How a pet photo contest raised $3,975 for an animal shelter in two weeks

Owen County Friends of Animals was more than $10,000 in debt from veterinary bills. Veronica Chisholm does not work there and is not on their board. She is a pageant director who has run People's Choice contests on Dempsi for years — and she recognized that the thing raising thousands for her pageants would work just as well for a shelter. In two weeks it raised $3,975.

That is really the whole story: she had a tool the shelter did not know existed, and she pointed it at their problem. This guide is that knowledge, written down. You do not need her years of pageant experience — you need the eight steps below and somebody at a shelter willing to say yes.

The finished contest page, exactly as voters saw it: OCFA: Owen County's Favorite Pet Contest.

Why this beats a donation link

Worth understanding before you start, because it is also the argument you will make to the shelter.

A donation page has one link and one ask. Somebody sees it, gives once, and that is the end of it. A pet contest has as many fundraisers as it has entries — every owner asking their own family and friends, for their own pet, for as long as the contest runs.

And the same people give more than once. The 167 pets drew 79 donations from 56 people — and 18 of those 56 gave more than once, accounting for 45% of everything raised. The money arrived across twelve separate days. A shelter's usual online appeal raises what it raises in the first forty-eight hours and then goes quiet.

There is one more thing an established platform gives you that a personal payment app does not. This shelter's Venmo had already been targeted by a scam, and people who wanted to help could no longer tell which account was real. Card payments, with the contest page as the only place to give, removed that question entirely.

The eight steps

1. Talk to the shelter first — permission, and be upfront about the 25%.
2. Let people enter their own pets — not the shelter's animals.
3. Set the contest up — name the cause, pick a reachable goal.
4. Collect the entries — share a registration link, close it after a day.
5. Get the word out through the shelter — they post, they tag you.
6. Line up a small prize — ask local businesses by text.
7. Keep it alive — email entrants, leave rankings visible.
8. Get the money to the shelter — agree how before you launch.

1Talk to the shelter first

Do this before anything else, and do not skip it.

The shelter had posted publicly that they were in trouble. A member of Veronica's pageant board texted her: “Do you think we could set something up like the pageant People's Choice, but for the shelter?” They talked it through, then went to the shelter's president and asked permission.

Ask for the president, the fundraising lead, or the treasurer. Be specific about three things:

• It costs the shelter nothing. No setup fee, no monthly charge.
• The split. Dempsi takes 25% of what is raised; the shelter receives 75%.
• Who handles the money — decide this now rather than later. See section 8.

“What about the 25%?”

It is the question that decides whether a shelter says yes, so answer it before they ask. Three things are true and worth saying plainly:

• It costs the shelter nothing up front and nothing at all if the contest raises nothing.
• The comparison is not 100% versus 75%. It is 75% of $3,975 versus whatever a plain donation link would have raised — which in this case would have been one ask, on one day, to whoever happened to see it.
• The shelter keeps the list. Every donor and every entrant arrives with contact details, and that outlives the money.

How that conversation actually went

It was a non-issue. Veronica's framing is worth copying exactly — she did not present it as a fee, she presented it as a split:

“I explained that 25% of the funds raised would go toward the website/platform and the remaining 75% would go to the shelter, which I would send by cashier's check. They were happy to participate and it really wasn't an issue.”

She also led with proof: she had already run this format successfully for pageants. A shelter is being asked to lend its name to a stranger's idea, and “I have done this before and it worked” is what makes that easy to say yes to.

What Veronica actually needed from the shelter turned out to be small: permission, and the use of their Facebook page. The president was easy to work with — in Veronica's words, “her attitude was essentially, 'Just tell me what to do and when you need me to do it.'”

2Let people enter their own pets

This is the decision that made it work.

The obvious idea is to photograph the shelter's adoptable animals and let people vote on those. Veronica considered exactly that and rejected it:

“At first, we considered uploading the shelter dogs ourselves, but we realized we could get a much wider reach by allowing people to submit their own pets.”

