The Rising In Community Excellence (RICE) Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

What sets the RICE Awards apart from Georgia's best-of ballots

Most public votes a Georgia supporter encounters are published by a media outlet. Best of Atlanta belongs to a magazine, Best of Cobb runs through Cobb Life, and Best of Forsyth sits with a county newspaper. The Rising In Community Excellence (RICE) Awards breaks that pattern: the ballot is owned and hosted by the honors program itself, The RICE Awards Foundation Inc., with no publisher between the supporter and the vote. That single difference shapes everything else about how the ballot behaves.

The foundation is Atlanta-based, and its program honors what its own materials call unsung heroes, with fields such as Business of the Year and a non-profit honor on the ballot. Nominees carry their cities with them, so a supporter sees Edwards Jones of Fayetteville or Mulan's Restaurant of Morrow listed by name and place rather than as an abstract entry. The gala dimension is also unusual for this vertical: the foundation stages an event, sold tickets for it, and held the 2025 ceremony on September 27 at 4 p.m. at Atlanta City Hall.

Dr. C. Chandon Carter, a radio personality and philanthropist, founded the program in 2010, and the site's copyright line still reads The 15th Annual Rice Awards across 2011 to 2025. The table gathers the fixed facts a supporter or nominee needs.

The dated record for the RICE Awards vote

The winners archive on thericeawards.com holds dedicated pages for the 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2024 editions, each titled as that year's winners and honorees. The archive adds 2025 and 2026, giving confirmed editions in 2020, 2021, 2022, 2024, 2025 and 2026 with 2019 also archived. The 2023 slot is absent from the archive, so the run has not been unbroken on the published winners pages.

The 2026 vote is dated precisely: September 7 through 21, with the ballot telling supporters to return every 24 hours. The foundation has kept the vote in September across recent cycles, and the 2025 event detail page carried the ceremony date of September 27, 2025 at 4 p.m. at Atlanta City Hall, shortly after that year's window closed.

A nomination round precedes the vote in the program's published cycle. The nominate page showed a deadline of July 25, 2023 in an earlier cycle, which places nominations well before the September ballot opens. The full category roster is the one thing the ballot page leaves out; the vote page surfaces Business of the Year and a non-profit honor, but the complete list of fields is something to confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Day-level open and close dates beyond the 2026 window, and any eligibility rule for voters, are likewise absent from the published pages.

How a supporter votes in the RICE Awards today

The mechanic is as plain as this vertical gets. A supporter opens the vote page on thericeawards.com during the September 7 to 21 window, scrolls the categories on offer, picks a nominee, and submits. Because thericeawards.com carries the ballot directly, no outside platform, no publisher landing page and no separate sign-in flow sits between the supporter and the nominee list.

The one published condition is rhythm: the ballot instructs supporters to return every 24 hours. That instruction makes the daily return the core unit of support in this program, and it is the instruction the foundation itself chose to print at the top of the vote page. A supporter who votes once and leaves has used a fraction of the ballot's own design.

The page prints no ceiling on participation beyond that daily rhythm, and no account requirement is described anywhere on the vote flow. The foundation also sells gala tickets through the same site, but ticket purchase is a separate action from the free vote, and nothing on the ballot ties the two together.

For a nominee's team, the practical sequence is therefore simple: confirm the window is open, send supporters to the exact vote page, and ask them to come back each day through September 21. The foundation's own instruction is the only rule printed on the ballot, so building a push around the daily return keeps a campaign aligned with what the organizer has actually published.

Where the RICE ballot sits among its Georgia neighbours

Georgia's public-vote landscape splits cleanly into two shapes, and the RICE Awards is the rarer one. The media-published ballots, including the Best of Atlanta program, Best of Cobb and Best of Forsyth, are reader's-choice contests run by publications whose ballots double as audience engagement. The RICE Awards answers to a foundation instead, and its ballot exists to feed a gala, not a publication's audience metrics.

The same split holds across the state. The Athens Community's Choice Awards, Best of Augusta and Best of Middle Georgia each answer to their own publisher, while the RICE ballot answers only to The RICE Awards Foundation Inc. For a nominee, that means the rules, the window and the gala calendar all come from one organizer rather than from a media company's contest desk.

The market focus differs too. The media ballots spread across counties and regions, but the RICE program is anchored to Atlanta and honours businesses and non-profits by name and city, from Fayetteville to Morrow. Its September window also sits inside the same month as several of the publication-run votes, so an Atlanta business can find itself on more than one Georgia ballot in a single season, with the RICE daily-return mechanic demanding the most sustained supporter effort of the set.

Strengthening support in the RICE Awards vote

This ballot rewards one behaviour above all others: the daily return. Because the foundation prints an every-24-hours instruction on the vote page, a nominee's most effective free play is a reminder cadence that matches it, asking each supporter to come back on every day of the September 7 to 21 window rather than voting once and moving on.

No position on outside help appears on the ballot, and no rule addresses coordinated campaigns, so a nominee carries the uncertainty. The conservative reading is to keep any push inside the ballot's own rhythm and to avoid anything that would look irregular against a two-week daily pattern. General outreach methods suited to a daily-return award ballot are set out at get more votes online.

A nominee weighing purchased support should check the foundation's rules first and the service terms second; the reference pages on this site describe both without promising any outcome.