2025 Community's Choice Awards Showcase: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Community's Choice Awards Showcase is

The Community's Choice Awards Showcase is a readers' choice awards program run by the Naples Daily News, the daily newspaper serving Naples, Florida. It follows the best-of vertical common to Gannett papers: local businesses and services are nominated, and readers decide the winners by voting publicly on a ballot page. The program name carries the year of its edition, so the current page is the 2025 Showcase and the earlier edition is the 2024 Showcase.

The ballot is hosted on Second Street, the promotions platform Gannett newspapers use for contests of this kind, under the Naples Daily News account. The ballot type is recorded as a VotingBallot, which is Second Street's standard public voting format: supporters open the page, move through the categories, and pick a favorite in each one they complete. There is no separate judging round described for this program, so the public vote is the whole competition.

The program sits on the newspaper's contest host, naplesnews.gannettcontests.com, alongside the other promotions the Naples Daily News publishes. Most of those neighbors are travel and prize sweepstakes, which makes the Showcase the newspaper's readers' choice ballot rather than another giveaway. The facts below are the ones the program's own publication supports.

The dated record for this ballot

The Showcase's confirmed editions are 2024 and 2025. Each edition lives on its own page on the gannettcontests.com host, with the year in the address, so the program's history can be read directly off its URLs. Two consecutive years also support treating the Showcase as an annual program, which is how the Naples Daily News structures its other recurring promotions on the same host.

The 2025 voting window is fully dated. Voting opened on April 4, 2025 and closed on April 28, 2025, a roughly three-and-a-half-week round that is now closed. A supporter arriving at the 2025 address today is looking at a finished ballot, not an open one, which is worth checking before submitting anything.

What the program has not published matters just as much. The Naples Daily News has not printed eligibility terms for nominees or voters, and no announcement of a 2026 edition exists yet; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Until the newspaper posts a new Showcase page with its own dates, the April 2025 window is the last confirmed voting period this program has, and any expectation about the next cycle should stay anchored to what a new ballot page actually states.

How a supporter votes on the Showcase ballot

Voting takes place on a Second Street VotingBallot, the platform's standard format for a Naples Daily News ballot of this kind. A supporter opens the Showcase page on naplesnews.gannettcontests.com, browses the categories, selects a favorite in each one they want to complete, and submits. No account requirement, no fee and no ballot fee tier is described anywhere in this program's publication, so the act of voting is the selection plus the submission.

The ballot is large for a single market. The Showcase covers local businesses and services across the Naples market, with the full category roster printed on each year's page, which means a supporter typically completes only the categories they care about rather than the whole list.

On frequency, a Naples-focused page for the program describes supporters voting up to once a day for their favorites, which is the standard daily-return pattern that makes a Showcase campaign stretch across the whole window rather than finishing in one visit. Whether that rule is restated identically on every edition is a ballot-level detail, and the terms printed on the live page for the cycle in question are the ones that govern that cycle's voting.

One practical note: the category links a business shares should point at the correct year's page, because the 2024 and 2025 addresses are both live on the same host and a supporter who lands on the wrong year cannot help the current cycle.

Where the Showcase sits among Florida ballots

The Showcase is one of several Florida readers' choice programs in this site's coverage, but it is the only one attached to the Naples Daily News and the only one voting on the gannettcontests.com host in this group. That distinction matters for rules and timing, because each program answers to its own publisher.

Statewide and regional neighbors include the Best of Florida Awards, which competes for attention across the whole state, and city-focused ballots such as the Best of Miami Readers' Poll and the Best of Orlando program. Each of those draws a different voter base, so a Naples business would not be traded off against them.

The Best of Tallahassee ballot and the Best of the Bay program cover other markets on the same logic, and CommunityVotes Boynton Beach represents the CommunityVotes brand's Florida footprint, a different organizer entirely.

What makes the Showcase distinct within this set is its publisher-plus-platform pairing: a Gannett newspaper running a Second Street ballot for its home market, covering local businesses and services across Naples. A supporter or business comparing programs should compare windows, rules and rosters program by program rather than assuming the Naples ballot behaves like any neighbor listed here.

Strengthening support in this Showcase

Because the Showcase rewards a daily return, the campaigns that perform best are the ones that make remembering easy. A Naples business can share its category link directly, name the category in every ask, and repeat the ask across the whole voting window instead of concentrating everything near the close on April 28.

The organizer's own terms are the boundary. The Naples Daily News publishes its voting conditions with each Showcase ballot, and the daily-vote pattern described for this program means any support strategy should fit inside the ballot's stated limits rather than testing them. A purchase, if one is under consideration, should be judged against this overview of award votes and the ballot's own terms first, and expectations should stay grounded: no route to more support removes the need for real customers who actually want to vote.