform carrying the ballot at https://www.gogophotocontest.com/bratcalendar, is built for charity photo contests. The page describes the contest as a fundraiser for Basset Rescue Across Texas, and the organizer's own text calls the annual rescue calendar one of its top annual fundraisers. Money flows in two ways: supporters pay 1.00 for every vote they cast, and entrants submit photos hoping to earn one of the calendar spots.

Facts at a glance

Because the contest is statewide rather than tied to one metro, it sits apart from the Texas readers' polls covered on this site, which answer to individual publications in individual cities.

The dated record for the BRAT calendar ballot

Two editions of the BRAT Calendar Contest are confirmed: 2024 and 2025. The 2024 cycle carries the fullest printed detail, because its rules block was published on the ballot itself. That window opened at 12:00 AM Central Time on Monday, December 2, 2024 and closed at 10:00 PM Central Time on Friday, December 13, 2024, a stretch of just under two weeks in early and mid December.

The organizer describes the calendar as annual, and the 2025 edition is named in the ballot's own title and in its photo-permission line, which grants the rescue the right to use submitted photos and names in the 2025 BRAT Calendar. The 2025 ballot page also shows that the contest has ended, so neither cycle is live at this moment.

The structure behind the vote is the part the ballot leaves out. Basset Rescue Across Texas has not published a category list or a per-supporter vote limit on the ballot page; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The same holds for eligibility rules and for the entry window that precedes voting in each cycle. The 13 calendar spots, including the cover, are the one structural figure the page does state, and the 1.00 vote price is the other.

The practical reading for anyone planning ahead is that the contest has run in consecutive recent years, that December has been its voting month, and that the next edition's dates will appear on the same GoGo Photo Contest page when the organizer publishes them.

How a supporter votes on the BRAT ballot today

The mechanic on the GoGo Photo Contest ballot is a paid public vote. Opening the ballot, a supporter selects View Entries and browses the basset hound photos competing for the 2025 BRAT Calendar. Choosing an entry leads to its vote option, and every vote is a 1.00 charge, so the vote action passes through a payment step before it counts. There is no free tier printed on the page: the 1.00 figure is stated flatly in the contest rules line, "All Votes are a 1.00".

Supporters who want their own dog on the calendar use the Participate link instead. Submitting a photo enters it into the vote, and the permission line matters: by submitting, the owner gives Basset Rescue Across Texas permission to use the photo and names in the 2025 BRAT Calendar. A Sign In link sits on the ballot alongside the entry browsing, though the page does not state whether signing in is required before a vote can be cast.

Because each vote costs money, the contest rewards concentrated support. Thirteen spots are available including the cover, so an entry needs to finish near the top of the standings to earn placement, and the margin between calendar spots can come down to a handful of paid votes in the final days of the window.

The ballot page for the 2025 edition currently reads "Contest has ended", so a supporter arriving today is seeing a closed cycle. The same URL carries each new edition when the organizer opens it.

Where the BRAT calendar sits among Texas ballots

This page covers a charity photo contest, and its nearest neighbours on this site are Texas readers' polls rather than other rescue calendars. The siblings are the Best of Austin Readers Poll, the Best of Dallas Readers' Choice, Best of El Paso, Best of Houston, Best of San Antonio and Best of Fort Worth. Each of those is a city market with a publication behind it; the BRAT ballot answers to a rescue organization instead.

Three differences matter to a supporter. First, the geography: the calendar draws from the whole state, with the organizer based in Carrollton, while each sibling ballot is anchored to one city. Second, the cost of voting: the BRAT ballot charges 1.00 per vote, where readers' polls are typically free to click. Third, the subject: a vote here backs one named basset hound photo, not a business or a venue.

Those differences change how support is built. A restaurant in the Best of Houston field campaigns to its customer base over weeks; a basset hound entry rallies a smaller, far more motivated circle of owners, adopters and foster followers who each pay per vote. The strategy advice differs accordingly, which is why this page stands alone rather than borrowing the readers'-poll playbook.

If you arrived here from one of the city ballots, the shared ground is the platform habit: both formats run on public-vote pages where the standings are visible and the deadline decides the outcome.

Strengthening support for a BRAT calendar entry

Because every vote on this ballot is a 1.00 charge, the most effective move for an entry's backer is to make paying effortless for supporters: post the direct entry link, name the dog, and say plainly that each vote costs a dollar and goes to the rescue. A basset hound's photo does the emotional work; the backer's job is removing every click between the supporter and the payment step.

Timing matters against a window like the confirmed 2024 run, which closed at 10:00 PM Central on December 13. Paid votes late in the window decide close standings, so a backer who saves a final push for the last days competes with entries that spread the same spend across the full two weeks.

On outside help: the ballot page carries no rule about purchased vote services, and the organizer's own format already monetizes each vote, so paid support is native to this contest rather than a workaround. What no backer should assume is a per-supporter cap, since none is printed. General tactics for widening a support base are covered in how to get more votes online, and the pricing side of paid support is laid out on buy award votes.