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

What the 2025 Calendar Pet Photo Contest is and who runs it

The problem a supporter runs into first is money. This is not a free-click poll: every vote on the AWLA calendar ballot costs $1, so a pet owner who wants their animal on a calendar cover has to plan a real budget before the window even opens. Knowing who runs the ballot, and where it lives, is the difference between supporting the right contest and donating to a lookalike.

The 2025 Calendar Pet Photo Contest is organized by the Animal Welfare League of Alexandria, the shelter whose address the ballot publishes as 4101 Eisenhower Avenue, Alexandria, VA 22304. GoGo Photo Contest hosts the ballot, a platform built for photo fundraiser ballots of this kind, and the 2025 edition sits at gogophotocontest.com/awlacalendarcontest-2024. The contest's own masthead carries the shelter's name, so the organizer and the host are visible on the same page.

The stakes are concrete. The entry with the most votes at the close of competition is recognized as Alexandria's 2025 Animal of the Year, and that animal's photo graces the front and back covers of the shelter's popular annual photo calendar. Runners-up appear inside the calendar itself, which is why a strong but losing finish still puts a pet in print.

The dated record behind the Alexandria calendar ballot

This is a long-running fundraiser, not a new experiment. The Animal Welfare League of Alexandria has used GoGo Photo Contest for its annual pet photo contest since 2014, and confirmed editions of the calendar contest ran in 2023, 2024 and 2025. Each edition gets its own dated address under the awlacalendarcontest pattern, so the 2025 ballot is a distinct page from the 2024 one rather than a single evergreen form.

The 2025 window is fully dated. The submission and voting periods opened Monday, June 1, 2025 at 8:00 AM Eastern and closed Tuesday, June 30, 2025 at 8:00 PM Eastern, so entry and voting ran side by side across the whole month of June rather than in separate phases. Online voting for a registered photo began as soon as that photo was registered and ran to the same June 30 close.

The 2025 edition is now finished. The ballot states that the contest has ended and congratulates the winners, which makes the final standings a matter of reading the page rather than guessing. What the ballot does not lay out is the structure of the calendar itself: AWLA has not published the list of photo categories or month slots its calendar ballot uses; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

How a supporter votes on the Alexandria calendar ballot

The mechanic is purchase-based and simple. A supporter opens the entry gallery, picks an animal, and buys votes on that entry's page at $1 per vote. The rules state plainly that each vote costs $1 and that there is no limit on vote quantity, so a supporter who wants to move an entry up the board can buy again and again within the window. Online voting begins the moment a photo is registered, which means early entrants start collecting dollars before the calendar month is half over.

The organizer also builds timed pushes into the window. Bonus Vote Challenge #1 ran on June 5 in the 2025 rules: any entry, including brand-new entries, that received 25 votes or more between 10 a.m. on Wednesday, June 5 and 10 a.m. on Thursday, June 6 Eastern Time was entered into the challenge. That gives a mid-window spike real value beyond the raw vote count.

Entry has its own rule worth knowing before a photo goes up. The ballot's copyright line states that copyrighted photos may only be included with the written permission of the copyright-holder, so a professional portrait needs the photographer's sign-off, not just the owner's enthusiasm. Everything else, from the gallery to the checkout, happens on the single GoGo Photo Contest page for the edition.

How this ballot sits beside other Virginia pet contests

Alexandria's calendar ballot is easy to confuse with its neighbours, and the confusion costs money when a supporter votes on the wrong page. The closest name-alike is the AWLA Calendar Contest run by the Animal Welfare League of Arlington, a different shelter in a different city whose acronym matches Alexandria's almost letter for letter. Checking the masthead city before buying votes is the only reliable separator.

Two other Virginia pet contests run on different models entirely. The Appalachian Great Pyrenees Rescue Calendar Photo Contest is a breed-rescue calendar fundraiser, narrower in audience than Alexandria's shelter-wide ballot. The Carroll News Cutest Pet Contest is a newspaper-run cutest-pet vote rather than a calendar fundraiser at all.

Beyond the pet vertical, the state's broader reader-choice ballots, Best of Arlington, the BroadwayWorld Central Virginia Awards and the BroadwayWorld NOVA Awards, answer to different publishers and different voting mechanics altogether. What makes the Alexandria calendar distinct is its dollar-per-vote design: the vote itself is the donation, the prize is a calendar cover rather than a title listing, and the whole race lives on a single GoGo Photo Contest page that the shelter controls.

Stretching a budget in a dollar-per-vote race

Because every vote costs $1 and no cap applies, the contest rewards planning over impulse. Decide the total spend before June opens, then split it: some votes bought early to establish the entry, some held for the bonus challenge days when a 25-vote threshold carries extra value, and the rest held for the final stretch when totals are closest. Sharing the entry link with a wide circle multiplies the same budget, since each supporter's dollars count identically. Our guide to getting more votes covers the outreach side, and award-contest vote support explains how purchased support is handled on ballots of this shape. The organizer's own rules, prizes and challenge schedule are published on the ballot, so read them before spending; they are the authority in this race, not any outside summary.