Best of 225: How Voting Works & How to Win

Best of 225 is 225 Magazine's award program, not a help desk

225batonrouge.com/best-225-faq is the confirmed home of Best of 225, and yes, "FAQ" sits right in that address. 225 Magazine simply chose to explain the program's own rules on the same page where the program itself lives, rather than building a separate landing page and a separate rules page. Read past the title and what's there is the actual mechanics of an annual readers'-choice program for residents of the Baton Rouge area, identified on the page itself by the 225 area code.

The program runs in two distinct rounds. First, a write-in nomination round, confirmed to run January 2 through January 31, where residents suggest local businesses, people and things by name. Second, a separate voting round built from whichever names came out of that nomination window.

Categories and any vote cap go unpublished; confirm on the live ballot each cycle, since 225 Magazine has kept both details off its confirmed page across every edition reviewed here.

A January nomination window, a February voting round, and a longer archive behind both

The one clean, unambiguous date here is the nomination window: January 2 through January 31. 225 Magazine's own page also describes a separate voting round opening in late February, with ballots changeable more than once ahead of an April deadline, though the exact day the voting round itself opens and closes is not stated consistently anywhere the program has published.

Confirmed editions of Best of 225 run 2025 and 2026. Archived pages show 2018 as the earliest year this best-of coverage appears online. That much earlier presence reflects the magazine's own longer publishing history, not an extra confirmed edition of this specific program.

The category names the page mentions, without treating them as the full list

225 Magazine's page names a handful of category-style phrases in passing, among them Best Eats, Best Antiques Shop and Best King Cakes. These read as examples pulled from the page rather than a formal, complete roster, so a business should not assume its own category is missing purely because these examples leave it out; confirm the full roster on the live ballot each cycle instead.

Baton Rouge has more than one 'Best of' ballot; here is where 225's sits

Sharing a metro area with another readers'-choice program is common in Louisiana, and Baton Rouge is no exception. A business chasing recognition should know exactly which publisher's ballot it has actually entered.

225 Magazine's own tally, judging and winner announcement stay entirely inside its own program. Best of Baton Rouge shares the same metro area but is judged and published by a different organization entirely, so a placement on one carries no automatic bearing on the other, and the same holds for each of the five programs further down the table, each answering to its own city or region and its own separate rulebook.

Building support around two separate rounds instead of one

Because Best of 225 splits nominating from voting, a Baton Rouge business needs a plan for both stages rather than one. Getting nominated during the January window is the entry requirement; nothing published here suggests a business can appear on the eventual ballot without first showing up in that write-in round.

Once voting opens, real supporters contacted directly and asked again before the round's own deadline are what actually build a result, whatever the eventual vote cap turns out to be. That same direct approach works just as well during the earlier write-in window, since a nomination still has to come from somewhere before any vote can follow it. 225 Magazine, like most publishers running this format, watches for activity that looks automated rather than genuinely local. is buying votes legal covers the legal line worth understanding before spending any budget here, buying votes online explains how paid support for a two-round nomination-then-voting format typically gets structured, and award-vote campaign planning walks through the readers'-choice format Best of 225 itself follows.