NACE Hawai'i 'Ekahi Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Hawai'i 'Ekahi Awards is and who runs it

The Hawai'i 'Ekahi Awards is a public-vote awards programme presented by NACE Hawaii, a local non-profit organization that promotes networking and education to event industry professionals from Hawaii. The chapter sits inside the national NACE structure, and its awards programme is aimed at the businesses and people who stage weddings, galas, conferences and private events across the state. On this site the programme is filed under the best-of vertical, because the ballot asks supporters to pick standouts rather than judge entries against a rubric.

Unlike most ballots of this kind, the vote is not outsourced to a third-party contest platform. The form is hosted in-house at nacehawaii.com/nace-ekahi-awards, alongside the chapter's member directory, events calendar and past winners listing. That matters to a nominating business in a practical way: every link in a supporter outreach campaign points back to a domain the organizer itself controls, so there is no separate voting platform whose terms sit on top of the organizer's rules.

The ballot page carries the chapter's own tagline, asking visitors whether they are the standout in their field, and it links directly to both the voting form and ticket sales for the gala. For a Hawaii event professional deciding where to spend outreach effort, the programme is small and focused: one organizer, one state, one industry, and a public vote that runs on the chapter's own site.

The dated record for the 2026 cycle

The ballot page lays out its upcoming deadlines in two steps. Entries and nominations opened in August 2026. Nominees were then announced and online voting opened in September 2026, which is the window the page confirms as live. The organizer has also told visitors to stay tuned for more information on the Awards Ceremony & Gala, so the celebration that follows the vote has not been dated on the ballot page yet.

Only the months are published. NACE Hawaii has not printed the specific days on which the nomination period and the voting window begin and end, and it has not printed the hours through which the ballot stays open on the final day. A supporter planning a last-week push, or a nominee deciding when to ask clients, has to read the live page for those details.

This is the first confirmed edition; whether it returns next year is not yet published; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The chapter's own materials frame the programme as a celebration it is proud to present, and the site keeps a past winners listing, but no future cycle is dated anywhere on the ballot page.

Two further gaps sit alongside the dates. The page publishes no category roster, so the fields a nominee can enter are only visible once the ballot itself is live. And no per-supporter voting rule, no eligibility terms and no cap of any kind appear on the awards page. Each of those is a fact a business would want before planning outreach, and each has to come from the live ballot rather than from anything published in advance.

How a supporter votes on the Ekahi ballot

The mechanic is deliberately simple. From the Hawai'i 'Ekahi Awards page on nacehawaii.com, a supporter follows the vote here link, which leads to the ballot hosted on the same domain. The organizer's published description of the voting step reads: "The public will be able to submit their vote for each of the categories." In other words, a voter is invited to move through the whole ballot, not to pick a single field, which is good news for a nominee whose supporters are willing to complete the full form.

What the page does not describe is any verification step. There is no published requirement to create an account, to confirm an email address, or to limit how often a person may submit. That silence cuts both ways for a nominee: it keeps friction low for genuine supporters, and it also means nobody can quote a daily-vote rule with confidence, because NACE Hawaii has not written one on the page.

For a Hawaii event business, the practical outreach sequence is short. Send supporters the ballot link during the September 2026 window, ask them to complete every category where the business appears, and point them back to the organizer's own page rather than to any mirror of it. Because the form sits on the chapter's domain, the link a client clicks is the same link the organizer promotes, which removes the broken-link risk that third-party platforms sometimes create. Supporters who want broader tactics can read our guide to getting more votes online, and the ethics of asking versus paying is covered in our legality overview.

How this ballot sits beside its Hawaii neighbours

Hawaii has a crowded best-of field, and the Ekahi ballot is the industry-specific corner of it. Six sibling programmes cover the state more broadly: the AIA Honolulu People's Choice Awards, Best of Hawaii, the Hawaii Business Magazine People's Choice Award, the Hawaii Home + Remodeling Readers' Choice Awards, and the HAWAIʻI Magazine Readers' Choice Awards with its Big Island edition. Each answers to its own publisher and runs on its own calendar.

What separates the Ekahi ballot from those neighbours is the audience and the host. The magazine and readers-choice programmes address the general public across the state, while NACE Hawaii addresses the events industry and invites that industry's clients to vote. And where most Hawaii ballots are hosted on media or contest platforms, this one runs on the chapter's own website, so the organizer controls the form, the deadlines and the past winners listing directly.

For a nominating business, that difference shapes strategy. A caterer or florist might appear in a general readers-choice ballot and on the Ekahi ballot in the same season, and the two audiences overlap only partly. Industry peers vote in both; the general public mostly votes in the magazine ballots. Outreach for the Ekahi window should lean on past clients and vendor partners who know the work, while a state-wide readers-choice push can be much broader. None of the sibling programmes shares this ballot's URL, its deadlines or its organizer, so a vote in one carries no weight toward any other.