Best of the West Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Best of the West Awards is and who runs it

The Best of the West Awards is a business best-of ballot for West Des Moines, Iowa, run by the West Des Moines Chamber of Commerce and hosted on the chamber's own site at wdmchamber.org/best-of-the-west/. The chamber frames the program in one line: the annual Best of the West Awards celebrate the best people, places, and things in West Des Moines. That framing matters for who the ballot is for, because it is not a trade award decided by a jury. It is a community vote in which chamber members and the customers who use them decide which bakery, barbershop, accounting firm, art gallery or car dealership takes the title in each category.

The chamber behind it is a substantial local institution. Its site carries a member login, a business directory, ambassador and workforce programs, a high school leadership academy, and a contact line of 515.225.6009 with inquiries to [email protected]. Its stated vision is to make West Des Moines the best suburban city in America to live, work, and play, and the awards are the public-facing piece of that: now is the time to show pride in our community, as the page puts it.

The program also has a history that runs beyond its two most recent confirmed editions. A third-party announcement from NCMIC, an insurance company, shows that it was named Best Insurance Company in the 2020 Best of the West Awards, so the honors were being handed out well before the 2025 and 2026 cycles that this page confirms directly.

The dated record: editions, the December anchor and what is unpublished

Two editions are directly confirmed for this program: 2025 and 2026. Both are anchored to December. The chamber's page carries an invitation to join a celebration on December 1, 2026, and it also carries the status line that matters most to a voter arriving today: the voting period for Best of the West is now closed. So the most recent cycle had finished its voting by the time the page was last read, with the December celebration as the closing event.

The 2026 ballot is the one with a printed structure. The chamber publishes a numbered list under a voting categories heading, running from Best Accounting Firm and Best Antique Store at the top through consumer favorites like Best Bakery, Best BBQ and Best Breakfast, into professional honors for firms, agents and executives. A sample of the printed names is exactly that, a sample: the full roster is the live list on the chamber page, not a fixed set that carries over untouched.

Several facts a careful voter would want sit outside the published page. The chamber leaves the exact open and close dates of the voting window off its page; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. It has likewise published no statement on how often a single person may cast a vote, whether an account is required, and who is eligible to take part. The 2020 NCMIC honor shows earlier editions existed, but a full year-by-year history is not printed anywhere on the chamber's page, so the confirmed list stays at 2025 and 2026 until the chamber says more.

How a supporter votes today, step by step

The mechanic is deliberately plain: a public online vote on a page the chamber controls itself, with no third-party contest platform in between. A supporter starts at wdmchamber.org/best-of-the-west/ and reads the status line at the top. On the most recent edition that line read voting closed, which is the single most important signal on the page: it tells you whether a live ballot is in front of you or you are looking at a finished cycle with the celebration behind it.

When a cycle is open, the work is per-category. The ballot presents the numbered list of voting categories, a supporter picks one business, person or place in each category they know first-hand, and the submission controls on the page handle the rest. There is no published note about registration, email verification, or a daily return, and the chamber publishes no limit on how often a single person may cast a vote, so the live form is the only authority on cadence while a cycle runs.

Two practical points follow from the setup. First, because the host is the chamber's own domain rather than a contest platform, there is no separate platform account to create or remember: the chamber's member login on the same site serves the directory and member services, and whether the ballot touches it at all is not stated. Second, because voting is free and public, the ballot's strength is a business's own customer base in West Des Moines, which is why the category pick that matters most is the one where a supporter has actually been through the door.

How this ballot sits beside its Iowa neighbours

West Des Moines sits in a crowded Iowa best-of market, and the chamber's program is distinguished mostly by who runs it. Where the other Des Moines-metro ballots belong to publishers, this one belongs to a chamber of commerce, which changes both the audience and the feel. The Best of Des Moines run by CITYVIEW and the Best of Des Moines run by the Business Record are editorial products with their own readerships, while the chamber's ballot is a membership institution celebrating its own city.

Statewide, the neighbours answer to different publishers again. The Cedar Rapids CommunityVotes ballot and the Best of Cedar Rapids from The Gazette serve the eastern side of the state, and the Best of the Corridor covers the Corridor business market under its own publisher. The AHBA Parade of Homes in Ames is a different vertical entirely, a housing event rather than a people's-choice list.

For a West Des Moines business, the practical difference is audience overlap. A customer can appear on several of these ballots in a year, but a vote on one carries no weight toward any other: each program is tallied by its own organizer on its own site. That is also why the chamber's December anchor is an asset, because it gives the western metro a late-year ballot that does not collide with the publisher cycles elsewhere in the state.

Strengthening support in a chamber-run December ballot

Any push for votes here should be built around what this specific ballot rewards. The field is wide, with a numbered roster of categories printed for 2026, so a business can often compete in several, and a customer who genuinely rates your work can fill more of the form than just your one category. The cycle is short and December-anchored, which means a campaign built on reminder emails, counter signs and social posts from West Des Moines customers has a narrow window to land and no room for drift.

The chamber publishes no rule on outside voting help, so there is no organizer policy to lean on in either direction. What is certain is the structure: a free public vote on the chamber's own site, tallied by the chamber, celebrated on December 1 in the most recent cycle. Support that comes from real customers in the market fits that structure naturally. For a broader view of the options, see our award votes overview and the votes guide, both written around ballots like this one.