Silos & Smokestacks People's Choice Award: How Voting Works & How to Win

What is the Silos & Smokestacks People's Choice Award and who runs it?

Silos & Smokestacks National Heritage Area, known across Iowa as SSNHA, presents the People's Choice Award as its yearly salute to the best in heritage development. The honor at stake is the People's Choice Site of the Year, and the organization is explicit about how it is decided: the award is voted on by the public and presented to only one deserving SSNHA Partner Site. Nothing the heritage area publishes about the program describes a judging panel or an insider selection step, which places the whole outcome in the hands of whichever attraction can rally the most supporters during the open window.

The ballot runs on the heritage area's own website. That detail separates this program from the many Iowa recognitions handled through commercial polling vendors or media-house ballot tools. Every instruction, nominee list and result announcement comes from the awarding body itself, on the same domain that carries SSNHA's other work, so a supporter reading the voting page is reading the organizer's own words rather than a middleman's rendering of them.

Because the nominees are heritage and preservation places rather than restaurants or contractors, a winning campaign here looks different from a metro readers-poll push. The story that motivates supporters is usually about a place worth protecting, and turnout depends on how well a site tells that story while the ballot is live.

Which editions of the People's Choice vote are documented, and when does it run?

Edition history so far

SSNHA frames the award as an annual tradition, stating that each year it celebrates the best in heritage development through the People's Choice Site of the Year. Documented cycles sit in 2024 and again in 2025, and the 2026 round is the next expected edition.

The 2025 sequence is the most fully described. A nomination round came first: the heritage area's nomination page for that cycle declared that the nomination period had closed, locking the candidate slate before any public voting started. Public voting for the 2025 Site of the Year then ran at www.silosandsmokestacks.org from Oct. 27-31, a stretch the organization advertised in advance.

Results follow quickly. Guests are invited to the Heritage Area Annual Training on Nov. 6, where the winning site is announced, and the 2025 crown went to Montauk Historic Site, which SSNHA named the 2025 People's Choice Site of the Year in a dedicated news post on its site.

Two things stay off the page ahead of a cycle. SSNHA publishes no category roster for this award, since everything converges on the lone Site of the Year title, and it posts no eligibility or repeat-voting rules anywhere in advance; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

How does a supporter actually cast a vote?

Casting a ballot takes little effort. While the public window is open, a supporter visits the People's Choice Voting page at https://www.silosandsmokestacks.org/peopleschoicevoting/ and finds the Partner Site nominees standing for that cycle. The visitor selects the site they want to champion and submits the form, and the choice registers on infrastructure the heritage area controls outright.

Nothing about participating costs money. This is a free civic-style poll: no ticket, membership or donation stands between a supporter and the submit button. What decides the outcome is reach, because every nominee draws from its own base of visitors, donors and volunteers, and the tally rewards whoever converts that goodwill into clicks inside a compressed window.

Devices and access

The voting page behaves like any standard web address, so a laptop browser and a phone browser load it alike. SSNHA advertises no separate app, text line or kiosk channel for this award; the page itself is the venue. If a confirmation message appears after submitting, treat it as the signal that the choice registered, and keep a note of it if the race matters to you.

Supporters who want a deeper playbook on turning out voters in any public online contest can consult this guide to getting more votes online, though the fundamentals here are simple: identify your site's natural constituency and give those people a concrete reason to act while the ballot is up.

How does this ballot compare with other Iowa public votes?

Iowa supports a deep bench of public-vote recognitions, and this award's closest relatives on this site are the metro readers polls and business honors. The siblings include the Best of Cedar Rapids balloting run by The Gazette, CITYVIEW's Best of Des Moines, the Business Record's Best of Des Moines, the Corridor Business Journal's Best of the Corridor, Cedar Rapids CommunityVotes and the Ames HBA Parade of Homes.

Three traits set the People's Choice Award apart within that company. Scope: it speaks for Iowa's heritage network at the state level rather than for a single metro's commercial scene. Shape: everything converges on the Site of the Year, so every nominee competes head to head instead of splitting attention across a spread of categories. Stagecraft: the verdict is delivered in person at the Heritage Area Annual Training, giving the result an event moment rather than a quiet webpage update.

For a nominee's team, the practical takeaway is that the competition here is not the usual restaurant-and-retail crowd. Fellow contenders are heritage attractions with missions, member bases and storytelling traditions, and the victorious campaign is normally the one that activates those communities hardest while the voting days run.

Anyone weighing this ballot against its Iowa neighbours should also weigh the calendars: the metro polls anchor themselves to their publishers' production schedules, while this cycle hinges on a nomination deadline, a late-autumn public window and a training-event reveal, each announced by SSNHA on its own pages.

How can a Partner Site's supporters strengthen its chances?

A Partner Site that wants the title should treat the award as a turnout sprint. The base already exists: past visitors, members, volunteers, board contacts and local history enthusiasts. The job is reaching those people before nominations close and then again when the public window arrives, because a site must make the slate before anybody can vote for it. Nomination traffic runs through the heritage area's nomination page at https://www.silosandsmokestacks.org/peoples-choice-nomination/.

Email and social channels do most of the work in races shaped like this, since the ask is narrow and time-bound: back this site for Site of the Year before the window shuts. SSNHA has not posted guidance on outside assistance such as promoted campaigns or purchased vote support, so a site weighing those routes should weigh them against the heritage area's expectations for the award. Services that supply contest votes exist across the wider market, covered in an overview of buying votes online.

Whatever mix a site chooses, the decisive asset stays the same: a community that cares enough about the place to act when asked, inside a window measured in days rather than weeks.