Best of the Region (NWI Times): How Voting Works & How to Win

Three counties, one ballot — why Best of the Region doesn't work like a normal readers' poll

Drive from Hammond to La Porte and you cross most of Northwest Indiana's identity: steel-town grit near the Illinois line, university energy in Valparaiso, lakefront tourism in Michigan City. Best of the Region puts a business from any of those towns on the exact same ballot. That's the whole design.

The Times of Northwest Indiana (Times Media Company), publisher of nwi.com, runs it as one region-wide program rather than the city-by-city format most Indiana papers use. Lake, Porter, and LaPorte counties vote together. A Munster dentist and a Portage auto shop can end up in adjacent rows of the same category. The official hub sits at nwi.com/contests/readerschoice/, with the live public ballot at nwi.com/bestof.

Why bother building a three-county ballot instead of twelve small-town ones? Reach. Nearly three-quarters of a million votes came in during the 2025 cycle, a number no single-town Indiana best-of program gets close to. More than 800 businesses were named winners at an in-person event at County Line Orchard. That scale is the payoff for merging the counties; it's also why category placement matters more here than it would on a smaller ballot.

For state-level context, see the Indiana contest hub; for the national picture, the USA contest index.

What the 800-winner spread actually tells a Hammond or Dyer business

Hundreds of categories, 800-plus winners, one region. That spread is the clearest signal in the program's own numbers: this isn't a contest where three or four marquee categories soak up all the attention and everything else is an afterthought. Food and dining, retail, services, health, home, and professional categories all produced named winners in the most recent cycle.

What that means practically: a Schererville family dentist competing in a niche health subcategory has roughly the same shot at being one of those 800 as a Merrillville restaurant in a crowded dining category, assuming both get their real customers to actually vote. Category size varies, sure. But nothing in the published mechanic weights small towns down or big commercial corridors up.

Category fit beats category ambition

The mistake is picking the broadest-sounding category instead of the one where existing customers will recognize the listing instantly. A Highland service business that enters a vague "Home Services" bucket competes against every plumber, roofer, and HVAC company in three counties. The same business, correctly placed in its exact subcategory, competes against a much shorter, more relevant list.

For a broader campaign framework that applies once the category is locked in, see best business award voting.

The nomination-to-ballot pipeline, and where businesses actually lose ground

Best of the Region runs three stages every year: reader nominations, a public voting window, then the winners event. Miss the nomination stage and a business simply never reaches the public ballot, no amount of customer enthusiasm in the voting window fixes that later. This page doesn't fix specific dates for the current cycle, since the calendar shifts year to year; check nwi.com/bestof before printing anything with a deadline on it.

A business planning a promotion calendar around a nomination-to-ballot cycle outside Northwest Indiana can compare notes in the general awards voting guide.

Daily voting, and why the reminder message matters more than the platform

The organizer's language is unusually plain: vote daily at nwi.com/bestof. No ambiguity, no "vote once and you're done." That single instruction is really the whole mechanic: supporters can return across the entire window, provided they follow whatever per-day rule the live ballot shows at that moment. See how online votes work for the general mechanics that apply across most fan-vote and readers-choice formats.

What actually moves the needle isn't the platform. It's whether the reminder message survives contact with a Northwest Indiana inbox that's also getting nomination requests from a dozen other local businesses. A cluttered ask gets ignored. A five-second one (award, category, nominee name, the daily rule, the link) gets acted on.

Split the message by town if the business serves several communities, but keep the voting instruction word-for-word identical across every version. Consistency there matters more than customization.

Restaurants weighing a food-category push can also check the restaurant voting guide for reminder patterns that translate directly into Best of the Region's dining group.

Reading the Northwest Indiana map before building the campaign

Twelve towns sit inside the Lake-Porter-LaPorte footprint, and each one pulls differently. Hammond and Gary carry deep community-loyalty currents near the Illinois border. Valparaiso layers university-connected voters on top of longtime residents. Michigan City adds a tourism dimension the inland towns don't have at all.

That's the real difference between Best of the Region and something like Best of Kokomo: a single-city ballot lets a business assume everyone shares one identity. Here, the winning campaigns are the ones that treat Hammond and Michigan City as different audiences entirely, not one undifferentiated "Region." For how a comparable multi-county program runs elsewhere, see Best of New Jersey.

Running the campaign without crossing a line the organizer would flag

Nothing about a strong Best of the Region push requires bots or fake accounts. The instruction is daily voting from real supporters, so the entire job is making that easy and repeated, not manufacturing traffic that doesn't exist. Fabricated sponsor claims and "winner" language before results post are the two fastest ways to damage a brand that actually wins.

Local personalities with an existing public following can check the influencer voting guide for reminder patterns suited to a fan-facing category rather than a storefront one.

How to use a Best of the Region result once it's official

No verified winners list sits on this page, on purpose. Old PDFs, screenshots, and reseller pages circulate well past the year they were accurate for, and copying one is how a business ends up claiming a title it never actually held. The Times of Northwest Indiana's own published result, for the specific year and category, is the only source worth trusting.

Precision beats volume in the copy that follows. "Best of the Region 2025 winner, [official category name]" survives scrutiny; "Region's best" with no year or category attached does not. Before results post, "nominated" or "vote for us" is the honest framing — not a preview of a result nobody has confirmed yet.

The same discipline applies to any paid help along the way: creative, reminders, landing pages, and real voter outreach can extend reach, but no promoter controls the organizer's review or the final count.