2026 Florida Power and Light Power Play Award (naplesnews): How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Power Play Award is and who stands behind it

The problem a nominated business usually hits with this program is identification. The name reads like a utility sponsorship, the ballot lives on a Gannett contests domain, and nothing on the listing explains the chain of custody. The chain is short: the 2026 Florida Power and Light Power Play Award is run by the Naples Daily News, the Naples, Florida newspaper whose domain is naplesnews.com, and it is built on the Second Street contest platform at naplesnews.gannettcontests.com.

The promotion is registered under the UGCVoting and UGCVotingVideo types, which marks it as a user-generated voting award rather than a sweepstakes or an editorial pick. In the vertical taxonomy it sits in the best-of family: a business-award ballot where nominees are entries and the public decides. The market is Naples, Florida, and the program is a US contest in the state of Florida.

That matters for a business because the organizer is a newsroom publisher, not a trade association or a chamber. A Naples Daily News award puts a business in front of the paper's own readership, and the ballot URL is the single place the program lives online.

Everything a supporter needs to verify the program is on that ballot page; everything the organizer has chosen not to print is simply absent from it.

The dated trail: editions, the 2026 window and what is missing

The confirmed history for this program is two editions deep. The Power Play Award ran in 2025 and again in 2026, and those edition years are what qualify it as an annual program in the Naples market. A 2027 edition is the next expected run, though Naples Daily News has not yet published anything about it.

The 2026 edition has a precise shape. Voting opened on April 7, 2026 and closed on May 1, 2026, a window of a little under a month, and the edition is now closed. That window is the single dated fact a business can act on: anybody arriving at the ballot today is looking at a closed listing, not a live form.

What the published trail does not carry is just as important for a nominee planning a push. Naples Daily News has not printed the award's category list, its per-supporter voting rule, or its eligibility terms anywhere on the published ballot; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The absence is a property of this program specifically: the platform listing gives dates and format but no field structure, and no rules text exists for the award anywhere in what has been published.

For a business, the practical reading is this. The window is knowable, the platform is knowable, the organizer is knowable. The competitive structure of the ballot is not, and it will only become visible when the 2027 edition opens and prints its own form.

How a supporter votes in the Power Play Award today

The voting action on this Naples ballot is a straightforward public choice on a Second Street form, but the format detail is worth spelling out because it shapes what a supporter actually sees. The promotion is registered as UGCVoting with UGCVotingVideo, meaning nominees are user-generated entries rather than a pre-printed list, and an entry can carry a video alongside its ballot listing.

During a live window, a supporter goes to the ballot at naplesnews.gannettcontests.com, finds the Naples business they want to back among the submitted entries, selects it and submits the vote through the form. Because entries are user-generated, a business that wants support has to make sure its entry is findable on the ballot before asking anybody to vote.

Right now the literal action a supporter takes is none of that, because the 2026 edition closed on May 1, 2026. The ballot page remains a closed listing. The same sequence restarts when the 2027 window opens, and the dates for that edition are not yet published.

Two things a supporter should not assume: that the form allows unlimited repeat voting, and that an account is or is not required. Neither detail is printed for this award, and Second Street forms differ promotion by promotion, so when the next edition opens, the live form settles both questions.

Where this ballot sits among Florida's best-of programs

The Power Play Award is a small, single-market program, and the clearest way to see that is against the other Florida ballots in the same family. The state carries a set of larger best-of programs: the Best of Florida Awards, which span the whole state, the Best of Miami Readers' Poll, the Best of Orlando ballot, Best of Tallahassee, Best of the Bay and Best in Destin.

What separates the Power Play Award from all of them is scale and sponsorship shape. Those six are broad readers-choice polls with many categories across a metro or a region. The Power Play Award is a Naples Daily News promotion with a sponsor-style name, a user-generated entry format with video, and a short spring window. It answers to the Naples Daily News alone, not to any of the state-wide programs.

There is also a publisher connection worth knowing: the same publisher runs the Bonita Springs Community's Choice Awards, a neighbouring program in the same corner of Florida. A business nominated in the Power Play Award may therefore encounter the publisher's contest family elsewhere in the market, but the two are separate ballots with separate rules.

For a nominee deciding where to invest effort, the difference is concentration. A Naples-specific award with a short window concentrates local attention in a way a state-wide poll does not, which is exactly why the unpublished per-supporter rule carries extra weight on this ballot compared with a longer-runway poll.

Strengthening support for a Power Play Award nomination

A business nominated in this Naples award works with a short window and a public form, so preparation before April matters more than a late push. The organizer has printed nothing about outside help for this program, which means a nominee cannot quote a permitted-or-banned line; the safe posture is to mobilise genuine customers and let them each vote as the live form allows.

Concretely: make sure the entry is complete and findable on the ballot, tell customers the exact window dates once the 2027 edition prints them, and ask for support while the form is open rather than after it closes on its published end date. The tactics that work for public-vote award ballots generally are collected in our votes guide, and the award-specific service options sit at the award votes page for nominees weighing outside help against the organizer's unpublished terms.

Because the per-supporter rule for this ballot is not printed anywhere, any repeat-voting plan should wait until the live form shows what it permits.