2025 Diamond Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Diamond Awards are and who runs them

The Diamond Awards are Midtown Magazine's readers' choice program for local businesses, and the 2025 edition carried the full banner BEST OF RALEIGH and WESTERN WAKE Diamond Awards. Midtown Magazine is a Raleigh, North Carolina publication, and midtownmag.com carries the ballot directly, with no hosted voting service standing between the reader and the form. That arrangement is the first thing separating this program from most of its North Carolina neighbours on this site.

The vertical is best-of: the ballot exists to let shoppers crown the shops they already frequent. The magazine's invitation puts it plainly, asking readers to vote for their favorite shop and see if their frequent visit makes the cut. That phrasing tells you who the ballot is for, the regular customer, and what is being judged, the businesses people return to week after week.

Because the program is publisher-run, everything about it routes back to one place: the voting page at midtownmag.com. There is no external platform to register with and no separate contest site to trust. The table below collects the details that do not move between cycles.

The dated record: editions, windows and what is unpublished

Three cycles of the Diamond Awards are confirmed: 2023, 2024 and 2025. That run qualifies the program as annual, and 2025 is the newest cycle on the magazine's site. The 2025 ballot opened September 2 and ran through September 30, 2025, a window the magazine printed directly on the voting page alongside the instruction to use the links before September 30 to cast a vote.

The 2024 edition left its own trace in a different form. When that cycle's voting ended, Midtown Magazine posted a closing notice thanking everyone who voted and promising to post the results in the January/February 2024 issue. That notice is useful in two ways: it confirms the 2024 edition ran to completion, and it shows where the magazine surfaces outcomes, in its print issues rather than only on the web ballot.

What the magazine has not printed anywhere in the material at hand is the category roster for the ballot, any limit on repeat votes from one reader, and the eligibility terms for nominees or voters; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Those gaps matter to anyone planning a serious push, because a rule that is not published cannot be planned around, only discovered on the ballot itself when the September window opens.

How a supporter votes in the Diamond Awards today

Voting in the Diamond Awards takes only a few clicks. A supporter opens the Diamond Awards voting page on midtownmag.com, works through the category links listed there, and selects a favorite shop in each field. The 2025 page framed the task with the magazine's words: voting has begun for the 2025 BEST OF RALEIGH and WESTERN WAKE Diamond Awards, please vote for your favorite shop. No account creation step, no login requirement, and no fee is described anywhere on the form.

Timing is the one constraint the page makes explicit. Votes had to be cast before September 30, 2025, and once a window closes the page changes character entirely. After the 2024 cycle ended, the same address carried a closing notice instead of a ballot, thanking voters and pointing to the January/February 2024 issue for results. A supporter arriving between cycles therefore sees history, not a live form, and has to wait for the magazine to open the next edition.

Whether the ballot enforces a per-person cap or a daily return rule is nowhere printed, so anyone hoping to return and vote again should treat the live form as the only authority on the matter. Midtown Magazine runs the whole program on infrastructure it controls, which means any such rule would be enforced at midtownmag.com itself rather than by an outside platform.

How this ballot sits beside its North Carolina neighbours

North Carolina is well covered on this site, and the Diamond Awards stand out within that set on three points. First, the host: Midtown Magazine keeps the ballot at midtownmag.com, while several sibling programs hand the vote to third-party platforms. Second, the market: this ballot is anchored to Raleigh and Western Wake specifically, a metro-and-suburb pairing, rather than to a whole state or a single county. Third, the subject: the ballot is built around favorite shops, a retail framing, which narrows who a supporter can vote for compared with broader readers' choice formats.

The neighbours worth comparing it to are the six other North Carolina programs on this site: Best of North Carolina, the Charlotte Magazine Best of the Best Awards, the Daily Reflector Best Of Pitt County, the Fayetteville Community's Choice Awards, Best of Chowan County and Best of Haywood. Every one of them has a separate publisher behind it and its own calendar, so a business with locations across the state could appear on several of these ballots in the same year under different rules.

For a Raleigh or Western Wake shop, the practical difference is focus. This is the ballot whose voters are the magazine's own readership in the magazine's own market, and the September window is the moment that readership is asked to name the shops it already visits.

Strengthening support for a Diamond Awards nominee

Because Midtown Magazine runs this ballot itself, without an outside platform in the loop, the support that moves a shop up the standings comes from real customers acting during the September window. A Raleigh or Western Wake business that wants to compete does the ordinary things well: tell in-store visitors the ballot is open, post the midtownmag.com voting link while the September 2 to September 30 window runs, and ask regulars to pick the shop in every category where it appears.

The organizer's published rules do not address outside vote help, so the safe posture is to build support through channels you control and let the ballot's own terms govern anything else. Tactics that work across open ballots, from timing asks to mobilizing a customer list, are laid out in our votes guide, and the award-specific context sits at buy award votes.