Best of Des Moines (Business Record): How Voting Works & How to Win

There's no shortlist to make. That's the whole game.

Most Des Moines readers-choice programs work the same way: nominate first, then vote on whoever cleared that bar. The Business Record skips the first step entirely. Open businessrecord.com/best-of-des-moines/ and the survey itself is the ballot, one continuous page, 75 categories, an open text field under each. A reader writes in the business name directly. No dropdown of pre-qualified finalists sits between the two.

That single structural choice changes what a campaign actually needs. A nominate-then-vote contest rewards whoever mobilizes hardest during the narrow qualifying window. An open-survey format rewards spelling consistency and reach across the whole submission period, since every entry is competing from zero, all at once, in the same pass.

A trade-publication survey running thirteen straight years has settled formats before, and it's worth checking the live page each cycle rather than assuming last year's category list carries over untouched. See the Iowa contest hub for how this compares to the state's other public-vote programs.

Seventy-five categories is a different problem than five

Best Bank sits a few rows from Best Credit Union, which sits a few rows from Best Company to Work For. That's not padding. The Business Record built a survey wide enough to cover most of what a Greater Des Moines business reader actually interacts with in a working week, banking, insurance, legal counsel, staffing, commercial real estate, alongside the employer-facing categories that most metro best-of polls skip entirely.

Guessing the wrong category costs the whole entry

A regional credit union and a community bank both plausibly belong somewhere in the finance cluster. But Best Bank and Best Credit Union are separate rows, and an entry split across both dilutes rather than doubles the write-in count. Confirm the exact category label on the live survey before asking anyone to submit.

For the underlying mechanics of running any award-style push honestly, see award vote campaign planning. A founder whose own name carries weight with clients can also look at personal-brand vote outreach for framing that names a principal alongside the survey link.

What thirteen years of running this survey actually tells a business

The 2025 edition was the Business Record's 13th consecutive Best of Des Moines survey. Thirteen years is long enough that most of the metro's larger employers, banks, and professional firms have been through this format before, some more than once.

That matters for a first-time entrant in a quiet way. A newer business isn't just competing against a name; it's competing against readers who already have a habit of writing in the same handful of institutions every year out of familiarity. Breaking that pattern takes more than one reminder email. It takes the same message repeated across the whole open window, not a single launch push followed by silence.

No public archive of past winners by category exists on this listing, and the Business Record's own site is the only place that record actually lives. A business sizing up how competitive a category has historically been should check the paper's past coverage directly rather than relying on secondhand claims.

One employer-facing category most best-of polls skip

Best Company to Work For sits on this ballot next to consumer-facing categories like banking and finance. That's unusual. Most metro readers-choice surveys run entirely on customer sentiment, restaurants, retail, services. An employer-recognition category flips the audience: the people submitting are staff, current and former, not customers.

A business chasing that specific category needs an internal message, not a customer-facing one. Employees who already speak well of a workplace in exit interviews or on hiring calls are a warmer audience for this particular row than any external client list, and treating it like a customer campaign wastes the actual advantage a good employer already has.

See getting people to vote for you for the general approach to reaching a real, willing audience, since the same discipline, ask people who already mean it, applies whether the reader base is customers or staff.

Des Moines has three separate ballots. This is the finance-heavy one.

A Des Moines business chasing metro recognition is realistically tracking three different organizers: the Business Record's open survey covered here, the CommunityVotes nominate-then-vote ballot at desmoines.communityvotes.com, and CITYVIEW's Metro's Best. Each runs its own category list, its own timing, and its own submission format. None of them share a results page.

Treating these as one contest under different logos is the fastest way to miss a deadline or submit under the wrong category label. A bank chasing Best Bank here gets nothing from also chasing a CommunityVotes restaurant category; the reader bases barely overlap.

What isn't confirmed, and how to word a claim honestly

No public winners list by category exists on this page, and old PDFs or secondhand recaps floating around don't carry the Business Record's authority for the current edition. The paper's own published coverage of that year's results is the only source worth citing.

Before results run, "featured in the 2025 Best of Des Moines survey" or "write in [business name] under Best Bank" are the honest framings. A bare "Des Moines' best bank" claim with no year attached goes further than the record supports. Once the Business Record publishes its results, cite the exact year and category, nothing broader.

For the general standard behind a legitimate vote push, see building real vote turnout, and for how open public ballots like this one work in general, how online contest votes work.