CFA Amazing Moms Photo Contest: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the CFA Amazing Moms Photo Contest is and who runs it

The CFA Amazing Moms Photo Contest is a public photo vote run by The Pilot Promotions, the promotions organization tied to The Pilot in Southern Pines, North Carolina. Within the best-of vertical it is an unusual shape: instead of asking readers to rank businesses across dozens of categories, this ballot centers on photo entries celebrating moms, and the community decides which entry wins by casting votes.

Second Street carries the ballot; it is the platform hosting every promotion The Pilot Promotions runs at pilot.secondstreetapp.com. That host also carries the publisher's sweepstakes and raffle promotions, but the Amazing Moms ballot is its own program with its own URL and its own window. The contest type is a photo vote, meaning supporters vote for a photograph rather than typing in a business name.

For a business or family thinking about support, the practical gap is this: the ballot leaves its category structure, its repeat-vote ceiling and its eligibility terms unprinted, so anyone planning a push has to work from the live page rather than a printed rulebook. That is the problem this page solves first, because every decision about timing and outreach depends on details the organizer leaves to the ballot itself.

The dated history for the Amazing Moms ballot

Two editions of the CFA Amazing Moms Photo Contest are confirmed: 2023 and 2025. Both ran on Second Street under The Pilot Promotions, and both fell in May. The 2025 edition opened on May 1 and closed on May 23, which is the most recent confirmed window for the program. The 2023 edition's day range begins May 2 in the platform dates held for that run.

Two confirmed years in the same month make this a recurring spring fixture for the Southern Pines market, not a one-off promotion. The gap between 2023 and 2025 in the confirmed list does not mean no edition ran in 2024; it means the confirmed list for this program carries those two years, and anything beyond them is not published. The next expected edition is 2026, but The Pilot Promotions has not printed its dates.

The organizer also leaves structural details off the ballot: no category list, no limit on repeat votes and no eligibility terms are published for this contest; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. For a supporter planning around a mom's entry, that means the May pattern is the only reliable planning anchor, and the live page is the sole source for everything else.

How a supporter votes in the Amazing Moms photo ballot

Voting is a plain public action on the Second Street page. A supporter opens the ballot at pilot.secondstreetapp.com through the CFA Amazing Moms Photo Contest link while the window is open, scrolls to the photo entry for the mom they want to back, and selects the vote control on that entry. Second Street logs the choice immediately. No purchase is involved in casting a vote, and the ballot is open to the public rather than restricted to subscribers of The Pilot.

Because the entries are photographs, the vote is attached to a specific image rather than a text listing. That shapes outreach: a supporter sharing the entry is sharing a photo and a name, which tends to travel well in family groups and local social feeds around Southern Pines. The visual format is the main difference between this ballot and the publisher's text-driven best-of programs.

The one mechanic a supporter cannot plan around in advance is the repeat-vote rule. The ballot does not print a per-supporter limit, so whether a person may return daily or vote once is displayed, if at all, on the live page during the window. Reading that instruction before launching any outreach avoids asking friends for votes the ballot will not accept.

Where this ballot sits among North Carolina contests

The CFA Amazing Moms Photo Contest is a niche program inside a crowded North Carolina ballot market. The state carries several large best-of competitions: 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. Those are multi-category readers-choice ballots run by their own publishers across their own markets.

This program differs in three ways. First, its organizer is a promotions arm rather than a newsroom contest desk, and it runs the ballot alongside sweepstakes and raffles on the same Second Street account. Second, its subject is a single theme, moms, carried through photo entries, instead of a long category roster of local businesses. Third, its scale is local: the market is Southern Pines and the audience is the paper's readership there, not a metro the size of Charlotte.

For a supporter, that means competition for votes is narrower but the pool of potential voters is smaller too. A mom's entry competes against other photos, not against hundreds of business listings, and outreach works best inside the Southern Pines community rather than statewide.

Strengthening support for a mom in this photo vote

What moves the needle in this ballot is reach during the May window. The mechanic is simple: each vote is cast on a photo entry at pilot.secondstreetapp.com, so every person a supporter reaches needs the direct link and a nudge while the ballot is open. The 2025 window ran May 1 through May 23, which gave supporters a defined stretch to work with rather than a single day.

Because the organizer publishes no rules on outside help for this ballot, the safe assumption is that votes must come from real people casting them on the live page. Asking friends, relatives, coworkers and local Southern Pines groups directly is the outreach that fits a photo ballot: the entry is visual, personal and easy to share. Our award votes page explains the wider options for contest support without promising any outcome in this program.

Timing matters more than volume here. A push that spreads asks across the whole window, with reminders at the start and again near the close, matches how public photo ballots accumulate votes and avoids a spike that looks irregular. Whatever per-supporter rule the live page displays governs how often each person may return, so read it before the first ask.