PLSN Hometown Hero Lighting Company of the Year (Parnelli Awards): How Voting Works & How to Win

What is the PLSN Hometown Hero Lighting Company of the Year, and who runs it?

The Hometown Hero Lighting Company of the Year is the lighting half of a reader-driven award programme that PLSN magazine runs alongside its Parnelli Awards coverage. PLSN is a trade publication for the live event and touring production industry, and its publisher, Timeless Communications, is headquartered at 6700 Via Austi Pkwy, Suite C, in Las Vegas, Nevada. The award rests on the magazine's readership, people who work in and around lighting production and know the regional companies well enough to rank them.

Voting takes place on the publisher's own site at plsn.com/hometown-heroes-vote/, not on a third-party poll service. The ballot divides North America into six separate regions, five covering the United States and one covering all of Canada, and asks readers to choose the best regional lighting company in each. That regional structure is the defining feature of the programme: a company competes against peers in its own geography rather than against the whole continent at once.

A sister publication in the same publishing house, FOH, runs the matching honour for regional sound companies, so the lighting and sound trades each get their own reader ballot. For a lighting company, a Hometown Hero nod functions as an industry credential voted by working peers rather than by the general public, which separates it from the consumer best-of ballots run by city newspapers. The essentials sit in the table below.

Which editions are confirmed, and when does the current window end?

PLSN frames the honour as an annual one: each year the magazine honors regional lighting production companies with the Hometown Hero award. Confirmed editions of the reader ballot run in 2025 and 2026, and the award predates both by a wide margin, because Gemini Light Sound Video received the 2011 Parnelli Hometown Hero Award for Best Lighting Company of the Year. The tradition therefore reaches back at least to 2011.

A full cycle involves more than the reader vote. A nomination round feeds the ballots, and the programme splits by trade: plsn.com carries the regional lighting companies while fohonline.com, the site of sister publication FOH, carries the regional sound companies. Once regional winners emerge they climb a level, appearing as finalists on the Parnelli Awards ballot itself for its 23rd voting round. The day-level dates for that sequence are gathered in the timeline below.

Beyond the regional company-of-the-year honour itself, PLSN does not print an itemized list of further ballot categories; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

How does a supporter cast a vote on the PLSN ballot?

Voting happens on the publisher's own ballot page at plsn.com/hometown-heroes-vote/. PLSN's stated eligibility rule is explicit: "You must be a PLSN or FOH subscriber to vote." That single condition defines who can take part, so the practical audience behind any lighting company's campaign is the magazine's subscriber base across the six regions rather than casual passers-by.

The act of voting is straightforward. The ballot presents the nominated regional lighting companies, and a nominee such as Tour Tech East of Dartmouth, in the Canadian region, shows how far the slate reaches, taking in firms across the five United States regions and Canada alike. A supporter selects the company in their region and submits the choice through the page's verification and submit controls.

No numeric limit shows up anywhere on the Hometown Hero pages. PLSN's printed text covers the subscriber condition alone and says nothing about how often one person may come back, so a supporter planning repeat visits should let whatever the plsn.com ballot displays during the current window settle the pattern first. The same applies to sign-in steps: the subscriber condition is the only gate the publisher states in connection with this honour, and any additional requirement would surface on the ballot page itself.

Because the whole journey runs on plsn.com, from opening the page to meeting the subscriber condition, choosing a regional company, verifying, and submitting, nothing about the process depends on an external polling provider.

How does this ballot sit beside Nevada's other reader-choice contests?

Nevada readers encounter plenty of reader-choice ballots, and this one is easy to mistake for them. The state's consumer contests include Best of Carson City run by the Nevada Appeal, Best of Elko County from the Elko Daily, Best of Las Vegas, the statewide Best of Nevada ballot, Best of Northern Nevada from the Reno News & Review, and the Best of Reno Community's Choice Awards. Each asks residents to rank restaurants, shops and services in a single city, county or region of the state.

The Hometown Hero ballot differs on every axis. Its publisher is a national trade magazine rather than a local newspaper. Its voters are industry subscribers spread across five United States regions and Canada, not residents of one Nevada community. Its subject is a business credential in lighting production rather than a consumer category. And its stakes extend past the reader vote, because regional winners historically advanced onto the Parnelli Awards ballot as finalists.

How can a lighting company strengthen its support in this vote?

A lighting company's realistic path in this vote runs through the subscriber rule. Because PLSN states that a voter must be a PLSN or FOH subscriber, the support worth cultivating comes from subscribed industry colleagues, clients and partners across the company's home region, and their votes must land within the ballot's open weeks. Reminders timed to the voting window matter more here than broad appeals to a general public that cannot participate.

PLSN publishes no guidance on this ballot about outside assistance or third-party promotion, so a campaign built on genuine subscriber outreach stays comfortably within what the publisher has actually said. Broader tactics for raising vote counts in reader ballots, from reminder timing to mobilizing a committed base, are covered in our votes guide. Some competitors weigh purchased support as well; the background on that option sits on the award votes page. Nothing about a paid push changes how tight this particular race is: the outcome rests on how many PLSN and FOH subscribers across a region back each firm before the October close, and the publisher's terms govern whichever tally stands.