Every entered pet brings its own owner, and that owner brings their family and friends. Shelter animals have no one to campaign for them. One hundred and sixty-seven pets meant one hundred and sixty-seven people with a personal reason to share the link.

3Set the contest up

Create a contest, name it, set your end date and time, and write a short description saying where the money goes. The settings that matter for this kind of contest:

• Cause — one line naming the shelter and what the money does. Contests that name a cause raise substantially more.
• Fundraising goal — see the note on picking the number below.
• Display order: ranking. Leave it there. See section 7.
• Self-registration: on — this is how entries come in.
• Photo: required.

4Collect the entries

Turn on self-registration and share the link. You get a registration link and a QR code. People fill in a short form — name, contact details, photo — and the entry lands in a queue for you to approve. Nothing appears on the voting page until you say so, and you can approve the whole queue at once.

Set a short entry deadline. Asked what she would change, Veronica was specific: one day is enough.

“I wouldn't keep entries open in the Facebook comments for as long. One day would have been plenty, and it would have cut down on some of the private messages and extra communication.”

Her original run collected entries out of Facebook comments over a full week, and she typed all 167 into the system by hand — six hours or more of work. Self-registration exists because of this contest. You get to skip that part.

Put the QR code on a flyer at the shelter, the vet's office, the groomer.

5Get the word out through the shelter

Veronica wrote the Facebook posts herself, then had the shelter's president post them — on the president's own personal page and the shelter's page.

“She tagged me in the posts, which allowed an additional group of people to see it. From there, other people began sharing it, and the message spread well beyond our immediate community and across Kentucky.”

The shelter's own page reaches the people who already know about the debt; being tagged pulls in the organizer's network as a second wave. She also posted on LinkedIn, which she credits with a noticeable share of the early spread.

What the posts did, and why they worked

The posts themselves were written for a contest with no registration link — the feature did not exist yet, so she asked people to email or message their entries and then typed all 167 in by hand. Reproducing them verbatim would hand you wording built around a step you no longer have to do. The structure is the useful part.

The entry post did five things, in this order:

• A question, not an announcement. It opened by asking whether your pet had what it takes — an invitation to picture your own animal winning, before any mention of money.
• Free to enter, stated immediately. The barrier is removed in the first line. Voting costs money; entering never does, and that distinction has to be obvious or people scroll past.
• The cause, named and specific. Not “a local charity” but the shelter, and what the money was for.
• Geography, widened on purpose. Open to pets anywhere in the state, not just the county. The shelter is local; the audience did not have to be.
• The prize package, itemised. Each donated item listed separately, which makes the list look longer and credits each business by name.

The “voting is live” post was shorter and did only three: the contest is open, here is the link, here is what a vote costs. It named the price tiers plainly — a dollar a vote, with bundles — so nobody had to click through to find out whether they could afford to take part.

Both closed the same way: every vote is a donation, share it, let us have some fun for a good cause. Nothing in either post asked anyone to give money to a charity. They asked people to enter a pet and to share a link.

What to write instead of the entry post. With self-registration you put the registration link straight into the post and let people enter themselves. Same five elements, one extra line telling them to click and upload a photo, and you skip the six hours of transcription Veronica did.

6Line up a small prize

The winner got a Chewy gift card — donated personally by the pageant board member whose text started the whole thing, to get the prize package going before the sponsor packages were in place. A local pet-care business donated a shampoo and bath kit; a local pet salon donated a nail trim.

How she asked

“I simply sent them a text saying I was helping create a fundraiser for Owen County Friends of Animals and asked if they would consider donating their service to the prize winner. That was essentially the whole ask. Everyone I approached agreed, and no one said no.”

A text message, to businesses she already knew. Nobody declined. Lead with the shelter rather than with yourself — you are offering a local business a visible way to help, which is easier to say yes to than a favour.

7Keep it alive for more than one day

This is where a pet contest beats a traditional appeal, and it is worth understanding why.

Donations arrived on twelve separate days. Across all contests on the platform, the average takes 37% of its money on the final day. This one took 12%.

