Best Things — Indianapolis Community's Choice Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

A gala at the end of a ballot most programs never bother with

Most readers-choice business awards end with a webpage. Best Things ends with a room full of the people who actually won. IndyStar, part of Gannett's USA TODAY Network, runs the Community's Choice Awards for the Indianapolis metro on the YourChoiceAwards platform, and the program closes out its cycle two ways at once: a printed IndyStar announcement, and a gala where honorees are recognized in person.

That combination matters more than it sounds. A single online winners page is easy to fake a screenshot of. A gala with actual attendees is not. Businesses weighing whether a "Best Things" claim they see elsewhere is real have a second, harder-to-fabricate signal to check against, beyond whatever a competitor posts to social media.

See the Indiana contest hub for how this program compares to the state's other public-vote programs, including a separate readers-choice ballot in the same city.

140+ categories means picking a lane, not a headline

A business with a strong customer base can still lose a nomination round entirely by entering the wrong category. That is the real risk inside a 140-plus-category structure, since the ballot is not one popularity contest, it is dozens of parallel ones running under a single program name.

Enter where regulars already look, not where the label sounds biggest

A neighborhood diner that also caters events could plausibly enter under either a dining category or a broader food-service one. Pick the broad option and it faces every restaurant in the metro. Pick the specific one and it faces a field its actual customers already recognize on sight. Getting this wrong does not just cost a few nominations. It can bury a genuinely popular business under a label nobody searching for it by name ever checks.

For the broader mechanics behind any nominate-then-vote award, award-style vote campaigns covers ground that applies directly to how Best Things structures its own categories.

Plan around the tally gap, not just the two visible windows

Two stages are visible: the nomination round, and the finalist vote. A third, invisible one sits between them, and it is the one businesses most often forget to plan for. IndyStar and YourChoiceAwards close nominations, tally the leading names per category, and build the finalist ballot with zero public activity in between. There is nothing to check, click, or campaign for until the vote itself opens.

A business that runs a separate seasonal promotion in the same stretch can compare notes with the photo contest voting guide, since both formats punish a single last-minute push more than they reward it.

Indianapolis doesn't vote as one market, and Best Things reflects that

A downtown Indianapolis law firm and a Fishers auto shop can both carry a "Best Things" nomination in the same year. They will never once appear on the same category ballot, because Best Things groups by business type, not by geography, and the metro itself splits along suburb lines that the ballot doesn't erase, it just runs underneath.

An Avon home-services company's outreach should read differently from a downtown law firm's, even inside the identical program. A founder-led business where the owner's own visibility drives trust can also see the personal-brand vote outreach guide for framing reminders around a named principal rather than a generic company voice.

What hasn't been confirmed, and why that limits any claim

No public year-by-year winners archive or vote-total dataset exists for Best Things on the record checked for this page. That absence isn't a hole in this guide. It's the actual shape of the program right now, and it means old screenshots, reseller pages, or a competitor's unverified claim should be treated as unproven until checked against IndyStar's own printed result.

The standard that follows from that is simple. "Nominated" and "finalist" describe accurate, in-progress status the moment those stages happen. "Winner" only applies once IndyStar's print announcement or the gala has named the specific year and category. A founder saying "Best Things finalist, Home Services, pending results" is honest. Skipping straight to "Indianapolis's favorite" before either confirmation exists is not, and it risks a claim IndyStar has never actually made.

None of this changes what legitimate outreach looks like day to day: real customers, a clear category name, and a direct link, repeated without exaggeration. A business weighing whether to run paid reminder traffic alongside organic outreach can compare the actual tradeoffs at buying votes online before committing a budget to either.