CANstruction Reno People’s Choice Award: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the CANstruction Reno People’s Choice Award is

The CANstruction Reno People’s Choice Award is the public-voting prize attached to CANStruction Reno, a design and build competition in which teams construct sculptures from canned food. The organizer is the Food Bank of Northern Nevada, and voting takes place on fbnn.org itself, not on a third-party contest platform. For the most recent confirmed edition the voting page sat at fbnn.org/canstruction2024, under the masthead "2024 CANstruction Reno - Food Bank of Northern Nevada."

The competition serves the Reno market in Nevada, and the food bank itself operates from Sparks at 550 Italy Drive. The event is described on the organizer's page as the 21st Annual CANStruction Reno, which places it among the longest-running charitable design competitions in the state.

Two kinds of recognition run side by side. A jury panel hands out judged honors, and the printed category list on the organizer's page names them as Best Use of Labels, Most Cans, Most Original Design, Structural Ingenuity and Best Meal. The People's Choice Award is different: it goes to whichever entry wins the public vote, so the audience rather than the judges decides the winner. The printed list may not be exhaustive, and the full set of honors for any given year is whatever the live page shows.

The dated facts: editions and the 2024 voting window

The confirmed edition years for this ballot are 2018, 2023 and 2024, with the 2024 page as the most recent and the one carrying day-level voting dates. The organizer describes the wider competition as the 21st Annual CANStruction Reno, which indicates a long unbroken run for the event even though only those three years are confirmed for the People's Choice ballot itself. Which year the next edition will fall in has not been published; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

The 2024 window is the most concrete dated fact here. The organizer's page stated: "Online voting opens at 8am on Wednesday and closes at 6pm Monday, May 6." A second dated phrase on the same page describes the span as "Wednesday, May 1 through Monday, May 6." That makes the 2024 public vote a six-day sprint, not a month-long poll, so supporters had less than a week to rally their $1 votes.

Nothing else about the schedule is carried forward. The page gives no dates for a build or judging phase relative to the vote, and it gives no opening date for future cycles. Because the competition's home is the food bank's own domain, the freshest edition replaces the old one at a new address each cycle, and the prior window's dates should never be assumed to repeat.

How a supporter votes for a People’s Choice entry

The mechanic is simple and it is paid by design. A supporter opens the CANstruction page on the Food Bank of Northern Nevada's site during the open window, browses the entries, and casts a vote for the structure they want to win. Every vote costs $1, and the organizer's own wording is that "all proceeds from voting benefiting the Food Bank of Northern Nevada." The vote and the donation are the same act, which is unusual among public ballots and worth stating plainly.

Because each vote is a dollar given to the food bank, repeat voting is functionally encouraged: a supporter who wants an entry to win can vote several times, and every extra dollar funds hunger relief. The page prints no ceiling on repeat voting and no eligibility conditions beyond completing the $1 transaction. Whatever limits apply in a future cycle are whatever that cycle's page shows.

Timing matters more here than on ballots that stay open for weeks. The confirmed 2024 run lasted six days, from the morning of Wednesday, May 1 to 6pm on Monday, May 6, with the close at 6pm sharp. A team that starts promoting on the final day has almost no runway, so the practical sequence is to know when voting opens, reach supporters early, and treat the whole window as the campaign.

How this ballot sits beside its Nevada neighbours

Nevada's public voting scene is led by readers-choice polls run by local publishers: Best of Reno Community's Choice Awards, Best of Northern Nevada, Best of Carson City, Best of Elko County, Best of Las Vegas and the statewide Best of Nevada. Those ballots rank businesses across many categories and answer to a newspaper or media company in each case.

This program answers to a charity instead. The Food Bank of Northern Nevada is not a publisher, the competition honors canned-food sculptures rather than local businesses, and the $1-per-vote rule turns the ballot into a fundraiser. That combination has no parallel among the readers-choice polls above, and it changes supporter behavior: the pitch to a voter is a donation story, not a loyalty story.

The market also differs. The readers-choice polls split Nevada by city, county and region, each under its own publisher, while this ballot is a single Reno-area event on one organizer's domain. A business that competes in Best of Reno gains nothing by cross-referencing it here, and vice versa. For anyone mapping Nevada's vote-driven programs, this one belongs in the charity-event column, with its own schedule, its own short six-day window and its own paid-vote mechanic.

Strengthening support for a CANstruction Reno entry

Teams that do well in the People's Choice vote treat the six-day window as a fundraising drive, because that is what the ballot is. Each vote is $1 to the Food Bank of Northern Nevada, so the ask to a supporter is twofold: back our structure and feed Northern Nevada with the same dollar. Messages built around that double benefit convert better than a bare vote request, and they give businesses a natural reason to share the ballot with customers and staff.

Start on opening morning. The confirmed 2024 window ran Wednesday, May 1 through Monday, May 6 with a 6pm close, so a campaign launched on the final day has almost no time to work. Post the entry photos, name the charity angle, and remind supporters that repeat votes are allowed at a dollar each. Since the vote happens on the food bank's own site, direct people to the exact page rather than a search result. For tactics that carry across contests, see how to get more votes online.