NEW Top Dog Contest: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the NEW Top Dog Contest is and who runs it

The NEW Top Dog Contest is a paid public-vote fundraiser built around a simple question the organizer poses on its own ballot: who is Northeast Wisconsin's Top Dog? Dog owners across the region enter photos of their canine companions, then compete to gather the most purchased votes before the window closes. The winner earns the title of NEW Top Dog for the year.

The program belongs to the Oshkosh Area Humane Society, whose mailing address in Oshkosh, Wisconsin anchors it firmly in the Fox Valley. Presentation comes from Oshkosh Mid-Morning Kiwanis, a service club partner the Oshkosh Herald credits alongside the society when describing the fundraiser's results. The ballot itself sits at its own address on gogophotocontest.com, the fundraising service GoGo Photo Contest, which specializes in paid-vote charity drives.

The money raised supports animal shelters, pets and kids throughout Northeast Wisconsin, a scope the organizer states plainly on the ballot page. It also bills the event as every dog and beer lover's dream, a nod to the local character of the fundraiser. The table below gathers the core facts.

The dated record: editions, the 2024 window and what is unpublished

Confirmed editions of the NEW Top Dog Contest ran in 2022, 2023 and 2024, each with its own ballot address on the GoGo Photo Contest platform. The 2024 edition is the most recent with published dates, and its dates are printed on the ballot itself: registration and voting began together on September 27, and both ended on October 26, 2024, with winners crowned at the close. The ballot clock ran on Central Time, and the page marked the contest as ended once that date passed.

The fundraiser's financial footprint is unusually well documented for a program of this size. The Oshkosh Herald reported in October 2024 that the contest has generated more than $600,000 since 2020, and that the edition before that report raised more than $71,000. Those figures come from the society's own local coverage rather than from the ballot, and they explain why the program has kept returning each fall since its confirmed 2022 run.

Two facts are missing from what the organizer publishes. The ballot page carries no category list and no eligibility terms for entrants or voters; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. And the humane society has not announced the year of the next edition, so no published source names a 2025 or later window.

How a supporter votes in the NEW Top Dog Contest today

The mechanic is purchase-based, which sets this ballot apart from free-click contests. After a contestant registers, the organizer's page instructs them to encourage friends and family to vote for their canine companion, and it states the price in the same breath: votes are just $1 each. Every dollar vote adds to a dog's total, and the top vote-earning dog takes the crown when the window ends.

A supporter's path runs through the GoGo Photo Contest ballot. The page carries a Participate option for entering a dog and a View Entries option for browsing the field, plus a Sign In link for returning visitors who want to check standing. Registration and voting shared a single window in 2024, opening September 27 and closing October 26, so there was no separate nomination round to wait for.

Because votes cost money, the contest rewards sustained outreach rather than a single burst. Contestants who share their dog's entry link early, and ask their network to vote more than once across the month-long window, build totals that late arrivals struggle to match. The organizer's own framing, that it is anyone's game, reflects how open the paid format leaves the outcome until the final day.

How this ballot sits beside its Wisconsin neighbours

Northeast Wisconsin supports a busy public-vote scene, and the NEW Top Dog Contest occupies its own corner of it. Where most Wisconsin ballots on this site are readers-choice or athlete polls, this is a pet fundraiser with a dollar-per-vote engine, closer in spirit to the Big Cheese 107.9 Howl-O-Ween Pet Costume Contest, the other pet-vertical program in the state's lineup, than to any best-of ballot.

The sport and readers-choice neighbours answer to media publishers. The Appleton Post-Crescent Cellcom Athlete of the Week and Bound Wisconsin Basketball Player of the Week run on news and school-athletics platforms with free voting, while Best of the Valley, Best of Madison and Best of Milwaukee pit local businesses against each other for citywide bragging rights.

The NEW Top Dog Contest differs from all of them in three ways. Its organizer is a charity rather than a publisher, so the money goes to animal welfare instead of media revenue. Its ballot charges for every vote, so the leaderboard tracks dollars as much as enthusiasm. And its market is a single city and its surrounding region rather than a whole metro's business community, which keeps the field of dogs personal and local.

Strengthening support for your dog in this fundraiser

Because this ballot charges a dollar per vote, the practical play is different from free contests. The organizer tells contestants to encourage friends and family after registering, and that instruction is the whole strategy in miniature: a personal ask with a direct link to your dog's entry page outperforms any broadcast post. Share the link the day you register, since the 2024 window gave contestants a full month from September 27 to October 26 to accumulate.

The humane society publishes no guidance on outside vote services for this program, and its rules live on the ballot page rather than in a separate document, so read them before spending beyond the ballot's own dollar votes. What the format rewards is repeat support from real people across the window, not a single push near the deadline. For a fuller picture of the options, our award-votes page covers how paid support works across contests of this kind.