Connecticut Magazine's Best of CT: How Voting Works & How to Win

Dozens of categories, one statewide ballot

Restaurants. Doctors. Dentists. That's not the full list, it's three of dozens running side by side on Connecticut Magazine's Best of CT contest, and the sheer number of categories is what separates this program from a narrower single-focus poll.

Readers nominate first, then vote on whichever businesses clear that stage. Connecticut Magazine has told its own Instagram and Facebook followers, in plain terms, to "vote for your favorite businesses" during the live window, so the contest isn't hiding behind an obscure submission form. It's promoted the same way the magazine promotes any other reader feature.

380,000+ readers a month is a large enough number that a category win travels well beyond the town where the business actually operates. A Top Dentists placement, once published, is citable language a practice can use in its own marketing for the rest of the year. See the Connecticut contest hub for how this compares to the state's other reader-vote programs.

Nomination comes before voting, and that order matters

Skip nomination, and there's no ballot line to campaign for later. Best of CT works in two stages: a nomination round where readers write in businesses, then a public vote limited to whoever advanced.

Category label first, campaign second

A general dentistry office that gets filed under a broad "health and wellness" heading instead of Top Dentists is competing in the wrong race, even if its patients are loyal enough to win the correct one. The fix costs nothing: confirm the exact category wording on the live ballot before asking a single person to nominate.

For the broader mechanics behind any nomination-and-vote structure like this one, the award-voting guide covers ground worth reading before the nomination window opens.

Following the calendar Connecticut Magazine actually sets

No fixed date exists. That's the single most useful thing to know before assuming last year's schedule still applies.

Connecticut Magazine posts the open nomination window, and later the public-vote window, on connecticutmag.com and through its Instagram and Facebook accounts. A business that checks those two channels directly, rather than a third-party recap post, sees the real dates first. The magazine has used direct calls to action on social media during past cycles, "vote for your favorite businesses in the Best of CT contest", so the announcement itself isn't buried.

Businesses juggling a two-stage structure for the first time can compare notes with how Best of New Jersey runs its own nominate-then-vote cycle, since the underlying pattern, nominate first, vote second, repeats across several statewide readers-choice programs.

What the 380,000-reader number means for a small practice

A single-location dental practice in Danbury doesn't reach 380,000 people on its own. Connecticut Magazine's monthly print and online audience does, and a Top Dentists placement borrows that reach for as long as the practice keeps citing the specific year and category.

That's different from a smaller local poll where the total readership might be a few thousand people concentrated in one town. Scale cuts both ways, though: a statewide category also draws statewide competition, so a Fairfield practice with strong patient loyalty isn't automatically favored just because the magazine's number is large.

Businesses serving multiple counties, an accounting firm with clients in Stamford and New Haven, for instance, get more practical value from the statewide reach than a single-city outfit would. The business-of-the-year vote guide covers how to frame outreach when the audience spans more than one metro area.

Hartford, New Haven, and Fairfield don't run the same playbook

Same statewide ballot. Different regions respond to different framing.

Greenwich customers tend to respond better to a "thank you for a great year, here's where to show it" tone than a hard "vote now" push. Stamford's finance-sector client base usually prefers the opposite: a short, direct ask with the category and link, nothing dressed up. Neither approach is wrong; matching the message to the region tends to outperform sending the same copy everywhere.

Connecticut Magazine keeps no public archive of past Best of CT winners, so a competitor's claimed placement in Top Dentists or Best Restaurants is only as good as the current year's listing on connecticutmag.com, not an old flyer or a reseller's recap. A Norwalk or Waterbury business weighing whether to match a rival's campaign spend should confirm that win against this year's ballot first. For the mechanics of running an above-board push during the open window, the guide to legitimate contest voting and how online contest votes work cover the ground worth reading before Hartford, Stamford, or any other team above starts asking supporters to nominate. Full package pricing sits on the pricing page.