What she did:

• Emailed every entrant, five separate times. 732 emails in all, sent from inside Dempsi — she never exported a list or opened a mail-merge tool. The contest editor has a bulk email built in that already knows who is entered and skips anyone who has unsubscribed or bounced. Subject, body, send.
• Started alphabetical, then switched to ranking after three or four days — “I didn't want contestants to immediately see that they were in 150th place when they had no votes yet and become discouraged.” Once money was coming in she switched to ranking, “which created more of that competitive spirit.”

The five emails, and what she put in the subject line

Not one of these mentions the shelter, and not one asks for a donation:

The temptation is to read that as a five-email formula. It was not. Veronica is clear that each one came out of something that was actually happening that day:

“My birthday happened to fall during the contest, so I used that as a natural reason to reach out. Instead of asking people for birthday gifts, I essentially gave them another way to support me through the contest.”

The 14 August email was the same. The shelter had a separate fundraiser scheduled that day which was rained off, so she wrote to say: that event is not happening, but here is another way to help animals tonight.

So the transferable part is not the wording. It is staying in contact and using whatever the day gives you — a birthday, a cancelled event, a deadline, a milestone — as a reason to write again. None of the emails said “donate”. They gave people a reason to engage, and the donations followed from that.

What 11 August actually shows

At 9:27 that morning she switched the contest to ranking and emailed all 149 entrants to say so — “Rankings: Who's leading the pack?” The day closed at $1,030, the highest daily total of the contest.

It is tempting to call that cause and effect. Look closer and it will not hold: $750 of that $1,030 was a single donation, from one supporter of the eventual winner. Strip it out and the day looks ordinary.

Counting donors instead of dollars tells a different story, and it is the more honest measure of whether anything changed:

By that measure the busiest days were the two right after the contest opened, not the day rankings appeared. The launch post did more for participation than the switch did.

The lesson worth keeping is still real, just smaller than it first looked: rankings gave people a new reason to check back, and the email put that in front of them. Neither one manufactured a crowd. Be careful reading any single day's total — in a contest this size one generous family can move it more than anything you did.

8Getting the money to the shelter

Two ways, and you should agree which before you launch.

The shelter's account, your hands on it. The better arrangement, and the one Veronica intends next time: “I will need to sit down with the president and show her how to set up her own account.” The shelter registers, connects its own bank details, and every donation settles straight into the charity's account. No volunteer ever holds charitable money, there is no check to write, and nothing below about card fees applies to you.

One thing to know before you choose it. The account holder is not just who gets paid — they are who runs the contest. Approving entries, sending the welcome emails, sending certificates. If the shelter's president is not going to do that, set the account up in the shelter's name and let the organizer work in it. That keeps the money where it belongs and the labour where it belongs, which are rarely the same person. Budget an evening for the setup: a charity's account needs its EIN, its bank details and one person willing to verify their identity.

The organizer collects, then writes one check. What Veronica actually did — the money goes into her existing account and the shelter gets a cashier's check once everything settles. Fewer moving parts on day one, and the right answer if the shelter cannot get set up before you want to launch. It does put you personally in the middle of someone else's donations, so read the next part carefully.

The card fee, and what to actually promise

Only if you are the one collecting. If the shelter's account takes the donations, skip this.

One number to get right before you say it out loud. The 25% is the platform's share and it is exactly 25%. Card processing is separate and comes out of the organizer's side — roughly 2.9% plus 30¢ per donation, charged by Stripe, not by Dempsi. It is not added to what the donor pays; the donor is charged the amount on the button.

On Veronica's contest that worked out as:

The important thing to understand: the 25% never reaches you. Stripe splits it off at the moment each donation is charged and sends it straight to the platform. What arrives in your account is already the shelter's money, with both the platform share and the card fee taken out. You are a pass-through, not a party with a cut — so the check you write is the whole balance, not a share of it.

