Best of NKY: How Voting Works & How to Win

Three ballots, one river valley. Which one is Best of NKY?

Best of NKY is NKY Magazine's (Cincinnati Magazine group) readers-choice ballot for Boone, Kenton, Campbell, and Grant counties, spanning 194 categories on the SecondStreet platform. Nominations open in January, public voting runs in spring, and 2026 is the 15th year of the program.

Here's the part that trips up first-time entrants. A Covington bakery or a Newport insurance agency doesn't have one metro ballot to worry about. It has three. Best of NKY runs at cincymagazine.secondstreetapp.com under NKY Magazine's own brand. Cincinnati CommunityVotes runs separately at cincinnati.communityvotes.com, under a different publisher, and its ballot folds in Ohio and Indiana alongside the same Kentucky river cities. Then there's Best in Kentucky, Kentucky Living's statewide program with roughly 30 categories covering the whole commonwealth. None of the three share a login, a results page, or a category list.

194 categories for four counties is a lot of room, and that's not padding, it's the whole design. A one-location dry cleaner in Erlanger isn't fighting a citywide restaurant chain for votes; it's fighting maybe a dozen other dry cleaners across the same four counties. See the Kentucky contest hub for how Best of NKY stacks up against the state's other readers-choice programs.

SecondStreet isn't a plain web form, and that changes the campaign

NJBIZ Reader Rankings and Best in Kentucky both run on custom, in-house ballot pages. Best of NKY doesn't. It runs on SecondStreet, a polling platform used by regional magazines well beyond Cincinnati, and SecondStreet ballots commonly ask a voter to confirm an email address or use a social login before the vote counts.

That login step is worth naming out loud to supporters

A voter who's used to a one-click poll.fm widget or a bare write-in field can bounce off an email-confirmation screen without realizing the vote never registered. Telling supporters upfront, "there's a quick email step, check for the confirmation," closes a gap that a plain-form ballot doesn't have.

None of that is a reason to avoid Best of NKY. It's a reason to write the reminder message correctly. For the broader mechanics of pairing a login-gated ballot with real supporter outreach, see award-style vote campaigns, and for a category built specifically around food and beverage businesses, restaurant vote campaign guidance covers the same SecondStreet-style friction from a different angle.

January decides the category. Spring only decides the winner

Plan backward from the spring vote, not forward from January. That's the same discipline Best in Kentucky rewards, and it applies here with one added wrinkle: 194 categories means a wrong guess in January is harder to walk back once the finalist list locks in.

A single-location business used to a simpler local poll can underestimate how much a 194-category ballot narrows its actual competitive set. Don't. A tight, well-matched category with a dozen real rivals is a better position than a broad one with fifty.

Boone and Kenton carry more voters than Grant, and the ballot doesn't correct for it

Four counties, one shared category list. Boone and Kenton are the two most populous of the four, and turnout tends to track population when a category has no built-in weighting for county size.

A Williamstown business isn't at a structural disadvantage here the way it might be on a statewide ballot. Grant County's smaller population means its categories often see lower total turnout too, so a modest, real campaign can carry proportionally more weight than the same effort would in a Florence-heavy category. Businesses also competing for attention across the river can compare notes with the Ohio contest hub, since several NKY-area businesses run campaigns on both sides of the Cincinnati metro at once.

194 categories, no shared archive: why one Best of NKY win doesn't cover the others

NKY Magazine posts results category by category as each of the 194 groups closes out, not on a single shared reveal date, and there's no consolidated public archive tying all 15 years of winners together in one place. That structure matters for how a win gets talked about: a dry cleaner's category result says nothing about whether a restaurant three categories over has posted yet, and a business can't borrow another category's announcement to imply its own is in.

The three-ballot overlap in this region raises the same risk from a different angle. A Covington or Newport business sitting inside Best of NKY, Cincinnati CommunityVotes, and the statewide Best in Kentucky at once needs the win attached to the right program by name, not just "Best of Northern Kentucky" on its own. "Best of NKY 2026, [category]" is checkable against the SecondStreet ballot once NKY Magazine posts it; a claim missing either the year or the specific one of 194 categories can't be checked against anything, and in a four-county market that gets noticed fast by the customers a business is trying to win. Before that category posts, "nominated" and "vote for us" are the claims worth making. For the mechanics behind a SecondStreet-style ballot generally, see how online contest votes work, and for a broader annual-recognition program beyond a single category, best business of the year voting covers that structure.