CFA Grandparents Day Photo Contest 2025: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the CFA Grandparents Day Photo Contest is and who runs it

The CFA Grandparents Day Photo Contest 2025 is a public-vote photo ballot run by The Pilot Promotions, the promotions operation attached to The Pilot, the newspaper serving the Southern Pines area of North Carolina. The program's theme is Grandparents Day, and its entries are photographs rather than the business listings that fill most readers-choice ballots. Supporters decide the outcome by voting for the photos they favor, which places the program in the user-generated photo voting format rather than the write-in or nomination style.

Second Street, the platform that carries The Pilot Promotions' other promotions at pilot.secondstreetapp.com, hosts the ballot. The 2025 edition sat at its own dated address, and the platform listing shows the promotion type as photo voting. The confirmed 2025 window opened on September 5 and closed on September 26, after which the ballot shows as closed.

The essentials, as published:

Because the ballot is a photo contest tied to a family occasion, its audience differs from a typical best-of business ballot. The people voting are largely relatives and friends of the people in the photographs, gathered around a holiday that falls in September, and the organizer leans into that seasonal timing with the program name itself.

The dated facts: editions, the September window, and what is not published

Confirmed editions of the CFA Grandparents Day Photo Contest ran in 2023 and 2025. The 2023 ballot sat at its own address on pilot.secondstreetapp.com and opened on September 5, 2023. The 2025 edition followed the same seasonal anchor: its voting window opened September 5, 2025 and closed September 26, 2025, a span of about three weeks, and the platform now lists that promotion as closed.

Those edition years are what qualify the program as annual rather than a single one-off promotion. The gap between them, with 2024 absent from the confirmed list, means the run is not continuous, and the next cycle would be expected in 2026 if the September pattern holds. The Pilot Promotions has not posted dates for a future edition, so the opening and closing days for the next ballot are not yet published.

Several facts about the ballot's rules sit outside the published material. The Pilot Promotions has not printed the list of photo categories, a per-supporter vote limit, or eligibility terms for entrants or voters; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. That is not unusual for a seasonal photo promotion of this size, but it does mean a supporter planning a serious push cannot plan around a printed daily rule, and an entrant cannot confirm in advance how the photo pool is divided.

What the published material does establish is the shape of the cycle: a September window of roughly three weeks, a photo gallery as the ballot, and a public tally deciding the result. Everything else about the rules lives on the live page during the window itself.

How a supporter votes on the Second Street photo ballot

Voting in the CFA Grandparents Day Photo Contest is a plain public-vote action on a Second Street page. A supporter opens the ballot at pilot.secondstreetapp.com, browses the gallery of submitted photographs, selects the entry to back, and uses the vote control on that photo's panel. Second Street registers the choice against the photo, and the running tally across the September window determines which entries lead.

Because the entries are photographs, the supporter's first task is finding the right image rather than searching a business category list. Family groups typically circulate the direct link to a specific photo so that relatives land straight on the entry they are meant to support, which matters in a format where the ballot is a gallery rather than a searchable directory.

The published material does not state whether the ballot requires an account, an email confirmation, or a limit on repeat votes. Those behaviors are shown on the live page during an open window, and the 2025 ballot is closed, so a supporter reading this between cycles will see the closed state rather than the vote controls. When the next edition opens, the same address pattern on pilot.secondstreetapp.com carries the live gallery.

The practical rhythm the format rewards is spread across the window. The 2025 span ran from September 5 to September 26, so a photo that collects support steadily through those weeks is positioned better than one that depends entirely on a final-day surge, whatever the per-supporter rule turns out to be on the live page.

How this ballot sits beside other North Carolina vote programs

North Carolina carries a dense set of public-vote programs, and the CFA Grandparents Day Photo Contest works a different corner of that field. The state's largest ballots are readers-choice business awards: Best of North Carolina covers the whole state, Charlotte Magazine Best of the Best Awards serves the Charlotte market, and Daily Reflector Best Of Pitt County, Fayetteville Community's Choice Awards, Best of Chowan County and Best of Haywood each serve their own regions. Those programs ask voters to pick businesses across many categories.

This program is different in three ways. Its entries are photographs, not businesses, so the competition is between images rather than between merchants. Its theme is a single occasion, Grandparents Day, rather than an annual best-of season. And its scale is local: it belongs to The Pilot Promotions in Southern Pines rather than to a statewide or metro-wide publication.

Closest to home is Best of the Pines, the large readers-choice ballot The Pilot itself runs, also hosted on Second Street. A supporter who knows Best of the Pines will recognize the platform and the general voting rhythm here, but should not import its rules: the photo contest is a separate promotion with its own window, its own gallery, and its own unpublished rule set. The two share a publisher and a platform, nothing more, and a vote cast in one does not touch the other.

Strengthening support for a photo entry in this ballot

Support in the CFA Grandparents Day Photo Contest flows through personal networks, because the entries are family photographs tied to a family holiday. The most direct lever is the entry link itself: relatives who receive the direct address of a specific photo land on the vote they are meant to cast without hunting through the gallery. Circulating that link through family group chats, especially in the days right after the window opens in early September, catches supporters while the ballot is fresh.

The Grandparents Day occasion does work a generic contest cannot. Relatives have a built-in reason to participate, and a request framed around the holiday tends to travel further through a family tree than a plain vote request. Spreading reminders across the roughly three-week window, rather than concentrating them on the final days, protects an entry from the fate of depending on a single late surge.

On outside help, the organizer has printed no rule for this ballot, so nothing published permits or forbids purchased support; the general legal picture is laid out at the legality page, and the mechanics of building support are covered at the votes guide. Whatever a supporter decides, nothing printed for this Southern Pines photo ballot says either way, and the live page during the window is the only place a rule would ever appear.