ARKAST Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the ARKAST Awards are and who counts the votes

A podcaster building an audience in Arkansas eventually hits the same wall: there are few places where listener support turns into something visible. The ARKAST Awards is the Arkansas Podcast Collaborative's answer to that. The Collaborative runs the program as a public-vote ballot where supporters vote for their favorite podcasters, and its own promotion tells them to watch the winners walk the stage in November at ARKAST 2024 in Fayetteville, AR.

The ballot is hosted on the Collaborative's own site rather than on an outside polling service. The voting address is https://www.arkansaspodcasters.org/vote, and the same domain carries the Collaborative's other material: an about section, a board list, events, resources, a podcast directory and a submission form for podcasts that want to be listed. That setup matters for anyone planning a support push, because every instruction a supporter needs comes from one publisher instead of being split across a contest platform and an organizer site.

The vertical is best-of, applied to podcasting rather than to restaurants or shops, and voting works as a straight fan ballot, with no nomination round described on the page. The table below pulls together the basics a supporter or a nominee needs first.

Dated facts behind the ARKAST Awards

Two edition years are confirmed for the ARKAST Awards: 2024 and 2026. The recurrence is annual, and the 2024 cycle was promoted as the first annual ARKAST Awards, which is why 2027 reads as the next expected cycle rather than a guess. The 2026 year in the list is the most recent confirmed run.

The 2024 edition ended on a stage. The Collaborative's promotion, echoed in outside coverage, put the first annual ARKAST Awards ceremony on November 14 in Fayetteville, Arkansas, with winners accepting their awards in person. That gives the program a fixed anchor: a November results month, celebrated in Fayetteville.

The 2025 ceremony recognized winners across a broad field of categories, according to Podnews's report on the ARKAST winners, which is the clearest published picture of the ballot's scale.

What the page does not carry is the exact dates when voting opens and closes, so confirm on the live ballot each cycle. No nomination or entry round is described on the voting page either, and the Collaborative has not printed platform round dates for the current cycle. For a nominee, that shape matters: the public vote and the stage moment sit in the same month, so a push that starts late runs into the ceremony itself.

How a supporter votes in the ARKAST Awards today

Voting takes little effort. A supporter opens the ARKAST Awards Voting page on arkansaspodcasters.org, reads the invitation to vote for favorite podcasters, and casts a public vote for the nominee they want to see walk the stage in November. No login step, nomination form or multi-round schedule is described on the page the Collaborative publishes.

What the page leaves out is as important for planning as what it prints. The Collaborative has not published any cap on repeat voting by a single person, an eligibility rule for who may cast a ballot, or a daily return requirement. None of those rules can be borrowed from another Arkansas ballot, because each program in the state answers to its own publisher and its own fine print.

Because the ballot is served from the Collaborative's own domain, a supporter who hits an error or a changed layout is looking at the Collaborative's own update, not a third-party platform outage. Reading the live page before organizing any group push is the only way to know the current shape of the ballot, and it costs nothing but a minute.

Where the ARKAST Awards sit among Arkansas ballots

Arkansas already hosts a crowded best-of field, and the ARKAST Awards stand out because of the vertical. Every sibling program on this site covers general community or business voting: Arkansas Business Best of Biz runs a business readers' ballot, Arkansas Times Best of Arkansas covers the state broadly, and CommunityVotes Jonesboro serves a city market. The Stuttgart, Russellville and AMP ballots fill in other corners of the state.

None of those ballots asks a public audience to vote for podcasters. That gives the ARKAST Awards a distinct lane: an Arkansas podcaster cannot pick up a business readers' win and treat it as podcast recognition, and a listener who wants to back a show has exactly one Arkansas ballot built for it.

The trade-off is scale and publisher. The siblings are newspaper and magazine programs with large general audiences, while the ARKAST Awards answer to a niche collaborative with a focused but smaller base. For a nominee deciding where to spend outreach effort, that difference matters more than any shared mechanic, because the same listener pool does not exist across the two kinds of ballot.

Strengthening support on the ARKAST ballot

Because the ARKAST Awards are a straight fan ballot on the Collaborative's own page, support that works is support built around listeners. Ask your show's audience directly, on air and in show notes, to visit the voting page and cast a ballot for your podcast. The Collaborative has not printed any position on outside help or automated voting, so the safe course is to treat the ballot the way the organizer presents it, a fan vote among real listeners. Our votes guide covers outreach habits that fit a niche ballot like this one, and the award votes page sets out the general position for award-style ballots.