First Responder of the Year Award: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the First Responder of the Year Award is and who runs it

The First Responder of the Year Award is a public-vote recognition program run by the Minnesota 100 Club, an organization whose own masthead describes its work as protecting the protectors. The award was created to recognize outstanding first responders, and it sits on the club's own website instead of a third-party contest platform, which means every rule, date and form field a supporter encounters comes directly from the club itself.

The ballot is unusually broad for a single-organization award. For the year the page describes, the club states there will be five awards given: Peace Officers, Corrections, Fire, EMT and EMS, and Public Safety Telecommunications. That structure lets a single program honor the whole public safety spectrum, from patrol officers and correctional staff to firefighters, ambulance crews and the dispatchers who coordinate them.

Geographically the program belongs to Minnesota as a whole. The club does not tie the award to one city or county on the page, so supporters anywhere in the state can take part, and nominees can come from any department the ballot recognizes.

The dated record for this award

Two edition years are confirmed for the First Responder of the Year Award: 2023 and 2024. Those two years are what qualify the program as annual, and the club's page for the 2024 edition carries a timestamp from October of that year, showing the award page remained active well after the nomination window closed.

The 2024 cycle anchored its nomination window to January. The month is what the page proves; the club has not published the exact open and closing days for the window; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. That single gap matters most for a nominee's department, because a January window leaves little slack once the month is underway.

Other details are simply not printed. The club does not publish a per-supporter vote limit, a daily return rule or nominee eligibility requirements on the award page. It also does not state whether a further edition is planned or when a future window would open. Each of those gaps is easy to close: the award page is the club's own, so whatever the current cycle allows is written there.

For a program of this size, the absence of published rules is not a red flag. It reflects a ballot run by a small charitable organization for its own community, not a national promotion with a legal team drafting terms. The practical reading is that the live page, checked in January, is the whole rulebook.

How a supporter votes today

The mechanic on the ballot is simple and deliberately personal. The page asks each supporter to submit a vote for one hero per group. With five award groups on the ballot, a supporter can recognize up to five first responders in a single pass, one in each group, or honor just the one nominee they came to support.

The nomination side of the form carries its own fields. A nomination names the department, the coworker making the nomination, and the reason for the nomination. That structure tells you something about who the award expects to hear from: the people who work beside a first responder are the ones best placed to describe what the nominee did, and the reason field is where that story goes.

Because the ballot lives on the club's own site, there is no third-party login, no platform account and no round structure to track. A supporter opens the page, reads the short introduction under Vote For Your Heroes, makes a selection in each group they wish to support, and submits. The club does not print a rule on how often one person may return or whether repeat submissions are counted, so a department organizing support should treat the one-hero-per-group instruction as the operative rule and let the form enforce anything further.

How this ballot sits beside its Minnesota neighbours

Minnesota readers who land on this page are rarely looking at only one ballot. The state carries a busy best-of scene, and this award is the odd one out among its neighbours because a charitable club runs it on its own domain rather than a media publisher running it for readers.

The nearest neighbours by shape are the reader-choice programs: Minnesota's Best, Best of the Midwest, and Best of the Best Brainerd Lakes Area. Each of those is a broad, multi-category ballot where the public votes on businesses and services. Two more, CommunityVotes Duluth and CommunityVotes Rochester, apply the same community-voting idea to specific cities, and the Best of the Best by the Duluth News Tribune brings a newspaper's audience to the format.

What makes the First Responder of the Year Award different is its subject and its scale. It honors people, not businesses, and it does so in exactly five public safety groups rather than dozens of consumer categories. A supporter who arrives here from one of the reader-choice ballots should expect a shorter, more personal form, and a window that runs in January rather than following a media publisher's seasonal calendar.

Strengthening support for a nominee

Support for a first responder nominee grows out of the community the nominee already serves. Because the ballot asks for one hero per group, a department does not need a huge audience to move the number; it needs every coworker, family member and resident the nominee has helped to actually submit their selection. A shift-change reminder, a post in the department's own channels and a short note in a local community group all fit the spirit of a ballot built to recognize outstanding first responders.

The club publishes no stated policy on outside voting help on the award page, so a department planning a larger push should keep its effort plainly organic: real people, asked once, voting for the hero they genuinely want to honor. Tactics suited to a small public ballot like this are covered in our votes guide, and the award-specific service options sit at award votes for readers weighing every route.