That leaves one decision, worth about $139 on a contest this size. Make it before you name a number, not after:

• Promise the balance, not a percentage. Tell them card processing comes off the top and you will send whatever lands. Costs you nothing, and it is how every payment platform a charity already uses works.
• Promise a round number and cover the difference yourself. Cleaner to communicate, but budget for it.

The trap is doing neither. It is very easy to work out 75% of the total, say that figure out loud early on, and only discover the processing fee when the money lands. By then the shelter has done the arithmetic on the number you gave them, and the gap is yours to explain or to make up.

One more thing she is still waiting on as this is published: the money takes time to settle. Card payments were still arriving days after voting closed, so the check goes out once the last of it clears rather than the morning after.

Receipts and timing

Nobody asked about receipts or tax deductions — not one donor. Worth knowing before you over-prepare for a question that does not come.

Tell the shelter about timing twice. Veronica said at the outset that she would send their portion by cashier's check once the contest closed, then told them again afterwards that she was waiting for the last transactions to clear and would mail it that week. Card payments take days to settle, and a shelter watching a public total climb has no way of knowing that unless you say so.

9What to expect

Most of the money came in ordinary amounts. The $25 tier was chosen 31 times out of 79. This is not a fundraiser that depends on finding one wealthy donor; it depends on enough pets to bring enough families.

On legitimacy: Veronica did not have to argue the case. “Both the president of OCFA and I are very well known in our community, and I think people trusted us.” If you are not well known locally, expect to do more convincing than she did — which is another reason to have the shelter post from its own page.

After the contest

Four things close the loop, and none of them takes long.

• Announce the winner where you announced the contest. The entry post promised public recognition; deliver it on the shelter's page with the winning photo.
• Send the certificates. Dempsi builds these for you. When a contest closes, the organizer gets a form with every entrant already sorted into an award — winner, finalist, appreciation, participation — and one button emails each of them a private link to their own certificate, printable, with their pet's photo on it. Veronica sent hers at nine the next morning. Worth copying: she sent to the thirty-seven pets who drew at least one supporter and switched off the rest. The default is to send to everyone, but a certificate carries weight in proportion to what it is recognising, and she judged that a family whose friends had actually given would want one on the fridge. There are no vote counts or dollar amounts on it — nobody learns where they placed.
• Thank the entrants, not just the donors. Everyone who entered brought their own network to a shelter that had none. They are the reason it worked.
• Hand the shelter the list. Names and email addresses of everyone who gave, and everyone who entered. That is the asset they did not have a month ago — worth more to them next year than the check.

What she would change

A shorter entry window. One day, not a week.

A theme. Her strongest idea, and better than splitting by species — which she ruled out for a practical reason:

“Since Owen County Friends of Animals is only a dog shelter, I'm not sure there would be enough species variety to make separate dog/cat contests worthwhile. I do think changing the theme could be a fun way to create different categories.”

Her suggestions: a holiday contest where pets are pictured with décor or in costume, a farm animals edition, or kids + pets. A theme gives people a fresh reason to enter next year rather than asking the same families for the same photo, and it narrows the field naturally without excluding anyone.

The timeline she ran

Two weeks of voting after that. Start to finish, under a month.

If you are not the one who will run this

Most people who read this far will not go and organize a pet contest, and that is fine. But look at how this one started.

Veronica did not have the idea. A board member texted it to her, because she was the person who would know what to do with it. That text is the entire origin of $3,975 against that vet bill.

Shelters are not out looking for fundraising ideas. The ones who need this most are the ones with the least spare capacity to go find it — which means somebody has to put it in front of them. If you know a shelter, a rescue, a foster network, or just someone who runs events well, forwarding this page is the two-minute version of what that board member did.

You do not need to write anything clever. This is enough:

“Saw this — a woman in Owen County raised about $4,000 for a dog shelter in two weeks with a pet photo contest. Wondered if it would work for you.”

Veronica Chisholm ran Owen County's Favorite Pet Contest in August 2026 for Owen County Friends of Animals. She reviewed and approved this account before publication, and Dempsi paid her for the interview it is based on. The figures are taken from the contest's own records.