Best of the Best (Grand Forks): How Voting Works & How to Win

Two Grand Forks ballots share a metro. Only one is this page.

Search "Grand Forks readers choice" and two different programs turn up. One is CommunityVotes Grand Forks. The other, the subject here, is the Grand Forks Herald's own Best of the Best, run by Forum Communications on the secondstreetapp platform. Confuse the two and a business can spend a whole nomination window pointing supporters at the wrong ballot.

They don't share an organizer, a category list, or a results page. CommunityVotes runs its own separate contest cycle in the same metro. The Herald's version pulls from 130+ categories across restaurants, retail, health care, and services, hosted at grandforksherald.com rather than a CommunityVotes domain.

That last row is the one worth double-checking before any outreach goes out. A supporter who bookmarks the wrong site won't discover the mistake until results post, by which point the actual ballot has closed. See the North Dakota contest hub for how this fits next to the state's other readers-choice programs.

130-plus categories means most businesses fall into more than one guess

Restaurants. Retail. Health care. Services. Those four broad groups fan out into 130-plus specific categories on the live ballot, and a business owner who assumes their storefront maps to one obvious slot is often wrong. A dentist's office could plausibly sit under health care generally or a narrower dental-specific category, depending on how the current year's list is structured.

Search by name, not by category guess

The fastest path on a ballot this size is searching the business name directly on the live grandforksherald.com page rather than scrolling every group. Category labels shift between cycles, so a business that competed under one name two years ago may find itself folded into a broader group or split into a narrower one this year.

For the general mechanics behind running any campaign once a nominate-then-vote ballot goes live, award-style vote campaigns covers pacing and message cadence in broader terms than this page needs to repeat.

Grand Forks Air Force Base and the towns past city limits

Grand Forks proper isn't the ballot's only pull. East Grand Forks sits directly across the Red River in Minnesota, and Grand Forks Air Force Base, Thompson, Larimore, Emerado, Manvel, and Northwood all sit within the trade radius a Herald-area business realistically draws from.

A base-adjacent business serving Air Force families has a different customer network than a downtown Grand Forks retailer, one built on deployment cycles and PCS turnover rather than a stable local address book. Whether that network actually shows up on this specific ballot's category list is a live-page question, not something this guide should assume on a business's behalf.

Businesses running an existing customer list can lean on the email vote outreach guide for reaching supporters who won't see a social post, useful for a base community that turns over faster than a typical small city.

What isn't published, and why guessing a number here backfires

No public vote-total archive exists for Grand Forks Herald's Best of the Best the way it does for some larger Forum Communications editions. That's a fact about this specific program, not a gap in the research. Inventing a plausible-sounding total would be worse than stating plainly that the Herald hasn't made one public.

The same caution applies to advertising a result. "Nominated for Best of the Best" or "vote for us in [category]" is honest before results post. A bare "Grand Forks' best" claim, with no year and no category named, doesn't survive a check against the Herald's own published list, and it risks getting confused with a CommunityVotes Grand Forks result from an entirely different ballot. For the broader standard behind any legitimate campaign built on a real vote mechanic, see buying real, verifiable votes, and for how a nominate-then-vote structure like this one typically runs end to end, how online contest votes work covers the general pattern this ballot builds on.