Monumental People's Choice Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

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

The Monumental People's Choice Awards are a public-vote award program run by Indy Chamber, the chamber of commerce whose name carries the Indianapolis market it serves. Within the best-of vertical, this ballot skips the jury stage: project submissions are put before supporters and the public vote decides the results. The ballot for the 2024 cycle was carried in a City of Carmel newsletter bulletin, which is why the voting link points to a City of Carmel bulletin page rather than a standalone contest site.

The program honors project submissions rather than individual businesses or people. The City of Carmel used its September 2024 newsletter to tell residents that the Carmel Redevelopment Commission was nominated in 3 Indy Chamber Monumental Awards categories for its work developing the community. That framing matters for supporters: the unit of competition is a project, and the organizer states that each project submission, regardless of finalist status, has a chance to win. A project that did not make the finalist cut is still live on the ballot.

The essentials are set out below.

Everything a supporter needs for the current cycle sits on the ballot page itself, and this page keeps to what the 2024 newsletter actually printed.

The dated record for the Monumental People's Choice Awards

This program has two confirmed edition years: 2024 and 2025. The 2024 edition is the one with a printed window, because the City of Carmel newsletter of Sept. 6, 2024 carried the ballot and stated the dates plainly. Voting ran Sept. 6 through Sept. 8, closing on Sept. 8, and the winners in each category were to be awarded at the Monumental Awards on Oct. 4. That gives the 2024 cycle a three-day public vote followed by an awards event less than a month later.

The 2025 edition is confirmed as a year the program ran, but the newsletter page does not print that cycle's open or close dates, so the 2025 window cannot be stated here. The same holds for 2026: the program has run in consecutive years, yet no date for the next cycle appears on the page that carried the 2024 ballot. Indy Chamber has not put the full category roster or any per-supporter voting rule on the newsletter page; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

The shortness of the 2024 window is worth restating because it shapes every supporter plan: a vote that opens and closes inside a single September weekend leaves no slack for a late start. Anyone backing a Carmel Redevelopment Commission project or any other nominated submission needed to act inside those three days, and the same pressure presumably applies to whatever dates the chamber prints for the current cycle.

How a supporter votes in the Monumental People's Choice Awards today

The literal mechanic is a public vote over a short window. A supporter opens the ballot page, reviews the project submissions listed for the cycle, and registers support for the entries they want to back. The organizer's own framing removes a common confusion: each project submission, regardless of finalist status, has a chance to win. A supporter does not need to guess which entries are still competitive, because every listed submission is live.

The 2024 ballot reached supporters through the City of Carmel newsletter, sent Sept. 6, 2024, the same day the window opened. That delivery method tells supporters something practical: the ballot is distributed by civic channels rather than a national contest platform, and the instructions shown on the page at voting time are the ones that govern. If the ballot asks for identification, a like, a click-through or a confirmation, the page itself is the authority for that cycle.

What the newsletter does not settle is the fine print. Nothing on the page addresses repeat voting, daily returns or supporter eligibility, so a supporter planning organized pushes should follow whatever the live page displays rather than importing a rule from another chamber program. The window is the hardest constraint: Sept. 6 through Sept. 8 in 2024 left roughly a long weekend, and the Oct. 4 awards event followed quickly, so both the voting push and the wait for results are compressed into a few weeks each September.

How this ballot sits beside its Indiana neighbours

Indiana runs a crowded field of public-vote best-of programs, and the Monumental People's Choice Awards differ from most of them in who organizes the ballot and what competes on it. Indy Chamber is a chamber of commerce, and the entries are project submissions, notably the Carmel Redevelopment Commission's community development work, rather than the restaurants, shops and service businesses that fill most reader's-choice ballots.

The nearest structural neighbour is Best of Indiana, a statewide best-of program. The CommunityVotes family runs separate city ballots: CommunityVotes Bloomington IN Best Of, CommunityVotes Evansville Best Of and CommunityVotes Fort Wayne Best Of. Northern Indiana adds YourChoiceAwards South Bend Best Of and Best of Elkhart County, the latter run by a local newspaper.

What makes the Monumental ballot distinct is its civic anchoring. The City of Carmel used an official resident newsletter to distribute the 2024 ballot, the window was a three-day September sprint, and the results feed the Monumental Awards event on Oct. 4 rather than a standalone announcement. A supporter moving between Indiana ballots should treat each program's dates, categories and rules as its own, because the chamber's compressed window and project-based entries do not transfer to the city best-of programs listed above.

Strengthening support for a Carmel project in a three-day window

A window that opens and closes between Sept. 6 and Sept. 8, as the 2024 cycle did, rewards preparation over improvisation. The organizer's structure gives every nominated project a chance to win regardless of finalist status, so the practical task is simple: make sure the people who care about a project know the ballot is live before it closes on Sept. 8. For a Carmel Redevelopment Commission submission that means residents, business partners and city staff who followed the development work.

On the newsletter page, Indy Chamber says nothing about outside assistance, purchased support or automated voting tools, so no organizer rule either permits or bans them for this program. What is certain is the window: three days in the 2024 cycle, with winners awarded at the Monumental Awards on Oct. 4. A push that starts after the close helps nobody, and a push spread across a month would outrun this ballot entirely. Supporters who want a broader playbook for short public windows can read how to get more votes online, and anyone weighing paid support should first read buying award votes and the organizer's own terms on the live ballot.