America's Favorite Animal Shelter Contest

In order to be eligible to participate in this contest, all shelters and groups need to be registered with our partner Adopt-a-Pet.com, a nonprofit homeless pet adoption website.

Getting your favorite shelter or group registered with Adopt-a-Pet.com is very simple. We need a representative from that group to fill out a simple registration form on Adopt-a-Pet.com's site: http://www.adoptapet.com/shelter/terms_conditions_signup.html

Someone from Adopt-a-Pet.com will then contact the group to verify their information and we'll be able to add them to the contest.

Registration is a quick process. Typically a group can be live on Adopt-a-Pet.com's site then on our site within 48 hours. Adopt-a-Pet.com will verify that all group are real rescue groups or animal shelters. Groups do NOT need to be registered 501(c)(3) nonprofits.

If your group registered with Adopt-a-Pet.com within the last day or two, then you should see your group on our site soon. It can take up to 48 hours between when you submit your registration and when you see your group on the contest site (possibly more if you submit your registration late on a Friday).

If you see your group on Adopt-a-Pet.com but don't have a login for their website, then your group probably is not formally registered with Adopt-a-Pet.com. Please follow the steps above to register your group with Adopt-a-Pet.com.

Yes, as of October 1, 2008 registration with Adopt-a-Pet.com is open to rescue groups for animals other than cats and dogs.

It usually takes about 48 hours to get you on the contest website after you registered with our friends at Adopt-a-Pet.com. If you still don't see your shelter listed after those 48 hours, send us an email at animalsheltercontest@earth.care2.com and we can help you.

We want to ensure all groups, no matter how small, have a chance to win a much-needed donation. That's why we are awarding a donation of $500 to a random participating group every week. All shelters with at least five votes that week are eligible to win the weekly prize.

We encourage you to use the "Tell-a-Friend" tool included in the contest's website to contact your friends. All messages sent from that tool will include a link that will allow us to credit your friends' votes towards your total tally.

You can also copy your unique promotion link and paste that link into your own email message through your email client. Once you have voted you will find this link on your shelter's contest page and in the Thank You email you received after voting.

To get to our Tell-a-Friend tool, click the "email your friends" button on your shelter's page.

Make sure you are only including your friends' email addresses separated by commas and avoid including special characters. If that doesn't work, try to send your message to one friend first and then to two friends. Then try sending more.

You can also copy your unique promotion link and paste that link into your own email message through your email client. Once you have voted you will find this link on your shelter's contest page and in the Thank You email you received after voting.

The America's Favorite Animal Shelter contest is an online contest, and so we ask for name, email address and zip code for all voters to ensure one vote per person. We may use a voter's email address to verify their vote, and all voters will receive a "thank you for voting" email from Care2 to confirm their vote. All voters will also receive periodic contest updates from Care2 with announcements of winners Ð these emails will only be sent during the contest and to announce final winners. Any voter may unsunscribe from these emails at any time. Your email will not be sold. This contest abides by Care2's Privacy policy: http://www.care2.com/help/general/privacy.html

We share your concern. We want to make sure that we respect the hard work of everyone promoting this contest and ensure that the rules are followed and we can award prizes fairly. That's why we have implemented a CAPTCHA-like security field on our voting form to ensure that only real people can vote, not computer scripts. We have other processes on the backend checking for deleting duplicate records to prevent anyone from trying to game the system and vote multiple times.

Yes, please send all your media requests to contestmedia@earth.care2.com.

Please email us at animalsheltercontest@earth.care2.com.