2026 Bonita Springs Community's Choice Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

What sets the Bonita Springs Community's Choice Awards apart from Florida's other best-of ballots

Most best-of programs in Florida answer to a chamber of commerce, an alternative weekly or a statewide publisher. This one answers to a single Gannett newspaper. The 2026 Bonita Springs Community's Choice Awards is organized by the Naples Daily News, the daily paper for the Naples market, and it narrows its focus to one city: Bonita Springs, the community just south of Naples. That single-city focus is the contrast with the siblings listed alongside it on this site, which tend to cover a whole region or the entire state.

The ballot runs on Second Street, the contest platform behind the newspaper's contests domain, and the 2026 edition lived at naplesnews.gannettcontests.com. The promotion type is a Ballot/VotingBallot, which is Second Street's public-vote format: supporters pick nominees in open categories and the totals decide the winners. It is a business-vertical program, a best-of contest rather than a sweepstakes, even though it sits on the same domain as the paper's sweepstakes promotions.

Because the publisher is a newspaper with a print product, the program has a feature many online-only ballots lack: a commemorative printed section in the Naples Daily News carrying the finalists and winners with their details. For a Bonita Springs business, that print placement is part of what winning means here, and it is a difference worth understanding before comparing this ballot with any other Florida program.

The dated record: which editions ran and when the 2026 window opened and closed

Four editions of the Bonita Springs Community's Choice Awards are confirmed: 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026. Each ran on the Naples Daily News contests platform, and the program is described by the organizer as an annual community voting event recognizing local businesses, organizations and communities that make a meaningful impact throughout the Bonita Springs area. The earliest platform activity dates to December 2023, and the series has carried through to the 2026 edition without a gap year.

The 2026 voting window ran from June 10 through June 25, 2026, and that round is closed. The 2026 ballot carried the Ballot/VotingBallot promotion type on Second Street, the same format as prior editions. A nomination phase precedes voting in this program's structure, with nominees settled before the June voting round opens, though the exact nomination dates for the 2026 cycle were not retained in a usable form and should be read from the live ballot pages.

Each edition leaves its own trail on the contests domain: a main ballot page, a nomination page and a winners page, with the same three-page pattern repeated for 2024 and 2025. Winners and finalists from each cycle are also published in a commemorative printed section in the Naples Daily News. For the next cycle, expected in 2027, the dates will be printed on the live ballot when the newspaper opens the round.

How a supporter votes on the Bonita Springs ballot today

The mechanic on this ballot is a daily public vote. The organizer's published rule states that you can vote once a day per category when the voting round is active. In practice that means a supporter opens the 2026 ballot on the Naples Daily News contests site, picks a category from the ballot's broad list spanning the Bonita Springs business community, selects a nominee, and submits. The allowance then resets, so the same supporter can return the following day and vote again in that same category, and can also vote in different categories on the same visit.

That per-category daily structure is the fact that shapes everything about campaigning here. A nominee's total is built by repeat visits across the days of the June window, not by a single push. Second Street is the platform behind the ballot, and the voting URL for the 2026 edition is the program page on naplesnews.gannettcontests.com, with a parallel nomination page used earlier in the cycle and a winners page published after the close.

What the published material does not spell out is the fine print around the mechanic: whether an account or email verification sits in front of the vote button, and whether any eligibility restriction applies to who may take part. Neither an eligibility rule for voters nor any overall cap beyond the daily limit appears in the published rules; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Everything else a supporter needs, the category list, the nominees and the round dates, is printed on the ballot itself when the round is live.

Where this ballot sits among its Florida neighbours

The Bonita Springs Community's Choice Awards is the most locally scoped program in its group. Its siblings on this site are broader: the Best of Florida Awards covers the entire state, the Best of Miami Readers' Poll and Best of Orlando anchor large metros, the Best of Tallahassee ballot serves the panhandle capital, the Best of the Bay program covers the Tampa Bay region, and CommunityVotes Boynton Beach runs a single-city format on a different platform altogether.

What makes the Bonita Springs ballot different is the publisher behind it. It is the only one of the group run by the Naples Daily News, and the only one whose winners are carried into a printed newspaper section. Its market is also the smallest named community in the set: a single city in the Naples coverage area rather than a metro or a state. For a Bonita Springs business, that means the competitive field is the local business community itself, not hundreds of nominees spread across a region.

The trade-off is scale. A statewide or metro ballot draws a larger voting audience, while a single-city ballot concentrates attention where the nominees actually operate. Supporters comparing programs should also note the timing: this ballot's 2026 round closed in June, while several sibling programs run on different calendars, so a business active in more than one Florida market will not be campaigning in all of them at once.

Strengthening support in the Bonita Springs Community's Choice Awards

Everything about this ballot rewards the daily habit. Because the published rule allows a vote once a day per category, a nominee's most reliable gain comes from supporters who return on many of the days of the June window, not from a single announcement. The practical play for a Bonita Springs business is to name the exact category, give supporters the direct link to the ballot, and remind them the next day and the day after, since each day is a fresh allowance in every category they care about.

Stay inside the organizer's frame. The Naples Daily News publishes the rules on its own ballot, and the stated daily limit is the boundary a campaign should respect; a push that looks like automated voting puts an entry at risk under any ballot's enforcement. Support that comes from real customers asked in person, by email or on social channels fits the format exactly as designed. For a fuller walkthrough of outreach that works on public-vote ballots, see our votes guide, and for the rules and legality questions behind paid support, the legality page covers the position in detail.