InForum Best of the Red River Valley: How Voting Works & How to Win

225,000 votes, 130+ categories, one metro that straddles a state line

In its biggest recent editions, Best of the Red River Valley has pulled 168,000 to more than 225,000 votes. That is not a typo, and it is not a single popularity contest, it is 130+ separate category ballots running at once, spread across a metro that crosses the North Dakota-Minnesota border. Forum Communications runs it, through InForum and The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead, and has done so for 18+ years.

Scale like that changes the math for any single business. A restaurant category alone can carry thousands of votes; disappearing into that volume is easy if a business skips the nomination round or waits until the final week to ask anyone to vote. The program's own structure, nominate first, then vote, is the first thing worth understanding before touching outreach at all.

Forum Communications runs sister "Best of" programs elsewhere in the region under the Grand Forks Herald and Jamestown Sun mastheads. Neither shares this scale or this cross-border footprint; treat this page as specific to the Red River Valley edition. For the broader North Dakota picture, see the North Dakota contest hub.

Picking the right lane inside 130+ categories

A dentist and a diner do not compete for the same votes here, and that's the point. Best of the Red River Valley splits the ballot into 130+ category groups, so a restaurant, a contractor, and a healthcare clinic each fight it out inside their own lane, not against every business in the metro at once.

Picking wrong costs more than it seems. A business that sounds broad often loses to one that picked the exact subcategory customers expect to see. So the real first decision isn't strategy or messaging, it's category fit: which label will an existing customer recognize instantly, without pausing to wonder if they're voting in the right place. That matters more in Fargo-Moorhead than in a single-city ballot, since customers here routinely straddle both the North Dakota and Minnesota sides of the metro.

Beyond category selection, the closest internal framework is best business award voting; dining-category businesses can also check restaurant contest voting tips. Neither replaces the live inforum.com ballot, which is still the only source for this cycle's exact category labels.

Two rounds, not one, and skipping the first ends your run

Here is the trap: a business with loyal customers and zero nomination-round activity can still lose before the public vote even opens. Best of the Red River Valley runs nominations first. Only the top nominees per category reach the finalist ballot that the public actually votes on. No nomination, no finalist slot, no vote count, no matter how strong the fall push would have been.

Results land in a fall "Best of" magazine insert distributed with The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead. Exact open and close dates shift year to year and aren't fixed on this page, check the live inforum.com listing before printing QR cards or booking ad space.

Award programs elsewhere follow a similar nominate-then-vote shape; how award voting works covers the general pattern if this is your first readers-choice cycle.

What one vote reminder should actually say

Contest name, category, business name, where to vote. That's it. Anything longer loses people before they click. The exact repeat-voting rule, any per-day or per-category cap, lives on the live inforum.com ballot and changes by cycle, so don't hardcode last year's rule into this year's message.

Fargo-Moorhead voters field a lot of local asks at once, that's the tax of a 130+ category, six-figure-vote metro. Clarity beats volume of messaging almost every time. A launch message when voting opens, one mid-window nudge, then a tighter final push as the close date nears (confirmed from the live ballot, not memory) is a workable cadence for most categories.

A business serving both sides of the river can split messaging by community, Fargo customers get a Fargo-flavored note, Moorhead customers get theirs, while the underlying ballot instruction stays identical. Small variation in tone, zero variation in the actual steps.

Categories built on personal reputation, a stylist, a real estate agent, a local media personality, tend to need a different outreach texture; the influencer-style voting guide compares those tactics directly. And for the general mechanics of any online ballot, how online votes work covers what's universal across platforms.

A Casselton business and a Fargo chain, same ballot, different playbook

Size doesn't gate the ballot. A retailer in Casselton, population a fraction of Fargo's, competes in the exact same category page as a Fargo-based chain with ten times the foot traffic. What decides it more often is reach density: can the smaller business actually put its ask in front of most of its real customer base, versus a bigger business fighting for attention inside a much noisier metro.

Fargo carries the largest voter base in the metro, so category clarity matters most there simply because a Fargo customer is being asked to vote for more things at once. Moorhead sits on the Minnesota side and often shares customers with Fargo businesses, so a Fargo-Moorhead messaging split can matter more than a single geographic label. West Fargo, Dilworth, and Horace are growing residential areas where a short, neighborly reminder tends to outperform a slick metro-wide graphic. Casselton, Hawley, and Kindred are smaller and rural; word-of-mouth and in-person asks do more work there than another social post.

Single-city North Dakota programs, the Bismarck Tribune and Minot Daily News editions among them, don't carry this cross-border complexity. For a same-scale comparison outside the state, Best of New Jersey runs a similarly large readers-choice ballot.

Turning customer goodwill into ballots, without the reputational risk

An email list beats a social post here, mostly because it reaches people who already chose the business once. Send it at launch, again mid-window, once more as the close nears; skip the version where subscribers get five identical emails in three days. In-store QR codes work well for restaurants, salons, and clinics, but check where they actually point after every ballot update, Forum Communications sometimes changes the URL structure between cycles.

Staff can mention it at checkout. Keep it optional, no pressure, no script that sounds rehearsed. Social posts help with visibility but lose power fast if it's the same graphic on day one and day twenty; rotate in a thank-you post, a progress note, a final-day nudge. Paid reach, if used, should point at people who already look like real customers, not a broad geographic blast, and should land on clear voting instructions, not a homepage.

None of this should slide into fake accounts, scripted voting, or "winner" language before Forum Communications publishes results. A Red River Valley business survives well past this one contest cycle; a spammy campaign here follows the brand into next year's ballot too. For sourcing genuine supporter traffic without crossing that line, see real votes from genuine supporters.

No winners list here, and that gap is deliberate

Search around and you'll find old magazine PDFs, screenshots, and reseller pages claiming specific Best of the Red River Valley winners. This page isn't one of them. No verified, current winners dataset is published here, and repeating a stale claim is worse than stating the gap plainly.

The only result that counts is the one Forum Communications publishes, in the magazine insert or on inforum.com, for the specific year and category. Checking a competitor's claim? Get the exact year, category name, and where it was published before repeating it. Promoting your own result? "Best of the Red River Valley [year] winner in [category]" holds up; "Valley's best" with no year or category does not.

Before results are official, "nominated" or "vote for us" is the honest phrasing. Paid promotion, creative, reminders, landing pages, QR setup, real voter outreach, can add reach. It cannot manufacture a result Forum Communications hasn't published, and no service should claim it can.