Annual Repurposed DooDad Sculpture Competition People's Choice Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the DooDad People's Choice Awards are and who runs them

The Annual Repurposed DooDad Sculpture Competition People's Choice Awards are the community-vote prize attached to a student art program in Tampa, Florida. The organizer is DooDad of Tampa, which describes its mission as inspiring students to create imaginative sculptures repurposing common objects, or doodads, following a specific theme. The program has been running since 2012, and the press release for the 2024 season billed that cycle as the 11th Annual Repurposed Doodad Sculpture Competition.

The People's Choice vote runs on DooDad of Tampa's own website, with no third-party polling service involved. The press page at doodadoftampa.org/press/ is the hub that links to each season's voting gallery, award winners and competition news. Because the ballot lives at doodadoftampa.org, the rules a supporter follows come from DooDad of Tampa itself, most notably the terms allowing one online vote every 24 hours.

The vertical here is a community best-of award: the audience is the Tampa art community, the schools and teachers who use the program's teacher resources, and the volunteers and sponsors who follow each season. For a nominating business or an artist's family trying to rally support, the practical question is how the ballot actually behaves, which the sections below answer from what the organizer publishes.

The dated record: which DooDad editions ran and when the window falls

The confirmed edition years for the People's Choice Awards are 2023, 2024 and 2025. DooDad of Tampa's site also carries a 2026 competition and gallery with its own award winners page, and a 2027 competition section is already listed in the site navigation, which is consistent with a program that keeps rolling forward each school year.

The 2024 cycle is the one with printed key dates. The press release states that the competition opened on November 20, 2024, and that December 20, 2024 was the deadline to upload sculpture images, entry information and video artist statements through the online link at doodadoftampa.org. The nomination and entry window therefore ran from late November through December 20, 2024, with the People's Choice voting gallery following the entry close.

The day-level open and close timing for the voting round itself is not printed anywhere on the site, so confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The category list for the ballot is also absent from the published pages, and no platform round dates exist beyond DooDad of Tampa's own season pages. A supporter or an entrant planning a push should treat the November 20 opening and the December 20 entry deadline as the fixed anchors and watch the gallery page for the voting window as it goes live.

How a supporter votes in the DooDad People's Choice gallery today

Voting takes little effort. A supporter visits the People's Choice gallery on the DooDad of Tampa site, browses the repurposed sculpture entries for the current season, selects a favorite and submits the vote through the online form. No nomination step is required from voters during the People's Choice round, because the entries were already uploaded by artists before the December deadline.

The terms and conditions on doodadoftampa.org set the frequency rule in plain language: one online vote every 24 hours. The same document notes that the system only counts unique votes, a measure DooDad of Tampa describes as countering vote fraud, and that the unique-vote count is not shown on the front end. For a supporter, that means returning the next day is the only way to vote again for the same sculpture, and for an entrant, it means the number of distinct people backing the entry matters more than repeat clicks from the same household.

Since doodadoftampa.org hosts the gallery itself, no external polling service stands between a supporter and the vote button in the way there is on hosted platforms. What the current gallery asks for before accepting a vote, if anything, is visible only on the live page, because the terms DooDad of Tampa publishes do not spell out a registration step.

How the DooDad ballot sits beside other Florida public votes

Florida readers comparing community ballots will find this one is structurally different from the state's media-run readers polls. The DooDad People's Choice Awards belong to a single arts organization in Tampa and live on that organization's own website, while programs like the Best of the Bay readers poll, the Best of Florida Awards and the Best of Miami Readers' Poll are publication-run best-of ballots with far larger category rosters.

The same contrast holds against the Best of Orlando readers choice poll, Best of Tallahassee and Best in Destin. Those ballots invite readers to name favorite businesses across dozens of categories; the DooDad ballot asks a community to pick favorite student sculptures made from repurposed objects. The subject matter, the entrant pool and the emotional stakes are entirely different, even though the underlying mechanic, a public online vote, is the same shape.

For an entrant, the practical difference is scale and audience. A DooDad supporter base is the artist's own school, family and neighborhood network in the Tampa area, not a publication's metro-wide readership. That makes personal outreach and the daily return rule the levers that matter, and it makes the unique-vote counting DooDad of Tampa runs the constraint any support effort has to respect.

Strengthening support for a DooDad entry without breaking the rules

Because the ballot allows one online vote per supporter every 24 hours, the effective strategy for a DooDad entrant is breadth plus repetition: reach as many distinct people as possible, and remind each of them to come back the next day. A sculpture backed by fifty people voting daily outruns one backed by a hundred who vote once and forget.

DooDad of Tampa's terms say the system counts only unique votes as an anti-fraud measure, so anything that generates duplicate or automated submissions simply does not register on the tally. The organization publishes no statement about purchased votes or outside promotion services, so the honest reading is that the 24-hour rule and the unique-vote counting are the whole rulebook visible to a supporter. For a fuller picture of what support campaigns look like in public votes like this, see the votes guide, and for the service side, the award votes page.