Alumni Alumni Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Malone University Alumni Awards are and who runs them

The Alumni Awards are Malone University's institutional recognition program for its graduates. The organizer behind the program is the Malone University Alumni Association, which has presented the awards annually since 1962 to honor alumni who have distinguished themselves through outstanding achievement, loyal support of Malone University, and exemplary service to their church and community. The program is based in Ohio, where the university operates, and unlike the media-run readers' polls common across the state, the ballot sits on the university's own domain instead of a commercial voting platform.

The vertical is alumni and institutional recognition rather than a business ranking, though past recipients include a company alongside individual graduates. The page itself is addressed to the alumni community: it opens with an invitation to nominate a distinguished Malone graduate for one of the university's prestigious awards. That framing matters for anyone comparing ballots, because the audience here is a defined body of graduates and their networks, not a general shopping public.

The confirmed history of this ballot

The program's history stretches back to 1962, when the Malone University Alumni Association began presenting awards annually. The university's awards pages confirm editions in 2023, 2024 and 2026, with fresh site activity marking the 2026 cycle. One dated milestone sits inside that span: the newest honor was introduced for the first time in 2023, is given by the administration at Malone University, and is not open to public nominations, which is why it never appears on the public form.

Recipients are named on the page by year, including Rod '99 and Liz '99 Neuenschwander for 2023 and the company ProVia for 2024. The one hard date in every cycle is the closing line for nominations, due by May 31, which the university restates on the page as an annual deadline. Beyond that, the organizer does not publish a category roster with dates, an opening day for nominations, or any per-person submission rule; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

How a supporter takes part today

Participation is a nomination, not a click-to-vote tally. A supporter starts at the alumni awards section of malone.edu, where the headline invitation reads as a call to nominate a distinguished Malone graduate for one of the university's prestigious awards. The supporter then chooses which honor fits the nominee, keeping in mind that the administrative award introduced in 2023 sits outside the public process entirely.

From there the form is completed directly on the university's site. No third-party voting platform, no login wall from an outside vendor, and no daily return are described on the page, because the action is a single submitted nomination rather than a repeatable vote. The controlling constraint is time: nominations for several different awards are due by May 31 each year, and that deadline is the one date the university prints on the page.

What happens after submission is not described in detail on the public page. The Alumni Association reviews the nominations and announces recipients, and the awards page accumulates past recipients by year, which is how 2023's and 2024's honorees appear today. A supporter wanting confirmation that a nomination arrived has no published status tool to check, so the association's own announcements are the practical signal.

How this ballot sits beside its Ohio neighbours

Within Ohio, this page belongs to a family of public-input ballots, but its neighbors work very differently. 97.1 The Fan Pizza Madness Columbus and CBUS Top Picks Community Choice Awards are radio and city-media style polls where supporters vote repeatedly for businesses. Best of Ohio and Best in Ohio Business Awards run statewide or business-focused slates, while Best of Cincinnati and the Akron Community's Choice Awards are city readers' polls.

Malone's program differs on three axes. First, the publisher is a university and its alumni association, so the eligibility rule is about being a distinguished graduate rather than being a local business. Second, the host is the organizer's own site, meaning the rules and the deadline come straight from the institution instead of a voting platform's generic terms. Third, the annual action is a nomination closing on May 31 rather than an open vote window, so campaign tactics built for daily-vote polls translate only partly. Anyone comparing these six ballots side by side should treat this one as the institutional outlier of the group.

Rallying support for a nominee

Because this program rewards a strong nomination from the alumni community, the effective move is organizing people who actually know the graduate: classmates, fraternity or sorority brothers and sisters, former teammates, and faculty connections. A short campaign that asks each of them to submit a nomination before the May 31 deadline does more than any last-day push, especially since the page gives no per-person submission rule to plan around.

The university prints no guidance on organized nomination drives or third-party help, so anything beyond a straightforward group effort is uncharted. Practical methods that work on public-vote ballots, and how far they carry over to a nomination form, are covered in our votes guide, and the service-side options for ballots that do run live tallies are on our award-votes page.